The Project's overall Objective is:
Reduced carbon footprint and improved resilience to the impacts of
climate change for targeted pilot cities.
This Objective shall be accomplished through the achievement of two
Expected Accomplishments (EAs):
EA 1 – Climate Action Plans approved and begun to be implemented by
targeted cities.
EA 2 – Selected priority climate investments are funded or financed.
The Climate Action Plans of targeted cities will include identifying
high-priority climate investments. The Project will further assist those cities
to lay out a roadmap for a pre-feasibility and feasibility project development
process that will lead to optimal project design, mobilize funding for such
studies, and eventually to link up priority investments to promising sources of
financing.
The present proposal will build upon and contribute to three
multi-stakeholder initiatives. First is the Compact of Mayors, an initiative launched at the 2014 Climate
Summit and on which UN-Habitat sits on the Management Committee. One commitment
made by cities that announce their intentions to comply with the Compact is to
complete Climate Action Plans within three years. The present project will help
selected cities in Least Developed Countries that have publicly announced their
intentions to comply with the Compact to complete their Climate Action Plans.
Note that this represents an important criterion for selection of participating
cities, particularly for the climate action planning process (EA 1).
Secondly, is a UN-Habitat led, multi-stakeholder initiative to
develop ‘Guiding Principles for City
Climate Action Planning'. The immediate plan of this initiative is to
launch a ‘Version 1.0' of these Guidelines at the 21st Conference of
Parties (COP-21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in
Paris in December 2015. Then (along with partners) we plan to test the draft
Guiding Principles in several pilot cities in 2016 and 2017, and then to
develop and release a revised Version 2.0 of the Guiding Principles. The
present project will support this process by supporting the testing of these
Guidelines in selected cities, in part to ensure that these plans pave the way
for the financing of priority climate investments, as well as providing input
into development of a ‘Version 2.0' of the Guiding Principles.
Thirdly is another initiative launched at the 2014 Climate Summit,
the Cities Climate Finance Leadership
Alliance. This Alliance, on which UN-Habitat serves on the Steering
Committee, seeks to address some of the above mentioned obstacles. The present
project will support the testing of innovative financing approaches in new
developing country regions (EA 2), with information fed into and disseminated
via Alliance knowledge products. At the same time we may well collaborate with
individual CCFLA members in particular cities and on particular stages in
project formulation and financing, e.g., with, CDIA on screening and project
preparation, UN Capital Development Fund, ICLEI on their TAP pipeline (see
below), and so on.
Finally the present project will also learn from
lessons captured by UN-Habitat's Cities and Climate Change Initiative (CCCI),
previously funded in part by Sida, from its on-the-ground work in helping more
than 40 cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America address various aspects of
climate change.
