EBRD Green Cities strives to build a better and more sustainable future
for cities and their residents. The programme achieves this by
identifying, prioritising and connecting cities’ environmental challenges
with sustainable infrastructure investments and policy measures.
The path to becoming a Green City is continuous, allowing cities to adjust their strategic goals and visions over time. The process has three key stages.
1. Developing a Green City Action Plan (GCAP)
Identifying and prioritising challenges
The first step in developing a GCAP involves assessing the city’s environmental performance using 35 core indicators that cover a wide range of urban issues. The indicators evaluate the state of the city’s environmental assets, its overall resource efficiency and climate change risks.
These indicators are combined with local stakeholder input from civil society organisations, private-sector partners and municipal and national actors to identify and prioritise the city’s environmental challenges.
Planning actions
In the next stage of the GCAP, the city establishes its long-term vision (10 to 15 years) for green city development. For example, the city could decide to reduce the waste sent to landfills and significantly increase recycling rates or incentivise passengers to use more active and public modes of transport.
The city then identifies specific, short-term actions (1 to 5 years) that can be taken to reach its long-term vision. These could include implementing household waste collection and separation systems to increase recycling rates or investing in electric buses to increase use of public transport.
The GCAPs take the city’s financial and budgetary context into account and identify potential sources of finance for the investments and policy measures identified.
2. Implementing the GCAP
Working with local stakeholders, the city implements the infrastructure investments and policy measures as outlined in the GCAP. The EBRD can support the city in these efforts by providing access to finance, as well as concessional loans and grants.
3. Monitoring the GCAP
To ensure that the GCAP is progressing as planned and contributing to the established targets, the city periodically reviews the Green City actions and their impacts on the environment. This allows the city to inform the public about what was accomplished, adjust the action plan as needed and make further policy and investment decisions outlined in the GCAP.
Become a Green City
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