"I hope that CRIC Pilot Cities do not repeat the same mistakes European cities had done in the last century," said Sara Silva, Project Coordinator at Ecolise during online dialogue forum between CRIC pilot cities and CRIC international partners, Tuesday, 28 June 2022.
According to Sara there are many best ways and best practices to work with the environment. She responded to pilot cities initiatives to mitigate risk of flooding in City of Pangkalpinang and to reduce waste and pollution in City of Gorontalo.
Representative of Climate Change Working Group and person in charge for CRIC project in City of Pangkalpinang, Andy Andriadoria mentioned that the city is still preparing climate action plan based on city’s climate risk profile. City of Pangkalpinang, according to Andy has relatively high population density and is developing early warning system for communities prone to flooding in the area.
The city has received CRIC’s climate adaptation trainings (A1 and A2) between August 2021 and April 2022 including trainings on data collection and climate risk and vulnerability assessment. Aside of building early warning system, the city is working with communities in coastal area to reduce coastal abrasion, expanding green urban spaces and performing rehabilitation of illegal tin mines to increase water retention and absorption in the area.
Gorontalo Climate Change Working Group representative, Mahathir Favlevy Monoarfa from City’s Development Planning Agency mentioned that City of Gorontalo’s sensitive to extreme weather as the average daily temperature could reach 35.6 degree Celsius. “We could only expect hot or hotter temperature in summer season as the sun could shine for 7-8 hours a day,” he said.
The city recently hosted the first Climate Adaptation Training (A1) between 2-8 June 2022 and has completed all climate mitigation training facilitated by trainers from CCROM, IPB University.
Pascaline Gaborit from Pilot4Dev gave high appreciations to all CRIC pilot cities that have created climate mitigation and adaptation working groups. “We (CRIC International Partners) are willing to visit the pilot cities. Congratulations to pilot cities that already have climate adaptation and mitigation working groups. Even many European cities do not have the same groups,” she said.
Sara from Ecolise added that city governments need good marketing campaigns that promote not only human health but also environmental health. “By learning from the world’s wisdom, we could directly jump to innovation. There are many opportunities to innovate around sanitation, good policies to manage waste or transform waste management into business,” she said.
Both pilot cities and CRIC Partners are willing to strengthen cooperation to provide lessons learned and solutions to environmental problems.
--##--
Contributors: Aniessa Delima Sari (UCLG ASPAC Regional Project Manager), Abimanyu Aya (CRIC Project Internship), Aditya Pratama Nugraha Akbar (CRIC Project Internship).
