Commission Advances Agenda During New York Climate Week

With the targeted $7 trillion in annual funding needed to combat climate change far from reach, city leaders gathered during New York Climate Week and the UN General Assembly to discuss solutions.

The 86-member Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) Global Commission for Urban SDG Finance, co-chaired by Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris; Eduardo Paes, Mayor of Rio de Janeiro; and Jeffrey Sachs, President of SDSN, chiefly sought to expand its impact in aiding cities needing to access urban climate finance. Its September 23rd meeting achieved the following outcomes: 

• It brought in the Local Governments and Municipal Authorities (LGMA) Constituency, which serves as the official voice for local and subnational governments within the UN Climate Change process to co-chair its Task Force on Finance. 

• The Commission joined with Resilient Cities’ Network’s Resilience Finance Task Force to amplify its efforts. 

• The Commission Guarantee Working Group teamed up with the Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance (CCFLA), a coalition of leaders committed to deploying finance for city-level climate action at scale by 2030, and The UN Capital Development Fund, which assists developing countries by supplementing existing sources of capital assistance.

“Cities are the most important actors because, at our level, we can organize coalitions with citizens, public actors and the private sector,” said Mayor Hidalgo. “If we want to go to the targets of the Paris Agreement, we need to build alliances at the global level.” 

Mauricio Rodas, Penn Institute for Urban Research visiting fellow and former mayor of Quito, Ecuador emphasized the importance of financial innovation in achieving the SDGs. As the Commission’s secretariat, the Penn IUR team, led by Mauricio Rodas, Eugenie Birch, and William Burke-White, supports its objectives and the efforts of its task forces and carries out the work plan.

"We need new mechanisms and partnerships to mobilize the necessary resources for cities, allowing greater use of guarantees and local currency lending for cities at the [Multilateral Development Bank] MDB level. Current structures just aren’t meeting city needs. They need more flexibility, especially in times of crisis,” Rodas emphasized.

Mayor Justin Bibb, of Cleveland, Ohio, who also serves as the chair of US Climate Mayors, a bipartisan group of nearly 400 mayors across the country, highlighted the transformative role of climate finance. 

"We have a big moonshot moment in the US right now, as we are leveraging the largest Federal investment in the history of any developed country to address climate change due to the Inflation Reduction Act,” he said. 

One of the unique things about the IRA is that it allows for direct pay, which gives cities direct access to public financing and allows us to tap into philanthropic and private sector capital in a different way. It has catalyzed public and private sector alignment at the local level on critical climate projects." 

Gino Van Begin, Secretary General, ICLEI, a global network working with more than 2,500 local and regional governments committed to sustainable urban development, talked about the importance of collaboration in preparation for the COP 29 negotiations in Baku. In particular, Van Begin called for looking at the new global finance goal, the fund for responding to loss and damage, and to “look at sustainable urbanization as a non-market approach under article 6.8 of the Paris Agreement."

Mayor Erion Veliaj of Tirana, Albania, took up this challenge to advocate for sustainable urbanization and urban climate finance. He spoke about the work of city networks such as Balkan 40 in Southern Europe as instrumental advocates and exploring very creative ways to raise finance with cities, leveraging new partnerships across the region. "I think we really are on the tipping point, and I think the COP in Azerbaijan is really the crest of a wave that we could rise positively when it comes to city finance."

In the past year, the Commission welcomed new mayors, including Giuseppe Sala, Milan, Italy; Erion Veliaj, Tirana, Albania; Kate Gallego, Phoenix, USA; Arizona, Ricardio Rio, Braga, Portugal, and Uche Anya, Enugu Capital Territory, Nigeria, Rafal Trzaskowski, Warsaw, Poland; Yousef Shawarbeh, Amman, Jordan; Ekrem İmamoğlu, Istanbul, Turkey as well as several legal and financial experts. A full list of the membership is on the Commission website.

The former Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, highlighted the importance of communicating these solutions. “Cities are critical to delivering the global Sustainable Development Goals, but they cannot succeed without the necessary resources. We urgently need national and international financial systems to reorient themselves toward empowering cities, enabling them to drive the sustainable and inclusive development the world so urgently needs."

The New York meeting was a follow-up to the Commission’s July 25th meeting hosted by Mayor Hidalgo in Paris against the backdrop of the “greenest” Olympic games, where the Commission workshopped its recommendations to:

• Operationalize the Green Cities Guarantee Fund;

• Align city interests with current multilateral development bank (MDB) reform discussions on country platforms, city project portfolios, and multilevel governmental coordination;

• Continue to contribute to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Climate Change and Cities; and 

• Address systemic misalignments that hinder collaboration between public and private sectors, fostering environments better enabled for climate action investments.

The Commission documented its recommendations to guide its ongoing work and advocacy.

“The work the Commission has achieved so far will enable us to push for effective urban mitigation and adaptation strategies and substantially higher sums of accessible urban climate finance across all levels of government,” said Birch. 

The Commission will reconvene for working group meetings in November in Cairo, Egypt for the World Urban Forum and again in Rio de Janeiro at Urban20, which facilitates discussions between countries and cities that inform G20 negotiations. On November 16th, the Commission will host an event during Urban20. The Commission’s New York meeting was hosted by Field Operations, headed by award-winning University of Pennsylvania Professor Emeritus James Corner (MLA‘86), who designed The High Line. 

For more information about the SDSN Global Commission for Urban SDG Finance and its efforts to support urban climate finance, visit www.urbansdgfinance.org.