 Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, and welcome to this site event of the ALPF, HLPF, about transitioning to circular cities where to focus and why findings from research. My name is Alke de Taïa and I'll be your host today or your moderator today. I'll be getting you through this webinar. First of all, what are the objectives of this webinar? We're going to try to examine the status quo and future ambitions of circular economies transition in Latin America, Chinese and European cities. We will explore how cities from the regions can maximize the full potential of circular economy beyond waste management. We'll also discuss the lessons that cities from the regions can learn from each other and we'll try to facilitate connections among stakeholders from the regions to strengthen existing partnerships and foster new collaborations. First of all, I will tell a bit more about who I am. So you know who's moderating this session, as stated before, I work in Flanders. I work for the Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities. Flanders is a region in Belgium, which contains 6.6 million inhabitants. We have around 300 cities and municipalities ranging from 100 inhabitants up to half a million. So there's a big diversity in how big our cities are. We, as an association, are the advocates, the knowledge provider and network developer of local authorities. We try to represent or we represent local governments and defend them in numerous policy dossiers. We also support them and strengthen with advice, training and communication. And we also try to bring them together in Flanders, but also across other regions with Brussels and Wallownie being the first other ones. But also our Netherlands, people's communities from the Netherlands. And we try to make sure or see how we can help them. For a circle economy, what is it exactly that we do? Because although we have very small cities and very big ones, or big for us, we try to support them all by supporting them in experiments and projects towards circular cities. Here you have one example on the shared economy where you had one city that really wanted to implement it. And then we try to help them with this and also exchange this knowledge and implement it in other cities and regions. And there we also wrote a book about that. We wrote a book on how local authorities can become more circular, which policy areas they have to work on, et cetera. And we also try to recognize and eliminate the barriers they have towards working a more circular city. So that's what we or what I do in Flanders. So that gives you a bit of background so you know that I know what we're talking about today. I will now go through the agenda. We will start, of course, with the welcoming and opening remarks, which I will give to you later. Then we'll get a bit more information on the transition to circular cities. And we'll hear about some findings from research by Federa. Then we'll have two case studies, one from Latin America and one from China. And then we'll also have an interactive discussion with people or representatives from all over the world and then some closing remarks. Who's here today? So you have me as a moderator. Then you have Federa, who's going to give you some information about the research she did. Then we will have Ms. Carolina Urrutia. Urrutia, I will try my best to say it all perfectly. Vasquez from the city of Bogota. Then we have Kanglei, who will also give a bit more insight in his work or his city study. And then we have also Su too, who is joining us here today from IKLEI during the panel. And we'll have some closing remarks by Katja Suo. And now a welcome from Veronica Tomé from BMUV, who will be greeting us via video. Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, good morning, good day and good evening, wherever you are. I extend a warm welcome to all of you attending this virtual HIPF SIDELAND. We will focus on regional perspectives of a transition to circular cities in Latin America, Europe and China. Our current resource consumption is unsustainable. The extraction and processing of resources contribute to one third of air pollution. Half of global greenhouse gas emissions and 90% of species extinction and water shortages. We need a fundamental shift in how we manage our resources and livelihoods. The concept of the circular economy has therefore gained popularity among political decision makers worldwide as a potential and very powerful solution. A circular economy is a model of consumption and production that aims to minimize waste and maximize the efficient use of resources by keeping products, materials and resources in circulation for as long as possible. Building a circular economy requires a radical transformation of production and consumption patterns to address environmental, economic and social dimensions of sustainability. The circular economy can play a crucial role in addressing the three major crises of our time, climate change, pollution and extinction of seed species. Cities possess a distinct advantage in transitioning to a circular economy as they concentrate resources and can serve as testing grounds for circular solutions. The German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection is supporting the implementation of numerous initiatives at national and international level that contribute significantly to these issues. Germany was one of the first countries to introduce a resource efficiency program in 2012, which is named PROGRESS. Its primary objective is to enhance the sustainability of resource extraction and utilization, fulfilling our responsibility to future generations by safeguarding the long-term natural foundations for life. We therefore welcome the EU Commission's initiative for sustainable products, presented in March 2022. In 2020 already, the EU adopted the new circular economy action plan to achieve a circular economy by 2050. The plan goes beyond achieving 100% recycling rates and aims to transform production modes and optimize materials flows. Internationally, Germany is committed to resource efficiency and the circular economy. Through a broad alliance of countries from all continents, Germany has actively campaigned for an international plastics agreement. Recent developments highlight Germany's commitment to building strong environmental and climate partnerships. Germany and Colombia have agreed to collaborate closely on climate protection, focusing on environmental protection, biodiversity conservation and sustainable urban development. The German-Chinese environmental partnership is also making significant progress. During this year's German-Chinese Intergovernmental Consultations, a joint declaration of intent was signed, and it was announced that the 7th German-Chinese Environmental Forum would take place in November 2023 under the motto, together for green and sustainable development, synergy between tackling pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change. Ladies and gentlemen, I am therefore very pleased that we have been able to gather such a diverse group of participants here today, bringing together expertise from a wide range of fields to establish new partnerships and strengthen existing ones. I am therefore particularly thankful to the Stockholm Environmental Institute to have co-organized this event with us. I am confident that you will have a stimulated discussion over the next 90 minutes, providing concrete ideas for advancing the circular economy at the international level. