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Cities Adapting: Financing Urban Resilience in the Face of Climate Change
Climate change is rapidly transforming how cities function. Extreme heat, heavy rainfall and water scarcity have become major threats affecting public health, mobility and urban infrastructure. These phenomena are no longer future risks — they are shaping city life today. Local authorities rank heatwaves, floods and drought as the most urgent impacts facing their territories….
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Carbon footprint as a competitiveness factor in SMEs
Measuring an organisation’s carbon footprint can be an activity that in itself can increase a company’s competitiveness. It is not a matter of calculating for the sake of calculating, but rather a preliminary step to establishing a plan to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in order to reduce the climate impact generated by the company’s…
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Yes to the Circular Economy… as long as it is profitable
The circular economy offers a very attractive conceptual framework, both from a conceptual point of view and from a more practical prism through which industrial companies can find new ways to optimise their production processes. However, the logic of the market will always prevail and any circular solution will necessarily have to be profitable for…
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Integrated Territorial Strategies (ITSs), establishing a culture of strategic planning
Almost 10 years ago, in 2015, the first call for Sustainable and Integrated Urban Development (SUID) Strategies was launched. Between 2015 and 2018, after two further calls, 598 applications were submitted, with a total of 173 cities obtaining funding. In this way, practically all cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants and around 70% of the…
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Circular Economy in the Manufacturing Industry: Practical Lessons
After months of working with companies to incorporate the circular economy into their business model, we can draw conclusions beyond the macroeconomic confrontation between the circular economy and the traditional economy. As an alternative to the traditional economy, the circular economy presents an approach that tries to break the linearity established in production processes -produce,…
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Keys to establishing a Sustainable Urban Food System (SUFS)
*This article was selected for publication in the 12th edition of URBANBATfest, a cultural festival on urbanism and social innovation in Bilbao organised by URBANBAT, focusing on this occasion on “how food shapes our cities”. The originally published text can be found at the following link. Introduction In designing a Sustainable Urban Food System (SUFS),…
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The most populated Spanish cities exceed the limits of the planet in relation to the use of materials.
The data reflected in the graph, and those of other cities around the world, are accessible in the tool GANBATTE.
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Energy Communities, a shared way of generating energy
The energy transition that must necessarily take place must go beyond the incorporation of renewable energy to the detriment of fossil fuels. It is not just a question of increasing the percentage of renewables in the energy mix, but also of introducing other models of energy production and management. The energy transition must evolve from…
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Gasteiz, free, open and global city
Lately we have read in the press unfortunate and irresponsible statements by some Basque mayors regarding immigration. The most notorious for its forcefulness has been that of the mayor of Vitoria-Gasteiz, accusing citizens of North African origin who live in the city of little less than criminals and fraudsters. Mr. Maroto was referring to the,…