Uudised

Täna toimub Tallinna Euroopa rohelise pealinna aasta avakonverents jätkusuutlike linnade teemal “Fantastic Creatures: Making European Cities Safe, Inclusive, Resilient and Sustainable”. Konverentsi avasõnad pidasid Euroopa Komisjoni keskkonna, ookeanide ja kalandusvolinik Virginijus Sinkevičius ja Tallinna linnapea Mihhail Kõlvart.

Linnapea kõne all muutmata kujul:

Honourable Mr Commissioner, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends!

It is my pleasure and honour to welcome you to Tallinn, at the conference „Fantastic creatures: Making European cities safe, inclusive, resilient and sustainable“.

The conference is also one of the kick-off events to celebrate Tallinn´s European Green Capital Year 2023.  The Green Capitals are the pioneers, taking leadership in creating sustainable, resilient, and inclusive cities of the future – and the original intent to bring cities together still holds today as it did in 2006 when the European Green Capital idea was born here in Tallinn.

Ban Ki-moon, the former United Nations Director General said “Our struggle for global sustainability will be won or lost in the cities”.

As we know, according to the United Nations, around 80% of Europeans will live in cities by 2050. The OECD estimates that 65% of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals can only be reached with the proper engagement of and coordination with the local and regional governments.  Different international and national strategies are urging cities to set ambitious sustainability and climate goals, but often fail to provide them with tools for that. A study from the European Parliament about the role of the cities in the EU says the following:

“As a result of the expansion of Union’s competencies and activities over the last decades, local authorities have gained a crucial role in implementing EU policies in areas as social cohesion, environment, migration and asylum”.

The world today is in a permanent emergency mode – the climate crisis is a constant issue, there is still COVID 19 and almost a year ago war started in Ukraine. For a long time, Europe hasn´t been on such a high alert level as today. Crises need well-coordinated and integrated solutions to mitigate their effects.

Our success and the well-being of our people is defined by our ability to adapt to new circumstances, our agility in solving unexpected situations, and our capability to build resilience.

It will be the cities, that will be implementing the EU Green Deal on the local level. It is the cities that are implementing the SDGs on the local level. It will be the local level that will bring about the most imminent change in people´s lives and well-being and contribute significantly towards achieving the EU´s ambition of a first climate-neutral continent by 2050.

In Tallinn, we have declared green transition our priority, and we strive towards integrating sustainability to the whole governance and development of our city. We are aiming at a change of paradigm in the city and in the mindset of the people.

We have made sure that also the Green Capital year is fully integrated with the Tallinn 2035 strategy, with our climate action plan and with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

One of our strategic priorities on a wider scale is to launch debates on new forms of governance, that support sustainable urban transitions and local green deals. Cities are not only providers of municipal services anymore. We are confronted with fundamental challenges, the most critical being social and environmental – equality, trust, mental health, and climate change to name a few. These challenges cannot be solved with the structures, services, and management principles of yesterday.

Cities need to employ skills of strategic planning, change management, and co-creation in a way that promotes foresight, collaboration, flexibility, and consensus. A lot of the knowledge and best practices on how to do it is starting to appear. But it is fragmented and not readily available to every city. We want to promote a Europe-wide initiative to consolidate that knowledge and make it available – to teach each other and to learn from each other. The need for consolidated leadership skills is already urgent in the context of the reconstruction of the Ukrainian cities and support to Ukraine in its EU membership process. 

The URBACT Global Goals for Cities network – whose representatives are also in this room today – was led by Tallinn and aimed to implement the UN sustainable development goals at the local level. It provided an excellent opportunity to learn from each other´s experiences, to share good practices. It was a useful tool to improve cross-sectorial thinking, to promote coordination among different stakeholders, and to adopt sustainable development goals as a common framework for local initiatives and actions.  Nineteen integrated action plans contributing to the SDGs and reshaping urban governance are now being taken forward by the “Global Goals for Cities” partners. In Tallinn, we want to use the European Green Capital Year to gear the discussions around sustainable city governance models and the Tallinn governance model we are developing can be one of the examples.

To enhance a meaningful exchange, learning and networking among the cities in the EU, we propose to:

• Strengthen the role of the European cities as change leaders and key players in achieving sustainable development goals and implementing the EU Green Deal objectives.
• Promote the international exchange of experience, peer learning, and capacity-building regarding the implementation of the SDGs.
• Team up with “expert partners” to assist cities to elaborate their local sustainability strategies.
• Apply experiences, good examples and experts from the existing European networks, working with new models of governance (for example the URBACT Global Goals for Cities network, Eurocities, etc.)

As cities, we are grateful, that the European Union is coming up with so many good initiatives and tools to accelerate the green transition. And we are trying to make the best use of them. But is this enough? Or maybe it is too much? Shouldn’t we be aiming at a more strategic and integrated approach? To achieve better policy coordination and complementarity between the financial instruments, we need to talk about setting up a Directorate-General for Urban Affairs in the European Commission to coordinate all the strands of the EU urban policy, gather cities in a structured policy dialogue around the table, effectively and proactively facilitate a multi-level dialogue.

We expect that the EU Voluntary Review prepared ahead of the UN 2023 SDG Summit in September will also cover specifically urban affairs and take the valuable insights and recommendations from the cities into account, and we acknowledge the important work by the European Committee of the Regions in this regard. We also would like to see the dimension of sustainable urban development highlighted at the UN 2023 SDG Summit.

A city is its people and change won´t happen if we are not rowing the boat together – our residents, businessmen, visionaries and city administration, stakeholders from Estonia and across Europe. A wholehearted thank you to all those already on board.  

As said before, as cities we need to work together, share our experiences and best practices, and learn and inspire each other. It is our responsibility towards our residents and the wider world to become sustainable urban environments.

I wish everyone an insightful conference and inspiring encounters around the coffee tables. You are always welcome back during the Green Capital year and beyond!

Thank you!