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you for these inspiring opening remarks. For the people who are not able to hear or only heard a bit of it, I will excuse myself. I should have told these housekeeping rules up front, because the event is being interpreted, so it's very important to select the language by your choose, or that corresponds to your language being English, Spanish or Chinese, but also to hear the English version you had to select English, so my apologies for that. The recording and presentation slides will be made available afterwards, and during the discussions you can pose your questions to the panelists in the Q&A or FNA section, so do you have any questions during one of the presentations? You can already put them in there, and in case you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to mail at citiesgoingcircular.de. And then also to contribute to a diversity-sensitive webinar or event, we are dedicated to provide an inclusive and harassment-free experience at all our events, so we celebrate diversity and embrace the opening exchange of IDEs among all participants. Wow, that went a bit wrong. So thank you for the attention already, and then it's now time for our first speaker of the day, being Fedra Van Heuze. She works at the Stockholm Environmental Institute and is head of Division Society, Climate and Policy Support, and she will learn us a bit more about her research findings. So hello, Fedra. Thank you, Elke, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today and to co-host together with GIZ and BMUV this event on transitioning to circular cities. I hope you can see my screen. So today I'll tell you a little bit about the research that we have done in Sweden, but also globally around transitioning to circular cities. My name is Fedra. I'm head of Division Society, Climate and Policy Support at the Stockholm Environment Institute, or SEI in short, and we received funding in 2019 from the Swedish Innovation Agency, Vinova, to support cities with becoming more circular. We had multiple objectives, but we were also focused quite practically on supporting municipalities with the implementation of circularity. So in a nutshell, our research looked at how we could monitor the circular economy in cities. We looked at how social consequences would manifest itself in cities with the transition to a circular economy, and then we also aimed to build a framework that would support cities with understanding the level of circularity, but also pinpoints to any gaps or opportunities present in the city. Through these three-year research periods, we undertook a systematic map of literature done on the circular economy in cities. We looked at frameworks that measure circularity. We looked at indicators. We did a social impact study in a city, and so basically our summary findings are that overall more cities are embarking on circular economy transitions. The reason they do so is because many cities have realized that they cannot continue with the make, take, and dispose linear trajectory of resource use at the moment, because cities, as they grow and continue to grow, the requirements that they have on materials, but the waste that they produce will also be insurmountable, and so it provides a huge opportunity to close the loop, reduce energy, and material footprints. In addition, there's also social pressures in cities, which provide an opportunity for increased circularity. If you look throughout the studies done so far, or the academic literature available on circular cities, we see a focus mostly in Europe and China. Somewhat it's starting in Latin America, and if you look at sector and ours, we see mostly a focus on recycling, so the waste management industry, and recovery of energy to waste, so in the energy production level, and I will come back to that later. In addition, our research has shown that most cities and policymakers have quite a technocentric view. They think that technology will resolve the material and energy challenges we have, and they see the circular economy as positive for the triple bottom line. For the economy, we'll create a lot of GDP and support growth. It's positive for people, because they assume there will be a lot of job creation, and it is positive for the planet, whereby environmental impacts of the linear economy model will be reduced. However, we noticed also in our research that there was limited consideration of negative consequences of the circular economy. Most of the times, transition processes do come with negative consequences, but they're, I would say, as good as always, unintended. So it's important to be vigilant to those to ensure that your process is just that you have the whole society with you and behind you, and that you design a new society where everyone has a place. So I'm thinking, for example, consequences that are often overlooked are rebound effects, where a reduce maybe in material consumption has a spill over effect somewhere else. The quality of jobs is not always high, especially if you look at the waste sector. If you're looking at formalizing informal waste practices, oftentimes people get pushed out of the labor market. There's challenges with access to services if we make the sharing economy based on cars, for example. And there's also challenges with the long term financial viability of some of these circular economy initiatives. A lot of them depend on subsidies, especially when it comes to labor for the integration of certain social economic groups. But it's important that we see to integrate VCE initiatives in society longer term. I briefly provide an interactive map. There's a link to this, which you will get when you receive the presentation. And so this is an evidence atlas with research from the last 10 years, 2010 to 2020, related to circular cities. So here we see a concentration in China, in Europe, but we also see now that Latin America is popping up on the radar. And so I'm very happy that we have the city of Bogota here today to talk about their work. So looking through the research and the findings, we also then decided to design a framework based on five different components aimed at clarifying the connection between different decisions. So it would be easier for cities, policymakers, but also academia to understand why the circular economy was envisioned in a certain way. I will provide the two practical examples in a minute of two Swedish cities. But so our five components were the circular economy vision, what does