Municipal Financing: The Key to Climate-Neutral Cities (video)
Cities must be powerhouses of the transition to a climate-neutral and sustainable world. The reason is simple: they grow every day.
By 2050, 2.5 billion additional people will be living in cities, many of them on the African continent. This means that in the coming years we must build new urban infrastructure on an unprecedented scale. Achieving the goals of the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement is thus impossible without decisive and ambitious action.
For this, cities need a solid financial foundation to drive transformation that responds to local needs and provides basic services to the urban population – especially to the most vulnerable city dwellers. Growing urbanisation and climate change narrow the window of opportunity, however, and call for intensified efforts and swift acting.
At the same time, the size and density of the urban population offer a unique opportunity: each dollar spent on sustainable urban infrastructure has a big impact since investments in cities improve the quality of life for many people at once.
To learn more about the three levels of action required to improve municipal finance and ultimately build climate-neutral cities, take a look at this short explanatory film by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).