2013 Best Climate Practices Award on “Climate change and urban resilience”
Note: This is an older edition of the Best Climate Practices Award. All information about the current edition of the contest is available on the Award Section of this website.
2013 Theme: “Climate change and urban resilience”
The focus of the 2013 contest was urban resilience. Resilience is defined as the ability of a system to recover and alter its modus operandi in order to prepare and respond to changes in its external environment and to recover from disruption to its internal structures.
Over half of the global population lives in urban areas and the United Nations estimate that by 2030, the planet’s current 2.9 billion urban residents will rise to a staggering 5 billion. Many urban areas are vulnerable to environmental change and many city inhabitants are concerned with the impacts of rapid and unsustainable land use changes. As urban centers have always been hubs of innovation and creativity, new perspectives on the practices used to secure urban environments against disruptive climate change challenges may lie in the collective brilliance of a wide range of people around the world. Through the 2013 call for proposals, the main goal is to encourage institutions, scientists, common people, enterprises, think tanks, stakeholders
Read the full Best Climate Practices 2013 Call for proposals
Key dates
Competition’s start date
April 22, 2013
Competition’s end date
June 21, 2013
Winners announcement
September 27, 2013
2013 Panel of Experts
Anthony Bigio
Professor at the George Washington University graduate program of Sustainable Planning. Urban Advisor with over 30 years of experience of urban development projects across the world. He retired from the World Bank (WB) in June 2013 after a nearly 20 years career as a Senior Urban Specialist. Lead author for the IPCC. Contributing to the chapter dedicated to urban planning of the Fifth Assessment Report.
Carlo Carraro
Carlo Carraro is Professor of Environmental Economics at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been President of the University of Venice from 2009 to 2014 and Director of the Department of Economics from 2005 to 2008. In 2008, he was elected Vice-Chair of the Working Group III and Member of the Bureau of the Nobel Laureate Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has been re-elected in 2015 for a second term.
Raffaello Cervigni
Jan Corfee-Morlot
Senior analyst at the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD). She has dedicated most of her career to intergovernmental affairs in the climate change policy arena. She has worked with national and local governments to design institutions and reform policies to respond to climate change. She is a member of the IPCC.
Robert H. Socolow
Professor Emeritus of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. He is co-principal investigator of Princeton’s Univesity’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI). His current research focuses on global carbon management and fossil-carbon sequestration. He was awarded the 2003 Leo Szilard Lectureship Award by the American Physical Society.
2013 Winners and Awards
The 2013 Best Climate Practices contest features two awards: the Experts’ Choice Award and the Users’ Choice Award. The Users’ Choice Award is voted on by the public through the BCP website, involving a quantitative voting system. The Experts’ Choice Award winners receive a valuable artistic Murano Glass sculpture created by a Murano Master.
The winner of the Experts’ Choice Award has been the New York City Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency, aiming to transform the city of New York into a high resilient urban space with respect to all expected climate impacts and in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. On October 2013, Prof. Carlo Carraro, flew to NYC to award the then-NYC Mayor, Mr. Bloomberg, a Murano glass sculpture handcrafted by the famous Glass Master Simone Cenedese.
The winner of the Users’ Choice Award has been Torri2020, a Sustainable Energy Action Plan (SEAP) project for Torri di Quartesolo, a municipality of 12.000 inhabitants located in the Italian province of Vicenza. The project was envisioned by Diego Pellizzaro and Emiliano Vettore, both urban planners and founders of Green DEV, who received a Murano glass sculpture handcrafted by the famous Glass Master Simone Cenedese. The winners of the Users’ Choice Award have been awarded during a special event entitled “Good ideas to prepare our cities for climate change”,