the city put forward as their aim and goals. In governance and participation, we're looking at who sits at the table in the design of the circular economy plan in the strategy in the implementation, but also in the evaluation, whose voice is heard. In the circular strategies here, we look at sectors that the strategy can focus on, but also at the R's. So the R framework is, I think most of us know the reuse, reduce, recycle, but there's actually 10 different R's starting from our zero refuse all the way to our nine recover of ways to energy. Then we have a component, urban stocks and flows to see how resources flow in the city. And then finally, our final component is the triple bottom line, people, planet and profits, showcasing that the circular economy is not only about the environment, but also impacts on people and impact on the economy. In more detail here, I will not explain this much, but there's a paper that you can look at. But so this showcases the different more detail on each component of the circular economy. And that's of our framework. And I said before, you can look at each on its own, but you can also look at some of these connected to the others, which allows you to understand why certain decisions were made or why the circular economy was implemented in a certain way. I will now provide you with two examples. So first, we have the city of Umeå in Sweden. So Umeå is a city in northern Sweden. They have grown quite extensively in the last decades. They currently have 120,000 citizens, but they plan on doubling in population in the next 30 years or so. They are one of the 112 cities in Europe that are part of the mission for climate neutral and smart cities. So their goal is to reach climate neutrality by 2030, from a territorial perspective, but the city of Umeå also has put forward a consumption-based target where they look at emissions not only generated within their territory, but also at the emissions caused by imports of goods and services. Overall, the city of Umeå, they are quite progressive and they are quite a frontrunner when it comes to the circular economy because their aim is to become a leader in the circular economy by 2028. So in their strategy, they are quite broad in the participation and the design. It's a lot of government agencies, yes, but they've also engaged quite extensively with industry, with academia, and they are part of a transnational collaboration under the OECD for circular cities. Here we're lacking a little bit the participation of civil society because they would then also allow to look at the people impact. And so in our framework, we see in the final impact that the consideration for people impact is mostly on job creation, but there is very little consideration of other types of social impacts, like personal rights, participation, political systems, and community cohesion. If you look at the sectors and the arts, so they're focusing quite a lot on the second hand shops, and they have a circular mall and a free teats bank, which is where you can share sports equipment and hobby equipment. And then their focus on the urban stocks and flows is mostly related to goods and services through the sharing economy. If you then look at the city of Stockholm, their vision is more narrow. So here they focus not on becoming a leader in the circular economy, but they look at it from a material perspective. They want to be a resource smart, which then also influences who participates, what sectors do they focus on, but also what urban stocks and flows do they look at. Stockholm, like Umeå, is also one of the 112 cities that aims to be climate neutral by 2030. And Stockholm actually updated its strategy and they will be climate positive by 2030. They work mostly to their waste and water companies, Stockholm, Vattenen, Affal, and through their energy company, where they, so basically their circular economy looks at the production of biochar, the removal of plastics from the district heating service, and then they have also circular strategies when it comes to the municipality itself, where they look at secondhand and refurbished furniture. But so overall, our recommendations, our next steps for practitioners and even for academia, is that we see there's an opportunity to look more at participation or how you can include civil society and citizens in your governance component to ensure that everyone is on boards, that it's circular economy for and by the people. Another area of further research is the one where it comes to rights, so including shared ownership, if we're talking about shared mobility service, how can you ensure access to circular services. In addition, there's an opportunity to move beyond the lower arse of recycling and recovery, but going higher to the remanufacturing, repurposing, but even the refusing of consumption. And then a final challenge or area of research that we would like to investigate is also looking at the financial side. There's substantial investments needed in a lot of this infrastructure to make the circular economy function well, but there's also an opportunity to investigate how profitable are these different circular initiatives and how can we support them to ensure that they become an embedded part of the economy. There's a little bit more of information on our website. Our project was called Urban Circularity Assessment Framework, so we received funding from the Swedish Innovation Agency, Vinova, but we'd be happy to engage with anybody. And we are actually in the process of looking at the city of Bogota and Buenos Aires to see how we can apply our framework in those two contexts, just to understand is it something that could work in different environments? And are there any lessons that we can learn from there? Thank you. Thank you, Fedor, for these interesting findings and also saying us a bit, telling us a bit more about how cities can implement this or implementing it at the moment. We'll go on with this by letting or having two case studies by city's representatives. One will be given by Carolina Orytia. She is indeed the Secretary of the Environment for the City of Bogota, which we just referred to in this role. She oversees policy development and implementation as well as the management of natural resources and key institutions such as the Institute of Animal Welfare and others. And then we will have a second case study by Kang Le. He is the Vice President of the Tangying Research Academy of Ecological and Environmental Science. Make sure that you have your language settings correct because not all speakers will speak in English. So I will first say hello to Carolina or good morning to Carolina. Good morning, Elke. And thank you for the invitation. The sun is shining right on my face. So if it gets any stronger, I'll get up and shut the shutters. It's great to be here. Bogota has received an enormous amount of support, both financial and technical, from the German cooperation, from Jay Zed. And we are not only very thankful, but very much looking forward to have this cooperation. Ensure that the work that we've started to do on the circular economy moves forward, our period in the local government ends in December, and we hope that these policies will continue in time. