News

December, 15, 2022

UEF5 Steering committee meeting

The Steering Committee members of the Fifth Urban Economy Forum (UEF5) met on December the 15th to discuss and finalize the general topics and themes of the annual forum.

The 5th Urban Economy Forum (UE 5) will be held from September 18-22, 2023, in Toronto, Canada. The topic of UEF 5 will be The role of Climate finance in promoting sustainable urbanization. For the past four years, the Forum has annually convened hundreds of urban partners and experts, city managers, mayors, academics, governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations, financial institutions, local communities and other stakeholders to engage in discourses on the topic of urban economy and finance.

Since the issue of climate change is one of the main agendas for all urban stakeholders, this year’s forum will focus particularly on climate change, urban finance, and urban SDGs. The issue of climate change is one of the basic challenges of living on the planet, which affects many, if not all, other issues. All development processes and any system that defines development priorities are somehow affected by climate change. 

At the same time, this concept is strongly related to the issue of resilience and increases the level of vulnerability of all development sectors. The noteworthy point is that in connection with the concept of climate change, we should mainly consider the macro scale for intervention. In other words, in this area, we cannot move forward by relying on regional and national measures, but effective national measures can support global problems on a large scale, but will not be able to bring about fundamental changes. 

The Steering Committee was attended by:

Patricia Canelas, Lecturer in Sustainable Urban Development (SUD), University of Oxford who has been selected as the Co-chair of the Steering Committee.

Graham Carr, President, and Vice-Chancellor, Concordia University, Canada

Michaela Kauer, Head, Brussels Office, City of Vienna, EUROCITIES, Austria

Jakub Mazur, First Deputy Mayor, Wrocław, Poland / President of METREX

Henk Bouwman, Secretary General, METREX 

Elaine Coburn, Director of Centre for Feminist Research, York University

Anaclaudia Rossbach, Director, Latin America and the Caribbean, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

Giuseppe Tesoriere, Urban and Regional Economist, World Resources

Julie Syversen, Researcher, Public Policy, Climate Change, Disaster Risk Reduction 

Adel Gamar, CEO of the Ghamar foundation

Sophia Kianni, Official United Nations Advisor on climate change 

The themes and topics of UEF5 have been finalized as the following:

1. Sustainable Urban finance, challenges and opportunities 
2. Importance of cities in climate action 
3. Climate finance in the context of cities’ sustainable development 
4. Urban sustainability solutions for key sectors and financing needs 
5. Sources of climate finance for cities 
6. Innovative financing mechanisms and instruments for cities’ climate action 
7. Cities’ financial needs and investment priorities 
8. Strategy Policy, and legislation regarding forming the process of interaction between different stakeholders (parliaments, local governors, municipalities and banks) 
9. Best practices on Public Private Participation on Sustainable Urban Finance 
10. Climate finance toward implementation of Urban sustainability 
11. Urban economy necessity of investment in cities to reduce carbon emission and reducing the global warming effects and the resources , 
12. Sustainable urban financial resources, processes towards realization 
13. Reducing the effects of climate change and global warning through direct urban investment 
14. Capacity building