URBAN-NET Stakeholder Workshop 3

"Joint activities: climate change in the urban context", CAOP, The Hague, 31 March & 1 April 2009

The third URBAN-NET Stakeholder Workshop in The Hague brought together 45 professionals from the URBAN-NET partner countries. In four sub-sessions, participants, experts and URBAN-NET members discussed several options for joint activities.

The overall ambition of the workshop was to work towards the development of joint activities in the realm of climate change between national urban research programmes and/or research funders, with the input from the end user to assure usability and practical implementation of the end results.

A majority of the world’s energy consumption takes place in cities or due to the transport of goods between cities. This proportion is set to grow as the United Nations forecast projects three in five people in the world will live in cities within the next twenty years. This global trend toward increased urbanisation has as a consequence that climate change impacts in most countries will mainly affect urban populations, not rural or traditional settlements. Thus, climate change and urban growth are inseparably linked, and general issues of sustainability require an urban focus. In addition, cities are not only vulnerable to changes in climate, but they also have great potential to bring about innovative and easily reproduced solutions.

The tasks of the workshop were to:

Get acquainted with the possible joint activities that can be undertaken (i.e. results of the survey);
Further deepen the knowledge of selected joint activities in separate workshops through brainstorming and clustering;
Draft recommendations to the URBAN-NET consortium regarding facilitating of joint activities;
Setting up of consortia of partners that will develop specific joint activities.

The full programme for Stakeholder Workshop 3, copies of the presentations given and the conference report (Proceedings of Stakeholder Workshop 3) are below.

Stakeholder Workshop 3 Programme

Stakeholder Workshop 3 delegate list

URBAN-NET Introduction - Paul Sizeland

Keynote Speaker - Prof Ingmar Elander

Sessions 1 and 2: Sinead Mullins, session expert - Dissemination events

Sessions 1 and 2: Birgit Georgi, session expert - Good practices

Sessions 1 and 2: Feedback and results

Session 3: Koos van Dijken, session expert - List of relevant indicators

Session 3: List of relevant indicators

Session 3: Feedback and results

Session 4: Paivi Elmkvist, session expert - Communities of practice

Session 4: Feedback and results