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about our circular, Bogota Circular, which is our initiative to start or to sort of jumpstart the transition towards a circular economy in Bogota. And let me share my screen and put this up in presentation mode. There you are. Okay. So there we are. Yeah. What are the main pillars for our initiative? Initially, we're looking into a whole systemic model. Of course, we're beginning to choose the sectors that we are initially focusing on. But we're looking at is the whole system. So what we want is full system efficiency. And just the way as Heather was describing, we're looking at the idea of circularity to be a principle in terms of how we consume, how we design what we produce, and of course, how we handle waste management. Behind that is the principle of preserving and improving our natural capital. And of course, in general, of optimizing the use of resources. How do we do that? Or where do we start by looking at consumption effectively? How we are going to promote more sustainable forms of consumption? We are, of course, a big capital, we're eight million people in a country of 40 million people and about half of our population live under poverty standards, not in absolute poverty, but just in general, in the description of sort of multi dimensional poverty. So we can't look at consumption in a very simplified manner. We have to look also at what opportunities can stem from having more sustainable consumption models. We do have to, of course, provide public services. And that's, since it is within the control of the city, we are very intensively looking at how to promote circularity from the public service perspective. What are the values behind that circularity? Of course, sustainability in general, and not to leave behind climate action and the way our emissions, our mitigation agenda and our adaptation agenda contribute to circularity and vice versa. What are the guiding principles of this transformation? So we're looking at governance and co-responsibility. Federer was describing it, I think, very effectively. We not only have to work with the private sector to make sure that there are economic opportunities behind the transition to circular economy, but we have to make sure that these opportunities reach those that are most vulnerable. Like in most of the developing world, we have a huge challenge in terms of who is picking up waste, who is separating waste, and the way in which waste pickers in general and the whole value chain at the bottom of the pyramid of waste management is included in our model. Of course, we want to reduce waste, but there also has to be a just transition behind circularity in terms of how people that live off of waste can eventually be effectively including in new production and new consumption schemes. And I think we've started to work very solidly with the private sector. I'll tell you a little bit about that in a few slides, but there's a lot we have to do in terms of getting more and more actors from civil society, including in our model. As I was mentioning, one of our principles is that we have to have a systemic vision that integrates all the links in the value chain and not just the initial ones. We want to have vertical and horizontal integrity in public policies and our regulatory framework. So we're not working exclusively from the environmental point of view, but as I was mentioning, we're looking into all public service provision and we're working with the economic development sector to see what opportunities we can identify from their perspective. The housing department, which is of course a key piece of promoting new ways to produce and consume. And a key part of this looking at systemic vision is that we put forward the city's master land use plan in 2021. And we included circularity as one of our criteria to organize the city's planning. So we have no criteria that demands that all new buildings include spaces to separate waste and to have a sort of more effective just spaces in the city to ensure that we can return a lot of our waste into no productions. Fourth, we are looking at innovation in processes, products and markets, not only from the production standpoint, but in every single link of the chain, we want to have innovation be a big part of this systemic transformation. And the fifth guiding principle is opportunities. We're looking for circular opportunities that increase private sector productivity and competitiveness, not looking at the private sector only from the standpoint of the huge corporations, but every single link that is looking to be more productive and is looking for no economic opportunities. So I think this graphic kind of summarizes it very well. We want to have impact on the extraction of natural resources. We're looking at innovation and social, institutional and organizational changes as the only means to really effectively transform every link of the chain. And we're looking to support processes from production and process and product design to manufacture, distribution, trade and services, responsible consumption and waste recovery. We did start working, to be honest, because we are a developing economy, we did start working from the waste recovery perspective. But in Bogota also, there's a very interesting thing, which is that the environment sector doesn't really look at service provision for the whole of the waste and the cleaning of the city services that's in a different sector. So we managed to work together and to have the environment sector and our secretariat to work a little more on circularity from the full systemic perspective, because when you're having to provide goods and services every day, the urgent displaces, the important policy measures all the time. So we're able to work on two different tracks, but together between both sectors. What challenges have we identified? I think the same challenges that most cities have. We have linear processes in the production and consumption of goods and services. That's just the way we've been thinking about things for very, very long. Culturally, we have a prevalence of very unsustainable habits that are tough to break. So we have to work on behavioral changes as much as we have to work on more, the more technical issues of consumption and production. We have very low levels of reuse. I mean, it is very low around 17 or 18 percent of recycling in general, and that stems from the use and differentiated treatments of waste. That comes a lot from the fact that people don't see that separating or differentiating treatment of waste is really effective, because we're still burying most of our waste every day. We don't have selective processes of collection of waste, and that's a key people want to separate and they want to have different