Why City-Business Collaboration?

City-business collaboration has huge potential to reduce emissions on a greater scale than the city or individual businesses could manage alone, by maximising the assets of each actor and implementing the ambitious, coordinated local climate action needed to create inclusive, prosperous and climate-safe cities.

Cities are uniquely positioned to meet the challenges of the climate emergency. Urban centres consume over two-thirds of global energy and emit more than 70 percent of the world’s total greenhouse gases, but also account for more than 80 percent of world GDP. They have influence over a huge range of assets and functions. Cities also have the most ambitious political leaders when it comes to climate - mayors who are already acting decisively across key areas of renewables, transport, buildings and waste to reduce carbon emissions. 

The CBCA Forum is a network for leading cities, or leaders of local business networks, to exchange ideas on how cities can use their formal and informal powers to influence, regulate and collaborate with the private sector to achieve ambitious climate actions.

We achieve this by:

• Facilitating peer-to-peer learning through city ‘buddying’, webinars, workshops and quarterly members’ meetings

• Offering training to city economic development teams on emerging climate topics

• Creating dialogues between leading cities and businesses so that both parties can learn and discuss how city-business collaboration can be established or improved

• Producing research, guides, interviews and case studies of successful city-business collaborations

• Advising and supporting cities to develop local city-business climate alliances which reduce city-level emissions, set joint commitments and deliver co-created projects

• Collectively communicating, advocating and promoting city-business collaboration as a critical tool to address climate change