Author Archives: Michaelhoule

Voices from the Corridor – 31 May

ICLEI asks Resilient Cities attendants: If you could change one thing in your home city to increase its resilience capacity, what would it be?   Eva Madeira – Head of Membership and Governance, ICLEI Global Services, Bonn, Germany Home city: Lisbon, Portugal Change: Vertical gardens to increase building’s energy efficiency         Conchita M. G. Kedowide – Director, CCGeo Consulting, Dakar, Senegal Home city: Cotonou, Benin Change: A controled urbanization to prevent the development of informal settlement in floodplains         Alberto Terenzi – Officer, Sustainable Resources, Climate and Resilience, ICLEI Europe, Freiburg, Germany Home city: Read more

Adaptation and Mitigation: Counter-efficient?

Presenters and speakers (from left to right): Nuno Lopes (Head of Environmental Studies and Management Division, City Council of Almada), Astrid Westerlind-Wingstroem (Senior Resilience Expert, ICLEI European Secretariat/Consultant, Freiburg), Robert Kehew (Leader, Climate Change Planning Unit, UN-Habitat, Nairobi), Stelios Grafakos (Lead Climate Change Specialist, IHS, Rotterdam), Juan Carlos (Vargas, Principal, GeoAdaptive LLC, Boston), Holly Vaughan (Adaptation and Resilience Planner, ICLEI Canada, Toronto, Canada), Kaj Fischer (Research Analyst, adelphi consult GmbH, Berlin). Climate change mitigation and adaptation are areas of high priority action in the urban context. While both approaches encompass a process of positive changes, they can also impede the Read more

A new way of promoting multi-stakeholder dialogue

Participants at work! The risk and resilience scorecard: Benchmark disaster resilience in cities The purpose of this workshop was to discuss a multilevel city resilience scorecard that is being developed jointly by the Global Earthquake Model (Christopher G. Burton, Senior Scientist, Foundation, Pavia, Italy), the Center for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology (Bijan Khazai, Senior Research Scientist, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany) and the South Asia Institute (Johannes Anhorn, Research Associate, Heidelberg University, Germany). It is a self-evaluation tool that makes use of primary source data to empower stakeholders to quantitatively assess resilience parameters based on data that is Read more

Communication and Integration: The keys to Sustainability

Reality Check Workshop Participants (from left to right) : Piero Pelizzaro (Head of the International Cooperation Unit, Kyoto Club, Rome), Lorenzo Bono (Climate Change and Urban Sustainability Manager, Ambiente Italia, Milan), Giovanni Fini (Coordinator of the Environmental Quality Unit, Bologna) The city of Bologna adopted the Bologna Local Urban Environment Adaptation Plan (BLUE AP) without having experienced a severe natural hazard. Based on the climate projections that were generated for the Local Climate Profile, the public stakeholders decided to develop and to implement the adaption plan in a preventive approach. The absence of catalyst, however, demands a different communication strategy to: 1) increase people awareness, and 2) get them involved Read more