“Saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth… these are one and the same fight. We must connect the dots between climate change, water scarcity, energy shortages, global health, food security and women’s empowerment. Solutions to one problem must be solutions for all”.
Ban Ki-moon, Address to the 66th General Assembly: “We the Peoples”, 2011
What is bestclimatesolutions.eu?
The Best Climate Solutions platform run and was updated until December 2018. The archive of projects and solutions that contributed to the platform is still available for consultation on this website.
Best Climate Solutions is a platform to showcase the most innovative and compelling efforts from around the world to build a climate-smart and resilient future, and engaging with local developers, innovators, business operators, and researchers to support the scaling up of tools, technologies and business models that can generate tangible impacts in tackling the causes and consequences of climate change.
Best Climate Solutions built on the unique experience of the Best Climate Practices observatory*, an initiative developed by ICCG in partnership with the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC). Since 2012 the Best Climate Practices observatory has collected and promoted a wide range of concrete actions for dealing with climate change challenges such as energy access, water management, climate finance, disaster risk reduction.
The CMCC gathered part of the Best Climate Practices expertise to start a new journey transitioning from a community of practioners to a community of solution-makers. This is Best Climate Solutions.
The application of an idea or method becomes a solution when it achieves tangible results that lead to a concrete and positive change in the context in which the starting problem is addressed. A good solution is one that not only solves a problem “here and now”, but also offers the possibility of being scaled and adapted to address similar problems in other situations and contexts. The focus of Best Climate Solutions was thus a quest for impact and scalability.
Why bestclimatesolutions.eu?
The impacts of a warming world are already being felt by people worldwide, while global levels and trends of greenhouse gases are still far away from the targets agreed in the Paris Agreement of 2015.
The scale of climate change problems is so enormous that they can be daunting and frustrating. Efforts by one person, or even by one nation alone, are usually not enough to solve them.
The good news is that there is not a single solution, but many solutions! From sea-level rise to sustainable mobility, from extreme weather to clean and accessible energy, each unique challenge requires locally-suitable solutions, each of which is challenging but feasible and, combined, can foster the transition towards more fair and environmentally-friendly development.
Initiatives and tools to reduce the causes and consequences of climate change are advancing and gathering steam around the world, but the pace and scale of change needs to increase dramatically. For these reasons, Best Climate Solutions aimed not only to scout the best examples of methods and ideas for building a sustainable future, but also to trigger conversation on how they are best deployed in each region of the world and provide insight, inspiration and collaboration opportunities to take those solutions to scale.
How did bestclimatesolutions.eu work?
The website bestclimatesolutions.eu served as a collaborative, crowdsourcing platform that collected inputs from all those who think critically and creatively about what must be done to prevent dangerous consequences of climate change, and act accordingly, bringing social and economic benefits to the communities addressed.
Through an open call, Best Climate Solutions invited and selected innovative projects and actionable ideas that provided solutions to targeted climate change challenges. Visit the Contest section to access all information about the next open call.
In the News section, the platform Best Climate Solutions also features stories and experiences of innovative responses to climate change challenges and provide updates on opportunities to start, develop and implement new concept and projects.
For suggestions and recommendations, please drop us a line at: info@cmcc.it
Only by learning from each other is it possible to make the kind of progress we need.
Let’s build new paths towards a more sustainable and inclusive world, one idea at a time.
* The Best Climate Practices observatory is a project launched by the International Center for Climate Governance (ICCG) in partnership with the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC). The ICCG was founded in 2009 as a joint initiative of Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) and Fondazione Giorgio Cini to promote the dissemination of information on climate change and the involvement of a broad non-academic audience in the process of adopting effective climate policies. Since its beginning, the ICCG developed its activities in collaboration with CMCC, which became a formal partner of ICCG in 2014.