This August 13-15, the CityLinks team will be hosting a Climate Leadership Academy (CLA) In Jakarta entitled “From Risk Barriers to Results – Managing the Social, Political, Environmental and Financial Risks of Urban Infrastructure.” The core of the program involves bringing together teams of senior-level practitioners from eight ASEAN cities working on issues of urban infrastructure and climate adaptation to learn, discuss and share ideas over the course of three intensive and exciting days.

Based on an innovative program developed by the Institute for Sustainable Communities, (a CityLinks partner organization), the Jakarta CLA aims to promote knowledge sharing between practitioners in the ASEAN region and their U.S. counterparts in order to enhance capacity, showcase practical solutions, share best practices, and identify networking opportunities related to urban climate adaptation. Each city team is comprised of representatives from both municipal and national government, businesses, nonprofit organizations, and educational institutions, for a total of 40 city participants. ISC’s CLA model emphasizes peer education: practitioners and decision makers working on similar issues share with and learn from their peers in other cities. Through these peer learning opportunities, networks are created and best practices, knowledge, and innovative ideas are shared.

To design the most successful CLA possible, the CityLinks team tailored the curriculum to address pressing needs for each ASEAN city that is involved. To anticipate these needs and to understand the political, social, financial, and environmental risks and challenges each team faces regarding urban infrastructure, the Citylinks team conducted a Needs/Wants Inquiry (NWI), interviewing each ASEAN team personally. All of this information was used to build a tailored, dynamic curriculum that will address the specific priorities and needs of the participating ASEAN cities.

As just one example, the NWIs revealed that many cities felt that a lack of public awareness regarding climate change made it difficult to get citizen buy-in and support for urban adaptation projects, while a few teams demonstrated best practices in this topic. For instance, Paksane, Lao PDR designates village leaders within the municipality as community coordinators and liaisons responsible for relaying information between citizens and local government representatives. In the case of a disaster such as severe flooding, village leaders let the government know about impact on citizens in their community and relay information about relocation and rebuilding efforts to citizens. Because Paksane has seen success with this approach, ISC built a concurrent session into the CLA agenda called Working with Village Leaders to Respond to Climate Impacts, at which a representative from the Paksane team will share these successes with other teams.

The CityLinks team then identified champions from the U.S. working on issues and themes that arose during NWI to comprise a Resource Team for the CLA. Individuals on the Resource Team represent diverse sectors in order to address the multifaceted priorities of participating ASEAN cities. With rich backgrounds in subjects such as water resource management, private-public partnerships, biodiversity and ecosystem protection, urban zoning and infrastructure, natural resources management, and resiliency, the Resource Team will offer a wealth of insight and experience, as well as challenge participating city representatives to think outside the box in responding to climate risks in their own cities. 

Finally, the CityLinks team worked hard to produce a Resource Guide (RG) in order to help the practitioners apply what they will learn in the CLA to real world situations when they return home. The Guide consists of relevant case studies which highlight interesting Urban Infrastructure projects that have been successfully completed in the U.S. The Guide also includes biographies of all attending stakeholders, and contains pertinent resources to further inform participant teams. The RG for the Jakarta event will be distributed at the CLA and will also be posted to this CityLinks blogs in coming weeks for general use.

Together, these CLA model components serve to create a participatory, shared learning opportunity that provides participants with the resources, tools, and networks they need to confront climate challenges in their respective cities and to strengthen relationships with their peers on a global scale. The CityLinks team is looking forward to sharing this model with the participants in Jakarta!