ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability

Hello and welcome to Local Voices for Sustainability, the ICLEI Europe podcast.

I'm your host, Lucy Mears.

In each episode of this podcast, we explore the sustainability challenges and solutions emerging in ICLEI member cities across Europe.

Today, we're heading to Malmö, Sweden's third largest city, located on the country's southern coast just across the Öresund Bridge from Copenhagen.

Once known for its shipbuilding industry, Malmo has reinvented itself over the past few decades as a city of sustainability and urban innovation.

Malmo is one of the cities putting that idea into practice.

is also one of more than 90 European cities to assign something called the Circular Cities Declaration.

This is an ICLEI-led initiative that helps cities advance, share and track their circular economy transition.

We are hoping to learn a lot about that in this week.

David Jakompoli, who is joining us from Bonn, from ICLEI.

You're the head of resilience development program in the world secretariat of ICLEI.

And we are hoping to learn about practice and how the work is conducted in other parts of the world as well.

Dr. Caitlin Robinson, who's running late because of trains being cancelled in the UK, which is a regular occurrence for those of you who joined us from other countries.

So if it's not one goal, it's going to be the other goal, okay? Now, let's move on.

This is from ICLEI, and we have done shows on them before.

They are an international data tracking corporation.

How eight U.S. communities modeled Holistic recovery, because it has to be about the whole child, has to be about the whole city, the whole family.

So it's a county, but yet it's a city.

Anyway, New Haven, Connecticut, Orange County, Florida, San Antonio, Texas, engaged in a group leadership and learning experience known as the SDG City Challenge.

All right, so here we had partnership between ICLEI in the United States, the University of Melbourne, which is in Australia, University of Texas at Arlington, and Brookings, who just gave us the report we said on how to get your city to align more to Sustainable Development Goal number 11.

Six months in 2021.

Now, it says Agenda 21 fears have played a role in opposition to local government's efforts to promote resources and land conservation, build bike lines and construct hubs for public transport.

It's all electric now, isn't it, people? The non-profit group ICLEI, Local Government for Sustainability USA, was targeted by anti-Agenda 21 activists.

It says in 2012, fears of Agenda 21 went mainstream.

I wonder why, people? And it says, several state and local governments have considered or passed motions and legislation opposing Agenda 21.

Our guest today, David Lubel.

He's a Senior Climate Mobility and Cities Fellow at the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, also called ICLEI USA.

And we will be talking all things climate migration, you know, from the concept of climate havens, how the media is talking about climate migration, and then really practical advice for you, the listener, on how to think about this.

And, you know, maybe this is a strategy you need to have in your toolkit to survive the climate.