8/12/2019 401 Richmond Update Tenant Profile_ICLEI

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ICLEI Canadais not an easy organization to describe,

so we were lucky to have Acting Director Ewa Jackson

help us understand this box-busting non-profit. At the

heart of what ICLEI does is the motto local action moves

the world and we cant think of a better phrase to keep

in mind as we step through their work in sustainability,

climate change, and urban biodiversity.

ICLEI was created in 1990 at the United Nations

Rio Summitto operationalize a sustainability initiative

called Agenda 21. From the beginning, it was decided

that governance should be participatory and people

need to be involved if they wanted to see results. The

highest concentrations of people are in cities, so Local

Agenda 21became the municipal component . The

International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives,

or ICLEI, was born with two hundred cities coming on

board as the founding members.

As Ewa explains, were a membership based

association of cities that want to implement sustainable

development and understand the global benefits through

the accumulation of local action. If you add up the efforts

of all the participating cities, it is often more substantial

than what national governments can do on their own.

Until late 2007, the bulk of ICLEIs programming was

focused on greenhouse gas mitigation until the sciencecame out that things had simply gone too far for mitigation

alone and attention needed to shif t to climate change

adaptation. Were going to have more extreme weather

(were already seeing it), the average temperatures are

going to get hotter, and its going to be wetter. Cities

need to prepare their own hard infrastructure (our roads and

electrical systems arent meant to withstand this kind of

activity) and at the same time help their residents prepare.

So what does this look like? The complicated answer

is that it looks a little different for each city. ICLEI has

created a new online tool called Building Adaptive and

Resilient Communitiesthat takes into account the fact

that no two Canadian cities are the same, so no one

program is going to work for everyone. Instead, it s about

asking the right questions and creating frameworks that

can be used to reach their goals. The tool is also designed

to encourage staff participation and ownership of the

plan a key ingredient to its success and is built to step

a city through constructing their own custom made action

plan. We want cities to be able to tangibly do something,

not just create plans with many goals and objectives,

but actually put them into practice.

Urban nature is another hot topic for ICLEI Canada

at the moment as they work with cities to conserve their

urban parks, promote biodiversity, plant native species,

and nurture pollinators. For many city dwellers, their

experience of nature happens in these spaces, not by

taking a four hour drive to see Canadian wildlife. As

Ewa pointed out more people interact with the green

roof here at 401 in the summer than they do with what

we traditionally call nature.

ICLEI will be in Vancouver from April 2 to 4 hosting the

Livable Cities Forumthat will explore how to build healthy,sustainable, and economically resilient communities.

ICLEI CANADA: Local Action Moves the World Studio 204

tenant profile

Above Clockwise from bottom left: Ewa Jackson, Acting

Director; Megan Meaney, Director (on maternity leave);

Leya Barry, Adaptation and Resilience Project Coordinator;

Mike Dean, Project Assistant; Shireen Aslam, Project

Assistant; Lili Gao, Accountant/Bookkeeper; Holly Vaughan,

Adaptation and Resilience Planner; Bahareh Toghiani

Rizi, Climate and Energy Planner; (centre)Nicole Marzok,

Biodiversity Project Coordinator