The fifth and final session of the Our Urban Future webinar series, co-organized by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the City Diplomacy Lab in collaboration with the Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GlobalABC), brought together city representatives from Kisumu (Kenya), Mumbai (India), and Toronto (Canada) to examine how multilevel governance turns international climate targets for the buildings and construction sector into local delivery.
In his opening remarks, Dr. Lorenzo Kihlgren Grandi, Founding Director of the City Diplomacy Lab and moderator of the session, noted a genuinely encouraging trend: across the world, more and more cities and regions are developing their own sustainable buildings and construction roadmaps, with local leadership fast becoming the engine of the sector’s transition rather than the exception. He framed the session’s closing chapter around a central question for the series as a whole — how this local dynamism can connect with, and be reinforced by, national and international action — before handing over to Dr. Gulnara Roll to set the global context.
Roll, Chief of the Sectoral Transition Section at UNEP’s Climate Change Division Mitigation Branch and Head of the GlobalABC Secretariat, opened with the state of the sector. GlobalABC now brings together more than 420 member organizations from government, the private sector, and civil society around a sector responsible for a high share of global emissions but also, simply, for the places where people live and work. She noted that half of the floor space that will exist by 2050 has not yet been built — much of it in fast-urbanizing Asia and Africa — making today’s planning and material choices decisive for decades to come. With 55 percent of the world’s population already living in cities, and subnational governments responsible for an estimated 70 percent of public investment, she argued that cities and regions hold real power to accelerate the sector’s transition, even as access to finance remains a persistent constraint. Roll pointed to UNEP’s own building-code support programs with UN-Habitat and UNOPS in Bangladesh, Ghana, Senegal, and India, and to Local Solutions for Green Buildings and Construction, the report produced by GlobalABC’s Subnational Action Group — established in 2024 and led by ICLEI with UNEP and GIZ — which identified local enforcement of building codes and local access to finance as the two priority topics for the sector. She also highlighted UNEP’s role, through the Local2030 Coalition, in co-chairing a working group on local finance now piloting new financing mechanisms, starting in Nigeria. Looking ahead to COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye (9–20 November), she noted that the Presidency has designated November 12 — the second day of the World Leaders Climate Action Summit — as a day dedicated to resilient cities and the built environment, alongside a second Ministerial Meeting of the Intergovernmental Council for Buildings and Climate (ICBC) and a COP31 Buildings and Cooling Pavilion convened with GlobalABC, the Cool Coalition, UN-Habitat, and İlbank of Türkiye.
Full Session Recording
Round 1: City Practices in the Built Environment
Each city representative presented one concrete practice from their own context, illustrated by a photograph.
KISUMU: A DEMONSTRATION BUILDING FOR LOW-CARBON CONSTRUCTION
Felix Odhiambo Akello, Energy Planning Officer, Chief Heat Officer, and Resource Mobilization Officer for the County Government of Kisumu, presented a demonstration office building retrofitted using low-carbon and bio-based materials, including construction material incorporating carbon captured from the atmosphere by a Kenyan direct air capture company, alongside bamboo.
Rather than new construction, the project reuses an existing structure that now houses several hundred county and national staff daily, including agencies such as Kenya’s National Industrial Training Authority and the Kenya Highways Authority, and doubles as a cooling refuge against extreme heat.
The initiative grew out of work with the World Resources Institute on a Zero Emission and Resilient Buildings program, translating national and global green building standards, including Kenya’s own new Green Building Standards, developed with the State Department of Public Works, into practical guidance that Kisumu’s fellow counties, all 47 of them, can adapt and replicate.
It sits alongside the county’s parallel roadmap toward a 100 percent renewable energy transition by 2050.
MUMBAI: A RIVER AS A LESSON IN MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE
Dr. Shankar C. Deshpande, Chief Investment and Planning Officer at the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), shared an aerial photograph of the Mithi River corridor near Mumbai’s airport, showing informal settlements, protected mangroves, resettlement housing, and new commercial development side by side.
After catastrophic flooding in 2005, when the region received 40 percent of its annual rainfall in 24 hours, MMRDA led a multi-agency effort, bringing together India’s Airport Authority, national and state water and pollution-control bodies, IIT Bombay, and Maharashtra state agencies, to widen and deepen the 17-kilometer river and resettle roughly 10,000 families along its banks.
The project was financed in part through land-value-capture mechanisms that let private developers build in exchange for funding free resettlement housing. The results: no flooding recorded since 2005, roughly triple the river’s carrying capacity, and expanded mangrove cover.
New buildings planned along the corridor incorporate passive cooling and low-carbon materials, developed together with UNEP. For Deshpande, the image captures a broader argument: with so much of the world’s future building stock still to be constructed, city-region institutions like MMRDA are where international climate targets are ultimately translated into resilient, low-carbon, affordable development.
TORONTO: BUILDING RESILIENCE AMID SHIFTING POLICY
Howlan Mullally, Manager, Corporate Sustainability at the City of Toronto, presented a new civic and community centre under construction on a brownfield site in Etobicoke, in the city’s west end, a multi-departmental facility combining municipal offices, a library, and recreation space, built to the Toronto Green Standard and served by a district geo-exchange energy system reaching roughly 200 meters underground across seven building blocks.
About 30 percent of the roughly 3,000 housing units planned across the wider site will be affordable housing.
