14 October 2015
- More than 700 delegates from across the world collaborate to drive tangible progress in developing ecocities -

- Melbourne announced as next host city for Ecocity World Summit 2017 -

Abu Dhabi: Ecocity World Summit (ECWS) 2015 concluded yesterday after having attracted more than 700 delegates from across the world. Through a dynamic programme of plenary sessions, workshops, debates, panel discussions, and more, speakers and delegates collaborated to usher in a new way of living that provides the best possible cities while enhancing, not destroying, the biosphere.

H.E. Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak, Secretary General of the Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi (EAD), said during her closing address: "During the Ecocity World Summit, we heard many interventions that were inspirational and visionary, but also that were very practical, demonstrating - through real life experience - how at the city level we can make real progress towards the vision of EcoCities. However, increasing pressure on resources, and the continued growth of emissions of greenhouse gases, our future challenges are stark. We must tackle climate change and we must ensure our cities work for people if we are to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. We must change what we value and how we plan, embrace today's technology and innovate for the future, and leverage on this global success in creating positive change."

While hosted by EAD and facilitated through the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI), the Summit was supported by the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Urban Planning Council (UPC) and Masdar, with Abu Dhabi Tourism & Cultural Authority (TCA) as the destination host. The Summit partners welcomed delegates to experience key attractions relevant to the its theme of Ecocities in Challenging Environments, including Masdar City, which is being developed to be the world's most sustainable eco-city.

"Masdar City is a living example of eco-development in challenging environments, and we are proud to have highlighted it as a case study within the agenda of the Summit," said Dr Ahmad Belhoul, CEO of Masdar. "The participants toured Masdar City, one of the world's most sustainable urban developments and experienced our innovation eco-system first-hand, and we hope that it serves as an inspiration for developing other ecocities worldwide."

The Summit's programme included a series of engaging solution-oriented workshops that will pave the way for further ecocity development initiatives. For example, the City Form and Resource Flows Workshop, which was hosted by Ecocity Builders and British Columbia Institute of Technology, focused on the development of a framework for an Ecocity index for local, regional and global use. The standards would represent a set of conditions for assessing whether a city is performing at an Ecocity level that engages the biophysical conditions with the socio-culture features of a city, supported by locally-specific tools that can be integrated with tools and information platforms that function at a global level.

Contributors recognised that urban form affects resource flows, but that so do the socio-cultural values of the people who live in that urban form, i.e. the personal consumption choices of residents can drive more than 50% of a city's resource flows to meet consumption demands. The workshop also recommended the integration of a comprehensive city overview approach via the bottom-up engagement of residents at the neighborhood scale, if engaging the whole community in sustainability is the goal; this would ensure that residents become not only more aware but also more committed to the shared outcomes of urban sustainability objectives.

Meanwhile, the American University of Beirut and Integrated Urbanism and Sustainable Design (IUSD) workshop on social networking addressed the role of local social networks and universities in addressing the environmental challenges in regional Arab cities. The workshop identified the potential strategies for universities to implement to enhance the relevance of their activities to society and industry partners, including partnerships with government, society and industry bodies in teaching and research activities. It was recommended that universities partner together to make best leverage their knowledge, capacities, and financial resources, and participants called for a joint pool of databases of results from academic activities. The two institutes also agreed to begin dialogue towards building an Arab region-wide consortium to map current successful practices in university-society partnerships.

Similarly, University of Geneva organised its Urban Futures workshop with UCLA and hosted with Masdar Institute, Zayed University, and ALHOSN University to identify the role that identity and sense of place play in formulating a successful ecocity, exploring Abu Dhabi, Los Angeles and Geneva as case studies. The workshop identified that experiential, problem-based learning is integral to better understanding the challenges and opportunities for ecocity development, which can be done by connecting people in person, such as via the workshop, and online, through MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) which the University of Geneva is developing. Once challenges were identified, participants discussed how to best create solutions on-ground, and agreed to host students from Geneva, Switzerland and Los Angeles, California, to Abu Dhabi next year to facilitate this.  

Finally, Ecocity Builders in partnership with EAD's Environment Information, Science & Outreach Management hosted Urbinsight Pilot and Ecocitizen World Project, introducing Urbinsight - a global initiative connecting cities and neighbourhoods with web-based crowd-mapping tools designed to explore, understand, and measure holistic urban health from a citizen's perspective. The well-received event realised the potential for collaboration and the important role the tool plays in better planning for better cities by giving more information that would help people understand their neighborhoods and provoke change to turn cities into more ecologically healthy ones. The initiative further provides policy-makers and decision-makers with greater insight into their cities' conditions.

The event also saw the announcement of Melbourne, Australia as the 2017 host of Ecocity World Summit during the closing ceremony.

-Ends-

About Ecocity World Summit 2015 - Abu Dhabi (ECWS 2015)
The Ecocity World Summit conference series, owned and initiated by Ecocity Builders in 1990, is the biennial cross-disciplinary gathering that focuses on key actions cities and citizens can take to rebuild our human habitat in balance with living system. From 11-13 October 2015, the 11th series of the event will be hosted in Abu Dhabi, UAE, marking its debut in the Middle East.  ECWS 2015 aims to tackle issues around building ecocities in challenging environments - how to make them greener, healthier and better places to live.  It will also serve as the platform upon which Abu Dhabi, and the region, will carry their ecocity visions forward. The event is being led by the Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi (EAD) supported by the UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Urban Planning Council (UPC) and Masdar, and is facilitated by Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI) with Abu Dhabi Tourism & Cultural Authority (TCA) as the destination host.

For more information, please visit: www.ecocityworldsummit.com
For media enquiries, please contact:
Lina Arke
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Email: lina.arke@hkstrategies.com

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© Press Release 2015