Municipal Climate Partnerships project hosts COP26 side event

The Municipal Climate Partnerships Project of “Servicestelle Kommunen in der Einen Welt” (SKEW), a service of Engagement Global together with the Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft Agenda 21 NRW, was represented at the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow in the form of a side event in the German Pavilion. Around 200 digital attendees avidly followed the livestream discussion on synergising climate protection actions and biodiversity preservation.

Time is running out in the climate crisis. The global community has little time left to achieve the Paris Climate Agreement and limit global warming. At the 26th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) in Glasgow from October 31 to November 12, 2021, member countries must make significant progress in implementing the climate targets.

Climate change is affecting all parts of the world, but in the Global South, people and ecosystems are under serious threat - from extreme weather events, food shortages, and loss of biodiversity. The international community must act now! We need to develop effective tools to support the poorest countries in climate protection measures and adaptation strategies.

For the last ten years, our municipal climate partnerships have been doing just that, by enabling joint climate projects of municipalities from Germany and the Global South.

On 4 November 2021, our Municipal Climate Partnerships programme contributed to COP26 in Glasgow with its own side event. Entitled “Climate and biodiversity: enhancing synergies and fostering efficiency from a Global South perspective”, our speakers explained what synergy effects exist between actions for preserving biodiversity and climate protection and climate change adaptation projects and how they can be optimally used on the basis of concrete examples.

With regard to national and international climate agreements, the event also explored how municipalities and nations in the Global South can be supported even better both on the programme level and financially, implement their nationally determined contributions and progress toward the goal of a green recovery.

• Mayor Ssekiziyivu Innocent Bakulungelo and Crispus Byaruhanga from Mubende, Uganda
• Cindy Winter, Manager Environmental Management from the City of Drakenstein, South Africa
• Sven Harten, DEval
• Dirk Vogeley and Maria Gagliardi, Karlsruher Energie- und Klimaschutzagentur

The side event was moderated by Marie Mévellec from our Servicestelle Kommunen in der Einen Welt (SKEW) and Moritz Schmidt from LAG21 NRW.

The discussion centred on the key role of ecosystem services and nature-based solutions and the need to tackle biodiversity and climate change together in order to achieve national and international sustainability targets. Ecosystem services are the many and varied benefits to humans provided by the natural environment and from healthy ecosystems. Nature-based solutions are solutions that are inspired and supported by nature, are cost-effective while at the same time offering ecological, social and economic advantages, and contribute to heightening resilience. They underscore the vital role of nature and the need to protect it and its crucial importance in combating the climate crisis. Particularly the clear declaration of this insight at the 15th UN Biodiversity Conference (CBD COP 15) in Kunming a few weeks prior placed it on all political agendas around the world, thus making it a central topic of the COP26 deliberations in Glasgow.

The discussion at our side event also clearly emphasised the value of nature-based solutions for achieving the Paris climate targets. However, it also highlighted how many obstacles stand in the way of realising this potential. For instance, the socioeconomic benefit of nature-based solutions needs to be better understood and communicated to the general public and municipal politics. Sensitising these stakeholders for this aspect is vital for attaining support and acceptance.

As a further obstacle, the side event participants identified the fact that nature-based solutions are still regarded by municipal politicians as too risky because these solutions cannot be associated with a concrete return on investment. This is because the value of nature-based solutions is hard to quantify due to the lack of suitable performance indicators. No systematic method to measure their value exists. Consequently, integrating them better in project plans and strategies would also bring them a great step closer to implementation.

Essentially, the primary task is to adequately support municipalities in implementing nature-based solutions both politically and financially. As the panel members of this COP26 side event clearly explained, this also means that the role of regional and local government must be given greater weight within the context of the nationally determined contributions. In general, there is a lot of catching-up to do here, as visibility of the work that municipalities perform in development cooperation is too low.