In year one (2017), K-12 teachers in Ireland, Germany, Mexico, and the United States participated in Continuing Professional Development (CPD) focused on increasing teachers’ competence and confidence in teaching about sustainability, taking into consideration impacts on students’ learning outcomes. In year two (2018), this project will scale the K-12 CPD model, broadening its reach to a new cohort of teachers and students. Through a novel evaluation process, the team will explore the impact of sustainability CPD on the pupils of the participating teachers.

In year one (2017), CapaCities built sustainability implementation capacity in city staff and leadership through trainings held in four cities across three countries. In year two (2018), CapaCities will build on year one outcomes to develop higher level capacity, with a specific focus on climate resilience. Each of four participating cities (Tempe, Mexico City, Lüneburg, Karlsruhe) will be evaluated on its existing planning process or goal related to climate change, sustainability, or resilience.

The current industrial food system, including its large-scale agribusinesses, food-processing companies, and retailers, is in urgent need of a transformation towards sustainability. This project will build capacity in food entrepreneurs and stakeholders to create, manage, and support sustainable local food enterprises in four regions across three countries. In this project, enterprise plans will be developed for land trusts, urban agriculture cooperatives, plant-based protein small-to-medium, and mill-bakery cooperatives.

The green energy revolution is an opportunity to design energy solutions that provide significant additional benefits to communities worldwide. The challenge is to design projects that enable households and businesses to use clean energy to advance a number of sustainable development goals, from improved health, education, economic development, food security, and wellbeing to reduced inequality, pollution, and corruption. With the support of GCSO, research teams will collaborate with companies and non-profits around the globe—including Nepal, the Philippines, Uganda, and Bolivia—to upgrade their capacity to design green energy initiatives with outsized social impact.

Sustainability impacts related to global health can be difficult to measure. This project introduces a methodology and scientific tool that will measure sustainability and community health indicators in near real-time using urban wastewater as a diagnostic matrix. With the support of GCSO, global teams will use Urban Metabolism Metrology (UMM) to obtain this near real-time data on a number of sustainability metrics, such as the occurrence of toxic agents within urban environments.

Cities worldwide are experiencing massive growth. As these cities grow, corresponding government purchasing needed to support its operations increases as well, leading to significant increases in carbon emissions. Government purchasing, or “public purchasing,” substantially contributes to carbon emissions as city government purchases have a carbon footprint 9x that of public buildings and vehicle fleets combined. Using an extensive international network, this GCSO-funded project will engage thousands of cities to implement sustainable public purchasing practices designed to mitigate carbon emissions and reduce spending.

Municipalities are increasingly taking action against climate change and have a long history of tackling a host of environmental challenges. However, solutions to complex problems remain fragmented and piecemeal in the majority of the world’s cities, hindering their effectiveness and long-term success. In this pilot year, capacity-building trainings were organized in four cities across three countries (Germany, Mexico, and United States) to help city leadership unpack complex urban issues, anticipate threats and opportunities, strengthen inter-departmental collaboration, as well as coordinate investments and policy options to advance urban sustainability.

Primary and secondary schools are formative environments for building the capacity of individuals to create changes toward sustainability. Although professional development is an essential mechanism for enabling educators to understand and teach sustainability principles and practices, many programs are outdated and overly theoretical. In this pilot year, K-12 teachers participated in tangible and interactive Continuing Professional Development (CPD) workshops to increase their competence and confidence in teaching about sustainability to effectuate changes in education at all grade levels.