differentiated treatments, but they're not seeing that it's actually that effective. And we have to make sure that when we offer public services and people can actually see the impact of the effort that they'll put into differentiated treatment. We have a lot of this articulation between all the actors in the public and private sectors. The inefficiency of our regulatory framework comes from decisions that were made, 10 or 15 years ago, and that have a lot to do with how the city works operationally with its waste collecting services, because they've been contracted to collect waste and get paid by the weight of that waste. And as long as we don't have a differentiated tariff scheme where people can actually get discounts when they correctly separate their waste, and if they don't see that the trucks that are actually picking up their waste have differentiated treatments between what's going to recycling or what's going to organic waste treatment and what's getting buried in our landfill, they have to see that difference before they start to effectively changing their behaviors. So that's what we're prioritizing our work on. And one of the, or possibly I think what we're leaving that is the most important legacy is that we're not thinking about this only from the perspective of environmental issues. We're looking at a multi-sectoral approach that includes the private sector and that includes civil society. So what we're working on is research innovation and market development that impacts regulations and public policy providing a solid structure in terms of data management and knowledge and of course looking into governance structures that remain in the future. Who's working on it? The environment sector, the economic development sector and the housing and public service sector. Who are we working with beyond public institutions? We're working with providers of our water and waste management companies from the energy provision and of course with a private sector with our Chamber of Commerce, the organizations that they have around waste management, our industrial organizations and WWF amongst others. We have a committee that meets almost on a monthly basis with a lot of support as I said from GESET and what we've been doing is identifying those innovative initial sectors that we can work with in order to sort of prove that this can be successful that we can work with the private and the public sectors to promote circularity. The first accelerator project that we identified was an issue that hadn't had much work done and where there was sort of a lot of thirst for innovation and a lot of thirst for feeling that a change could be done and that's our circular fashion network where we've been working with the private sector on eco design, on including repair in the value change, on improving the modes and habits of consumption and of recovering materials. We've been working with designers and repairers on improving their knowledge of circular fashion and how that can work and posing innovation challenges to the academic sector so universities and academic institutions can also put forward their proposals. On repair, we've been working on aligning institutional support from different sectors, strengthening the capacities of those repair clothes and developing business models from design and repair that they can work together and have better economic opportunities for both links of the chain. We worked, it's by far the most glamorous of our events every year. We've been presenting in both that fashion week, looking into circularity as an option that can be taking into account both from the designer's point of view and from the consumer's point of view and we've had two sustainable fashion trade expos so far. They've been hugely successful and we hope to scale them up in the future. We also have a recovery scheme. We've recovered more than, I forget the number right now, but I think we're around five tons of clothes that we've recovered over the past year and we've worked with organizations that are actually including them into more production schemes. What are we going to do next? We have the approval of our public policy and circular economy hopefully in August. We've been working with all our partners in developing a single policy that joins together all these pieces. In both that we have an economic policy committee that has to approve all our policies and that's the way we ensure that they have long-term impact a government to government. Second, we're looking to regulatory improvement across the board. We've been doing a lot of lobbying and having a lot of conversations to improve the national regulation on tariff and waste scheme definitions and of course at our city level as well, including construction and demolition waste. We have a huge issue with our waste from construction and demolition and we're trying to tighten up the regulation so that we make sure that most of those residues from building usually get included into new development of building. Third, governance. We're consolidating the platform for public, private, academic and international cooperation and of course, as I mentioned in the beginning, we have to keep working on differential approaches to population and territory in the transition to circularity including more actors from the civil society and having, I think in terms of waste pickers across the board, there's a lot of fear that looking into circularity is going to take away their livelihoods and so naturally, there's a lot of rejection when we put forward this work that we're doing but we have to make sure that waste pickers know that we're not looking to eliminate their sources of income and their livelihoods but to actually improve their economic opportunities. That's a very quick look into what we're doing in Bogota. We look forward to any consultations or questions that may come from panelists and participants and again, we're very happy to be here and also to work so well with the German cooperation and we look forward to continuing this work in the future. Thank you, Carolina. That was very interesting. I saw a lot of similarities with the Flanders work although the context is completely different so it's very interesting to learn from each other. Then I will now give the floor to Kang Lee if he's able to connect. Hello or good evening, Kang Lee. Thank you for wrapping up so quickly again. It was a very interesting presentation so that was not the issue of course. Then I would now like to go on further to the panel discussion and therefore I would like to say hi to a new speaker of today, Mr. Xu. Mr. Xu has an extensive experience in sustainable development and regional cooperation so I was wondering if Mr. Xu you can tell me a bit more how cities and regions in China and beyond can create partnerships to maximize the potential of urban circular economies transitions and what are the benefits of collaborating across regions in terms of knowledge and sharing and innovation of course. Could you tell me