Club de Madrid Members, PM Lubbers, PM Campbell and Pres. Quiroga, together with mayors and ministers from across the globe gathered in Chicago on 8 March 2012 for the fourth meeting of the OECD Urban Roundtable, Mobilizing Investments for Urban Sustainability, Job Creation and Resilient Growth. These leaders affirmed that this moment in history provides us with the opportunity to expand our knowledge and choose innovation over stagnancy. They worked together to assess and share existing best practices, to identify common challenges and to uncover financing solutions to secure sustainability in cities, which are home to over half of the world’s population, 67% of energy consumption, and growing environmental challenges.
The discussions confirmed that there is no “onesize-fits-all” model for implementing urban sustainability, and that strategies will differ across cities as they do across countries, according to urban form, economic and institutional settings, resource endowments and environmental pressures. Yet, the Roundtable participants’ work uncovered existing financing mechanisms and identified new approaches, shared local solutions, and set an agenda for change: a road map to help advance innovative new approaches for financing critical infrastructure, and ultimately achieve sustainability in our urban areas, create jobs and ensure resilient growth. A key point of agreement was that national governments have a critical role to play in establishing the right frameworks for financing urban sustainability.
You can read the event report here.
If you go green you mobilise the economy.
RUUD LUBBERS , Former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Club de Madrid Member
