Vijayawada: UNIDO workshop on climate investment planning begins

Vijayawada (NTR District): The two-day workshop on the Sustainable Cities Integrated Approach Pilot (SCIAP) project being implemented by the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) in close cooperation with the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) with funding assistance from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in Vijayawada and other cities began on Tuesday. The project is also implemented in Guntur, Bhopal, Mysore, and Jaipur. The VMC officials have participated in the workshop on the first day and explained the objectives and achievements of the project in the city.

The technical assistance on climate-smart capital budgeting to improve the credit worthiness of the cities is one of the key activities supported under the SCIAP project. The project is also focusing on implementation of sustainability planning, investments in low carbon solutions to address municipal waste management and enhancing the capacity and skills of city officials for effective implementation and management of projects in waste and sanitation sector.

The technical assistance activity supports VMC officials and technical staff with enhanced capacity to produce capital investment plans with a specific focus on climate-smart and resilient attributes and make effective financial decision-making for the investment plans. UNIDO in partnership with the University of Washington (Seattle) is executing the capital budgeting exercise in Vijayawada and other project cities. A two-day workshop will end on Wednesday.

The team of University of Washington (UW) Prof. Janice Whittington, Prof. Adrienne Greve from California State Polytechnic University, Sujatha Srikumar, and UNIDO project team Nand Pal Singh and Manasa Suresh and Ramana Rao had meetings and workshop with VMC officials and provided hands-on training to 25 officers from engineering, planning, and finance officers at Command Control Centre, VMC.

The team of UW introduced an Excel-based capital investment planning model on day 1 of the workshop offering a step-by-step process for energy auditing, carbon emission forecasting, and lifecycle cost analysis for selected projects of VMC. Day 2 of the workshop focused on resilience cost-effectiveness analysis of the projects, and how to prioritize capital projects against various criteria and indicators, includingmeasures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve resilience. The UW team also demonstrated the design strategies to engineers to reduce the impact of hazards for each project.

The workshop also included discussions on screening projects for Public-Private partnerships and sources of revenue from the proposed projects.

VMC Additional Commissioner (Projects) KV Satyavathy, Examiner of Accounts SN Chakraborty, Assistant Examiner of Accounts T Vani Kumari, Deputy City Planner (Planning) Zubin Shiran Roy and others attended the workshop.

UNIDO and VMC officials participate in workshop at VMC command control Room in Vijayawada on Tuesday.