a bit more about that please? Thank you very much for the invitation and for the opportunity to join this very inspiring discussion. First of all, Mr. Kang Lee just introduced a very good example of a Chinese city Tianjin's practices on promoting circular economy but from a overall national perspective I see that Chinese government has been putting priority on the circular transition and also under the national goal of climate neutrality or we call the dual carbon goal to peak the carbon emission by 2030 and also realize carbon neutrality by 2060. We see from many of the national policies and strategies that mention the connection between circular economy towards the climate goal and also under another national strategy of realizing or promoting ecological civilization to support the transformation of a sustainable economic growth and structure. So multi-level policies have been taken to promote circular economy including those at the local and subnational level. For instance, China has launched a pilot program to promote so-called zero west cities to promote the local government action to reduce the urban solid west and also promoting green factories and also circular industrial zones in the past years. All these have been generating major impacts on the result of reducing uncutting carbon emission and also the total volume of west. So in the recent 14th of five years plan circular economy also being mentioned as one of the priority sector and also instruments to realize China's overall social, economic and environmental management and development. So however from the city level we see also some of the issues and also gaps are there. For instance at the local level, for example many of the equally members and also partner cities or when we are discussing with them about circular economy in cities or circular cities they only think of urban solid west management. I think this is also something mentioned by our colleague from Stockholm Environment Institute. They still stick to the three R policies but not having extended understanding about the relations between circular economy with the climate change, with the biodiversity, with the transition of food and agricultural system etc. So it's a very traditional understanding about circular economy. That's also the management and implementation of circular actions are within very specific narrowly defined departments work, not having to bring in this work on the table of promoting collaboration and synergy between different departments who are related to the circular transition. For example having integrated a strategy at the local level to connect the circular economy promotion with urban planning, with the transportation, with the climate adaptation and mitigation of course and also biodiversity and agriculture sectors. Ike has been doing a number of projects in relations with the Chinese city's engagement. For example we are promoting the green public procurement. This is also another perspective has been not emphasized by Chinese cities so far but in European context EU has been promoting the green public procurement not only within Europe but also many of the European cities have been putting this as one of the local priority policies. We are also supporting the commission to produce a green public procurement guide for the European cities. However this has been just started in China. We have conducted many workshops to help build the awareness to Chinese local leaders on the importance of green public procurement as a driver and also instrument to promote circular transition. And also we are implementing projects in relation in the sector of textile and also food sector, providing also research report and case studies from Europe and other part of the world for Chinese local leaders to consider. As I said China has put in much effort on the industrial sector in terms of circular transition but less on the public awareness, building on the behavior change of the consumption and also using green public procurement as an instrument as such. So we have been working in these areas that are not being paid much attention to help the cities to get the opportunity to learn from Europe and other part of the world and also big partnership for extent. For example we have established a so-called green circular cities coalition between three Chinese cities with the city of Buon, Tuku from Finland and also Yokohama and Kitakyushu from Japan to help them to have a regular learning and knowledge sharing platform. So lastly we think that a lot of potential could be helping to drive the circular city actions and transition with the Chinese participation by providing more capacity building opportunities to link the Chinese cities with the cities from other part of the world but also how to apply the research outcome to the local policy making to bring this cutting-edge research outcome and theories to the local leadership. For example how for them to understand an extended concept of circular cities you know from 3R to 10R or even more in the future and also what is relations between circular city development with the climate actions with the economic goals and also transitions you know and also one of the most important thing is that how to build a synergy between different department and policy and sectors you know under the overall growth of circular and environment governance. I think these are a lot of topics that we may work together with the GIZ also with the colleagues and cities from all over the world to help also engage Chinese. Thank you very much. As well for this extensive answer I think you mentioned a lot of very interesting points for example the synergies or the importance of it also working to or to gather of different departments an issue we here in Finland or in Belgium or in Europe are also known for or known with. Then I have a question for Karolina how can cities ensure that a just and inclusive transition while implementing circular economy strategies and how can civil society be involved to ensure that no one is left behind in this process I would like to hear a bit more from your perspective or your context about this. I think that's actually the greatest challenge in terms of just transition in general because I think the traditional consultation processes meetings where we present policies and get comments aren't being effective enough. So what does it mean to actually collectively build circularity policies? I think a lot of it has to do and it's sometimes difficult to find the boundaries between the responsibilities of solely the public sector and the private sector and I think that's why circular Bogota is an interesting initiative because giving the public sector and the civil society organizations even though they're not grassroots since they're an active part of the platform and can actually build policies with us it's in their interest as well that we don't have only traditional consultation processes but actually look at civil society organizations and the smaller