Sustainable Cities India Program

🔆Sustainable Cities India Program

✅Why in News : the World Economic Forum and the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) signed a MoU to collaborate on a jointly designed ‘Sustainable Cities India program’.

🔸The ‘Sustainable Cities India' intends to enable cities to decarbonise in a systematic and sustainable way that will reduce emissions and deliver resilient and equitable urban ecosystems.

🔸This initiative is in synergy with India’s commitment to turn net zero by 2070 as a climate mitigation response at COP26.

▪️What are the Key Points of ‘Sustainable Cities India Program’?

✅The program aims to create an enabling environment for cities to generate decarbonization solutions across the energy, transport, and the built environment sectors.

✅The Forum and NIUA will adapt the Forum’s City Sprint process and Toolbox of Solutions for decarbonization in the context of five to seven Indian cities across two years.

✅City Sprint Process: The City Sprint process is a series of multi-sectoral, multi-stakeholder workshops involving business, government, and civil society leaders to enable decarbonization, especially through clean electrification and circularity.

✅Toolbox of Solutions: It provides a digital platform containing over 200 examples of clean electrification, efficiency and smart infrastructure best practices and case studies across buildings, energy systems and mobility from over 110 cities around the world.

▪️What is the Need for Decarbonisation?

✅As per the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2022, densely populated countries that are highly dependent on agriculture, such as India, are especially vulnerable to climate insecurity.

Decarbonization in cities is a real opportunity to keep global warming well below 2°C and cities in India can make an enormous contribution in reaching this goal.

✅The World Economic Forum’s Net Zero Carbon Cities’ mission is to create an enabling environment for clean electrification and circularity, resulting in urban decarbonization and resilience.

✅The program aims to do this by fostering public-private collaboration to bridge the gap across the energy, built environment and transport sectors.