Event:      NIUA and ICLEI-South Asia joint initiatives to address Urban Climate Change

 
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City Level Carbon Emissions Reduction Project

Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam and Thane cities started “The Carbon Emission Reduction” project under the Climate Change and Energy (CCE) program of British High Commission. This Project looks at developing City Level Local Action Plans by Integrating Renewable Energy (RE) & Energy Efficiency (EE) Measures into city activities and will address the issues of climate change and ensure energy security and low carbon future for Indian cities.

All three cities formed signed an MoU in this regard and a “Cross Functional Core“with has formed with municipal Commissioner as head to implement and monitor the project activities.  Under this project cities will prepare Energy Status Reports and come out with a carbon emission inventory and action plans and implement the action plans. 

A city level Stakeholder group with persons from industry, academia, pollution control board, etc is also formed to get policy level inputs and to monitor the implementation. 

For more details on the progress please see http://www.iclei.org/index.php?id=7401

  1. The Urban Climate Project: Building Clean and Efficient Cities under the ASIA PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP (APP) PROGRAM

The urban climate project aims towards a comprehensive and multi sector clean development strategy backed by real investment capital mainly targeting the JNNURM scheme. Fast growing Indian cities have potentially numerous opportunities to showcase clean development through the JNNURM activities. The three-year APP Project targets these opportunities by helping one or two cities to implement 15 clean development measures through 10 interventions including technical and  implementation support. Through the urban climate project ICLEI-SA and NIUA aims to assist the city implement infrastructure projects including cleaner and efficient technologies and also model GHG deflections to showcase benefits. The key activities under the project have been identified as:

a.  Work with one to two cities that plan to invest a minimum of $200 Million over the next five years, and have strong political will to challenge status quo development thinking.

b.  Developing a Greenhouse Gas (GHG) and energy use baseline for these cities.

c.  Engaging expert consultants to design the city level JNNURM projects implementation plan with a multi-sector set of energy/GHG interventions, and model deflections against the baseline with a goal of reaching a 10-20% reduction of energy and GHG emissions.

d.  Working with the cities to guide project implementation under JNNURM.

e.  Distributing knowledge to other JNNURM cities through a series of international and national workshops.

f.   Specific interventions will be targeted over the project period with the specific aim to help the city become clean and efficient.

Cities of Rajkot and Coimbatore have been finalized as project implementation cities and discussions are going on with the City Municipal Authorities to prepare a city level project action plan.

  1. Roadmap of South Asian Cities and Local Governments for the post 2012 global climate agreement and actions

The Road Map project aims at facilitating South Asian local governments to develop a regional consensus for local action on addressing urban climate change issues and enable them to lead post 2012 international negotiation processes on Climate Change. The project in India will cover over 40 local governments under the South Asian Initiative of ICLEI. The project is supported by British High Commission, India.

The project activities will include the following:

a.  Preparing city energy status reports and carbon emission inventory of 40-50 cities (based on secondary sources).

b.  Provide platform for local governments to generate a South Asian position/consensus/opinion on international environmental treaties.

c.  Preparing generic city action plans as a guiding framework for addressing climate change issues in the local context to debate need for broad national urban climate change action framework through consensus for all partner countries.

d.  Develop Local Government Delegation comprising of local leaders from all parts of the SA region linked to the World Mayors Council on Climate Change, to lead the interaction with the international negotiation process (at COP-14, Poznan and COP-15, Copenhagen) and the parallel national dialogues.

e.  Documentation of activities and outcomes under the project to act as a reference for continued action by participating SA cities.

The above project has also been supported by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency – Ministry of power who are also facilitating information collection for the project