links of the productive sector and waste pickers everybody across the board gets to put some serious thought into how they want to be included and not only looking at documents as policy papers but looking at the value chain as a process that includes all sectors of society so I think and that honestly sometimes that goes beyond the capacity of local governments we don't have the time or the resources to go into that level of detail whereas the private sector and NGOs such as WWF and in our case SEMPRE which is a foundation funded by the industries and the productive sector they want these policies to be effective so we can collaborate on having a sort of mixed roles in terms of inclusiveness that are more effective than the traditional you know let's have a meeting and I'll listen to what your concerns are when that is actually not usually as effective but I do think that's an issue with all climate change policies and with all of the just transition it's not it's a matter of going beyond the way we usually look at participation and looking into collaborative building of policies I don't have the complete answer I just think there's a lot more time and resources that have to be put into the process when we want policies that are actually inclusive and that has to be something that decision makers know from the beginning if you want to have a good policy that's sort of technically robust you can just use a couple of weeks and and have a regular participation process if you want a collaborative development of a policy you're going to need a year or two and that's the way it works and even if we have this dead sense of urgency that we have to put policies forward very quickly effective participation takes a lot of time and a lot of money okay if I might compliment what Carolina said I think you made really good points around the participation it's something that we see also in Europe if we do transition processes and we ask for participation it's always the same groups that join into the discussion and debate and so that feed into the policy process so what we're trying to try to do with our research on circular cities so we we carried out a social impact study looking across eight different categories of social impact to assess in which way are people positively or negatively impacted by circularity and that also then allows to understand the social acceptability of your different studies looking at for example you see it often with decarbonization and renewable energy projects with the NIMBY not in my backyards winter binds and solar panels etc so we're doing something similar for the circular economy so if you talk around how will it impact people I think that's a really good point that you made around the boundaries public private sector and how to improve consultation processes thank you for this addition to Carolina's answer I think it was a good uh good addition to it and then I have a question for Mr. Lei what are the future goals of the of cities like changing in China for transition to um transitioning to an urban circular economy and what are the next steps or priorities in advancing circularity within the urban context maybe you were planning to say it but we didn't have time for it sorry thank you for this uh very um straightforward and very compact but very clear answer um I see we have a bit more time so if it's okay I would like to ask another question to Mr. Xu um what are the main enablers to accelerate circular economy transition um thank you as we heard also from other uh colleagues I think your top down the combination of top down and bottom up policy firm should be created for the future promotion of circular transition in cities you know um particularly in China now the our government is updating our circular economy promotional law which was made in 2008 you know um by that time I think the understanding and the definition of circular economy was quite limited and narrow as I just mentioned so we should now introduce some new perspective as connected with the climate target and also of course the Chinese national commitment by dual carbon goal as there were other targets for example the biodiversity global target and also the national strategy as such also introducing for example a whole life cycle principle into uh say green design and also production but not only look at the recycling site you know and also waste management reinforce for example extended producer responsibility in assessment of the private sector performance in the in the in the whole value chain but also another very important enabler is the technological innovation you know uh how to create an environment for the government to stimulate the market and also the private sector particularly to drive the reform and the transition uh for instance in China the in the promotion of electric vehicles in cities as you can see from many mega cities like Beijing Shanghai and Shenzhen you know uh we are making a major progress in the promotion of EVs you know comparing with many other big cities in the world for example in in in Shenzhen we have now nearly 860 000 EVs running in the street you know just by the past 10 years it is almost more than 20 percent I think of the total number of cars in Shenzhen there is a target I think within 10 years probably majority more than 80 percent of the cars in Shenzhen will be electric you know the Shenzhen also is the is the is the base of BYD one of the the leading producer of course I actually taking this example I just want to say that the government has been working closely with the private sector to create a favorable environment you know by providing of course also a lot of financial support to drive the technological innovation that is another topic and the enabler about the money you know you need a resources you need a funding but not necessarily only provided by the the national or municipal government you have to create a very good business model to engage with the private sector for example to promote the transition in mobility sector is not only about producing and buying the electric cars but also deploying the whole charging system you know that is more expensive than the car and vehicles themselves so so I think Shenzhen and Beijing all are doing well through the past years of efforts lastly one most important point enabler is the enhancing of awareness and understanding of the public that can lead to the change of the public's behavior you know in China this is a very important point the one we are promoting the so-called zero west cities and one of the important the quality is the reduction of food and kitchen waste you know we have been famous a famous country for our hospitality but also very famous for wasting food on our table you know as as you have been visiting China you know that you know that is really bad you know so how to promote this change of perception and understanding of the public down to the leading to the change of behavior you know in in in the kitchen and food waste and also change