Summary Report

Need for Faster and Pervasive Action

18 June 2009: Summary Report on ICLEI’s World Congress 2009 Sessions and Roundtables to ICLEI Council Meeting, by Gino Van Begin, Deputy Secretary General and Regional Director for Europe, ICLEI (With many thanks to Ewa Ciuk, ICLEI Canada and the entire reporting team)

How can we translate the global challenges that were explained at ICLEI’s World Congress 2009 - Connecting Leaders, to parameters for local action by ICLEI members?

Such an exercise is essentially a political and strategic reflection on the current appropriateness of our governance, our policy making, our management systems, our planning and our daily practices in our cities to address world-wide urbanization and peak resources.

I have received reports from all of your discussions and, as a result, I am pleased to offer you a synthesis of the past days as formulated into 5 strategic directions for future work:

(1) Radical change requires radical decision makers!

Radical means: faster, deeper, and more far reaching than anything we have done thus far!

It means that we have to move from 5% CO2 reduction targets to 80% (by 2050) in minimum 37 industrialized countries;
It means that we have to provide water to the over 1 billion people without it;
It means that we stop the hourly extinction of plants and animal species;
We will not get the two planets we need by 2030; You are the decision makers and we as ICLEI are to empower you to take on that challenge!

(2) Understand it, Localize it, Customize it, and Humanize it!

Understanding the global challenges requires a more effective link between research and action: global research is as a basis for local implementation;
Localizing and customizing work means addressing a global problem through localized impacts and to customizing this global challenge to or into local realities: mechanisms must be found which work locally to address global problems;
Humanize the global discussion means that citizens must “feel” that they can change global problems: global problems must be brought or broken down to an individual level;

(3) Integrated action - peak everything!

The global crisis requires us to look at all issues in an integrated way – water, energy, biodiversity, planning, land-use, waste, and governance;
In addition, the biggest challenge is to take sustainability action while addressing simultaneously the economic, financial and social crises;

(4) Make the business case - make the political/election case!

Money talks: this means that figures must underpin facts and strategic directions; for example, in the case of climate mitigation, these actions pay for themselves; in the case of climate adaptation and resilience planning, we can not afford not doing so ;

(5) Behavioral changes and production patterns: change them!

Balance democratic access to goods and services with their energy and resource efficiency;
In developed countries, there is a particular need to induce lifestyle changes among young people.