City-business collaboration is critical to sustainable development

Today at the Metropolitan Solutions forum in Hannover, ICLEI and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) unveiled the results of a new survey on city relationships with the private sector.

City leaders around the world are driving real action on climate change and sustainable development but they can’t do it alone, said Gino Van Begin, Secretary General, ICLEI–Local Governments for Sustainability, and Peter Bakker, President & CEO, WBCSD, in a joint statement released ahead of the Metropolitan Solutions event. 

For urban planners and decision-makers, it is therefore key to know which technological solutions are available or which innovations can be provided by industry in order to successfully address their challenges and achieve strategic goals.

And, according to research undertaken by ICLEI and the WBCSD, which brought responses from 59 cities in Asia, Europe and the Americas, it is crucial that cites and business develop new models for strategic engagement to realise the full capability of business to deliver innovative solutions.

“More than three-quarters of the respondents said that business had an important role in the sustainability process for cities but the results show there is more to be done in terms of improving the engagement with business,” said Matthew Lynch, Project Director at WBCSD, who provided a snapshot of the results at today’s forum. “In terms of how cities could better engage with business, by far the most popular response was through facilitated dialogue.”

One key example of city-business collaboration is the WBCSD’s Urban Infrastructure Initiative (UII), which has demonstrated the value of early collaborative engagement between cities and business for sustainable development. The UII mobilised multi-sector, expertise from 14 leading companies  to help 10 cities around the world identify innovative and effective solutions to realise their sustainability visions [see video below]. ICLEI played a very important role as a bridging organisation in the UII, facilitating the engagements with Turku in Finland and Tilburg in the Netherlands.

At the launch of the UII final report during the  ICLEI Global Town Hall at Metropolitan Solutions, Philippe Joubert, Senior Adviser at the WBCSD, said: “The idea was to develop strategies and solutions to help mayors turn their vision into reality.The UII was established to demonstrate the value of the role that business can play in supporting cities when they can mobilise multi-company and multi-sector expertise.”

According to Joubert, business as usual was no longer acceptable to the WBCSD and cities are likely to bear the major share of the burden, cost and risk associated with extreme events and climate change. “Business has a long relationship with cities but it has been engaged very late in a specific and narrow relationship,” he added. “We clearly feel there is a need for a new model of collaboration [with business involved] early in the planning process and with businesses more open to input rather than answering a precise question. Addressing cross-cutting challenges holistically is the solution.”

The UII report will be distributed this month with Cities Today. To get your copy, please email editorial@cities-today.com