the perception urbanization back into the topic about the mobility system I think the most important is for people to change the behavior of buying and driving private car you know comparing taking a more sustainable ecological friendly mobility you know walking cycling you know this is also a mainstream in Europe and many other countries we are we're getting back to our past being famous for a bicycle city as a vision as a sound just say that lastly I think also for the local governments we need to identify some priority sectors for example in building sector in in textile sector in the food waste management but more importantly to bring the department working together because we are lack of data you know so far when we are making a policy at the local level if the department has a part of the data there is no a complete data set for policy making I think this is very important you know to bring them together to build synergy and also building a shared data system for the circular policy making thank you very much thank you for the answer before we go to the closing remarks by Katja Sur I would like to ask all panel members one last question for the people who have asked the question in the Q&A they have been answered by the experts and the presentations will also be shared afterwards just so you know so my final question and I will first ask it to Fedra what lessons can lesson America Chinese and European cities draw from each other's experience in transitioning to a circle economy and please try to give your answer very briefly and concise yes thank you so much okay and so my response to this would be what can everyone learn from one another is that we're all connected so it doesn't really matter where you utilize the resource or the energy we are global society whatever gets produced or consumed has an effect on a global scale and so one of the examples is in Sweden if you look at climate neutrality from a territorial perspective just move all your industry outside of your border and your climate neutral that is not how we want to go we want to look at consumption based emissions ensuring that you consider import export and also geopolitical stability importantly it's also not only about climate neutrality and mitigation but also adaptation biodiversity as you should refer to also soil quality and so on and so forth very important system perspective basically thank you for this concise answer maybe Carolina or can they want to add to this I will give you the floor before I go to Katia I think I'll go even though I completely agree with the systemic perspective and the systemic as wide as you can get you have to choose how to start so how do you eat an elephant you have to cut it up in little pieces otherwise huge policies are impossible to implement so I'd compliment federal with saying yes we need to have a full systemic approach to thinking about these issues but then you have to sort of decide what how you're going to start and how it you can scale it up eventually thank you for this very good addition Mr Kangley do you have some closing answer to this or go to Katia okay thank you then I will now give the floor to Katia as said before for the closing remarks she is the head of the circle economy team at GIC where she focuses on developing concepts and pilot projects to promote a stronger and circle economy in emerging and developing countries so Katia the floor is yours thank you very much Elke and thank you very much for all the panelists it is a very hard job to do now in five minutes to sort of do some closing remarks but I just want to give you some reflection on what I took with me and I found really interesting some key words in the various presentations like Fedra was mentioning the importance of looking beyond the city borders so you just really or said it again it's really important to look at consumption patterns not just at the resources so Carolina Carolina from Bogota I found very interesting that you said the innovation is key and so innovation is key for the systemic change and I think one very good example at the Bogota level is the circular economy lab it's a laboratory of the economy in Bogota where the enterprises can come together and test products processes and also their business models so this I found really interesting there Kang I found really interesting the that you said there must be a benefit people must feel the benefit rather from circular economy measures and also that there needs to be a regulation which I found which I find also is key and so you said green public procurement I think this is for on the city level it's the most influential level besides regulation one thing that I was missing a bit was that nobody mentioned the effect of prices I think we can all do a lot in terms of awareness raising trying to change consumers patterns but I think without changes in prices and without real prices being put on the on the price tax we will not get very far so this is a very important thing and I know you can't do it on the municipal municipal level alone there must be a link between national policies extended producers responsibility policies and so on but I think some cities can also try their own pricing schemes there's one example that just went through the court in Germany one smaller town in like 300 000 inhabitants in Germany they introduced tax on single use packaging for gastronomy and gastro I mean industry was fighting against it but in the end the city of tubing and one and now they are having 50 50 cents Euro cent on single use packaging and 20 cent on single use cutlery for example so I think there can be some pricing schemes that could be tried out and tested on a municipal level as well so and just give me two more seconds because we have as we also have a circular city labs project with tries and and sees how we can test deposit and reuse schemes in five cities around the world so if you're interested that won't get in touch and we also have the prevent wasted lines I think you might have put it in the chat which is the multi stakeholder partnership of more than 500 participants I have some of you know it already with very practical solutions so we can all learn from each other and not reinvent the wheel so thank you very much for for giving me the opportunity for this closing remarks I hope it was brief enough okay back to you yeah I think it was a very brief but clear closing remarks very interesting to have the wrap up and to also have the addition of the importance of pricing so thank you very much for for those closing remarks and then I would like to thank all people who have followed this webinar I hope you found it as interesting as I did I learned a lot I saw a lot of similarities but what we are doing but also some some opportunities or some work that I didn't know yet and that could be very interesting for us here in Flauners or even in Europe so thank you very much have a nice day or evening or good night depending on where you are at the moment so thank you and good