COP 23 event brings cities, partners and investors together

Cities are increasingly acting to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change. However, they remain unable to fully implement their ambitions because of a lack of capacity and because of limited access to finance for sustainable infrastructure projects. The event “Accelerating the urban transformation - Financing and implementing infrastructure projects in cities and regions”, held at COP 23 in Bonn, Germany, was an opportunity to discuss how to overcome these barriers and to showcase initiatives that are aiming to take advantage of these infrastructure opportunities. It included contributions from cities, bilateral donors, project preparation facilities (PPFs), and banks. The event was jointly hosted by the C40 Cities Finance Facility and a number of its partners.

Mark Watts, Executive Director of C40, laid out the different programmes through which C40 seeks to address these challenges, especially the C40 Cities Finance Facility. Ani Dasgupta, Global Director of the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, noted the achievements in helping cities access finance in the last few years through the proliferation of city-focused PPFs and how much the discourse had changed thanks to the efforts of cities and their partners. The roundtable discussion emphasised the importance of building partnerships between actors, particularly among PPFs; a new report by the Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance similarly makes this point.