Low Carbon Future Cities: A Sino-German Cooperation on an Integrated Climate and Resource Proof Urban Development

Increasing urbanization and climate change are two of the great challenges of the 21st Century. Cities cover only 1% of the Earth‘s surface, but are already home to about 50% of the Earth‘s population. Up to 80 % of global greenhouse gas emissions are estimated to originate in urban areas, providing large mitigation potentials, e.g. through Low Carbon City (LCC) concepts and strategies. At the same time, with high population and infrastructure densities, as well as concentrated economic activities cities are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and need to adapt.

An integrated and participatory low carbon approach

The Low Carbon Future Cities Project, funded by the Mercator Foundation started in 2011 and aims:

• To develop an integrated low carbon, adaptation and circular economy strategy for a city govern- ment in China and Germany that addresses the needs of political and industrial decision-makers and improves resource efficiency in order to de- couple resource usage from economic growth.
• To show good practice examples of sustainable urban development with a high potential for transferability, implementation and replication in urban areas in other regions
• To stimulate dialogue among stakeholders from Wuxi and Düsseldorf to enable and actively support mutual learning and information exchange bet- ween China and Germany.

Sino-German co-operation to address the challenges of climate change

At the heart of the project design is the principle of knowledge sharing and cooperation between cities and regions.

For China, Wuxi, a five-million inhabitant city near Shanghai was identified as eager to pursue a low carbon path without having received financial support from large programmes.

In Germany, the region around Düsseldorf serves as the counterpart as a densely populated region of high economic and political relevance whose political decision-makers have recognised the challenge of climate change.