Mullally used the project to illustrate a tension increasingly familiar to North American cities: provincial policy is pushing to streamline and loosen local development standards, and the elimination of Canada’s federal carbon levy has shifted the underlying project economics, even as the development moves forward as one of the more ambitious green phases likely to be built under current conditions.
His conclusion: local governments have to keep adapting and advancing sustainability commitments even as national and provincial policy shifts around them.
Round 2: Keywords for Multilevel Cooperation
Each panelist was then asked for a single keyword capturing their city’s approach to multilevel cooperation on decarbonizing the built environment.
Toronto — Jazz: Howlan Mullally chose the word on the spot, comparing multilevel cooperation to musical improvisation: cities have to listen and respond in real time to the moves of other levels of government and other actors, while still working toward something coherent.
Mumbai — Ecosystem: Dr. Deshpande picked up the musical metaphor, describing multilevel governance as requiring the “orchestration” of an ecosystem — water, land, mobility, and housing — in which national, state, and regional institutions and the private sector each play their own role while pulling in the same direction. He pointed to MMRDA’s own model: roughly USD 5 billion in annual public infrastructure investment attracting a further USD 10 billion in private capital, within a governance structure that translates city- and region-level net-zero targets into project-level delivery.
Kisumu — Circularity: Felix Akello’s keyword captured Kisumu’s effort to integrate sustainability across every sector, department, and stage of a project rather than treating construction as an isolated technical exercise — from material choice to user experience to long-term community wellbeing — with decentralized governance providing the local machinery to make that integration possible.
Discussion and Q&A
The Q&A drew questions from a global audience and ranged across four themes.
Turning goals into local action. Asked which messengers and channels are most effective at converting sustainable buildings and cooling goals into concrete action, Mullally pointed to committed leadership one or two tiers below the mayor — deputy city managers with authority spanning multiple divisions — as the most consistent driver of change in Toronto. Deshpande argued that alignment across national, state, and metropolitan leadership behind a single message reduces public resistance and builds a shared sense of ownership. Akello described bringing political, technical, and administrative leaders to the same table so that Kisumu’s own message is communicated consistently at every level.
Advice for cities starting out. Asked what single piece of advice they would give another city launching a similar project, Akello emphasized building trust and genuine partnership with national government, so that policy is co-created rather than imposed. Mullally advised building personal relationships across departments before you need them, and not letting the perfect get in the way of the good. Deshpande returned to a recurring theme of the session: never decouple equity, environment, and economics, at any scale, from a single project up to national policy.
What national governments could do next. Asked what one additional action from national government would make the biggest difference, Deshpande called for clear, measurable national targets and benchmarking, so that local achievements are visible against a shared national ambition. Akello proposed a dedicated transition-support mechanism to help subnational governments translate national and global policy into local practice — noting that Kisumu already leads a network of neighboring counties doing exactly this on heat action and green building. Mullally argued for applying the same rigor — metrics, accountability — to major national infrastructure investment as to climate targets, so that economic growth and decarbonization are not treated as separate agendas.
Bridging policy, practice, and private investment. On the role of architects and planners in connecting national policy to project-level delivery, Deshpande urged making the lifecycle economic case directly to clients and financiers — that sustainable materials and design pay for themselves through lower operating costs. Mullally pointed to planners’ persuasive skills as an asset in keeping ambitious design options on the table against more conservative engineering pushback. Akello stressed continuous upskilling across the entire implementation chain — architects, contractors, and technical staff alike — so that new low-carbon techniques are understood consistently on the ground. Asked separately what governments and international organizations can do to make private investment in sustainable buildings more attractive, Gulnara Roll pointed to stronger building codes and regulations, better-integrated financing mechanisms that reach subnational governments directly through the Local2030 Coalition’s local finance working group, and direct engagement with real estate investors through venues such as the GlobalABC-supported Sustainable Real Estate Forum at New York and Baku Climate Weeks, alongside UNEP’s Finance Initiative.
Closing Reflections
Each speaker closed with a thought to carry forward. Felix Akello urged cities to act now rather than wait for perfect conditions, warning that climate impacts are accelerating faster than past assumptions, and called for development that stays people-centered and grounded in long-term research. Dr. Shankar Deshpande offered a defining line for the session: resilience, he said, “is not bouncing back, it is bouncing forward” — belonging on the planning table, not in the disaster room. Howlan Mullally picked up both threads, connecting Akello’s circularity and Deshpande’s insistence on holding equity, environment, and economy together, and pointed to the value of engaging unexpected allies across an organization to get things done.
Gulnara Roll thanked the three cities on behalf of UNEP and GlobalABC, noting that their experiences will feed into future GlobalABC publications and into COP31, and reaffirmed UNEP’s commitment to continuing this work through the Subnational Action Group.
This closed the fifth and final session of the first cycle of Our Urban Future. On behalf of the City Diplomacy Lab, Lorenzo Kihlgren Grandi thanked UNEP for the collaboration. Since December 2025, the series has convened officials from 19 cities and regions spanning Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Middle East, across five sessions: Delivering Local Climate Action: Insights from COP30, Driving Change in Urban Mobility, Cities and the Future of Food, Beating the Heat Together, and this final chapter on the built environment.
Published July 10, 2026. Last updated August 29, 2026.