How do we make Amsterdam’s bike tunnels less scary?
It involves all the five senses, apparently
An interview with the Head of Circular Development – ICLEI
Burcu Tuncer leads the Circular Development team at ICLEI’s World Secretariat. She is a senior expert with 15+ years of sustainable production and consumption experience in Germany, Asia and MENA. She is an environmental engineer, who holds an MBA and MSc. in environmental management and policy.
With our team's appointment as the global coordinator for the Circular Development pathway, we first started developing a global strategy and work plan for the Circular Development in consultation with the ICLEI Regional Offices. We have consolidated ongoing efforts in our network that amount to more than 20 projects and initiated the seeds of a community of experts and leading cities as part of the newly launched ICLEI Circulars platform. The Circular Development pathway’s work plan has been recently approved and launched at the ICLEI World Congress.
The leadership of our new Vice President Mayor Arve, from the city of Turku, and her team has been also instrumental in defining the elements of our work plan. One main item that came up was the need for peer-to-peer exchanges both at the high-level and the technical level for spreading the existing knowledge and approaches. We are especially eager to spread the lessons from the Circular Turku project that has facilitated the development of a circular economy roadmap, which will be presented to the city council in the coming months.
We have also conducted a small survey of 54 city practitioners to understand the needs of our members in the network in order to prepare the right support package. We are seeing that there is a need for practical tools for developing circular economy interventions and finance facilitation for the planned actions.
In response to this need, we worked on a practitioners’ handbook for circularity interventions in urban food systems. We are planning to introduce more such practical guidance for other priority areas, such as urban infrastructure in the coming months.
Another necessary and important achievement has been the release of the Circulars Cities Action Framework that introduces cities to the range of circular economy strategies and actions available to them at the local level. This framework has been developed by us, ICLEI, in collaboration with the leading organizations working in the circular economy field, such as Circle Economy, Metabolic and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Having this simple (but not simplistic), the inclusive and consolidated approach is important to be able to guide local and regional governments with one voice and on a large scale.
ICLEI Circulars is a new global platform that offers cities concrete instruments and practical tools to kick off local and regional circular development journey. As mentioned above, it delivers on the mission we have as the World Secretariat Circular Development team to convene the ICLEI regional offices and leading ICLEI network members to embark on and go further in their circular development journey.
It is also a unique space because now we can find all ICLEI network strategy, priorities, projects, actions and tools about circular development in one place. ICLEI Circulars platform has been launched to act as a catalyst offering members concrete instruments and practical tools to take action in this field.
The regional Hubs will slowly grow accommodating the regional priorities and challenges, featuring the leading cities’ stories of transition as well as their needs to bring their efforts from end of pipe waste management solutions to more systemic approaches, meaning urban resource management. This kind of new knowledge, we hope will also be useful not only for bringing good practices forward but also to help funders set their strategic priorities.
All steps of our food production and consumption practices have many environmental and socio-economic implications. For example, approximately 70% of global freshwater demand is used for agriculture.
We also know that almost 20% of the food available to consumers - in shops, households and restaurants - goes directly into the bin (according to the UN Environment Programme’s Food Waste Index). Access to food and a resilient food supply is also a challenge for our cities. Not all urban dwellers have access to healthy and nutritious food: in developing countries, extremely poor urban residents may spend 50% or more of their income on food.
At the same time, local governments are directly or indirectly connected to all stages of the food value chain. Hence, from food procurement and catering services in public facilities to organic waste and land use management, local governments can influence food systems across the value chain.
That is why we have chosen food value chains as an initial area of focus. It is an environmental and socio-economic priority area and local governments have the levers to enable a just transition to sustainable food consumption and production systems.
We are planning to introduce more guidance for other priority areas, such as urban infrastructure in the following months.
We have found that the overarching issue is how to move from concept to practice. Major obstacles are not technical, but rather related to governance and economy.
It involves all the five senses, apparently
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It involves all the five senses, apparently
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Germany’s new approach has convinced hundreds of thousands of people to start using public transport for the first time
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