Dear UBC colleagues,
Two weeks ago, the XV UBC General Conference was held in Kaunas Lithuania and a new presidium and executive board were elected.
"In UBC’s future, I see an inclusive and value-based UBC by the content and the results, and also some developments inside the Union. I am looking forward to putting shoulder to shoulder to deliver the results the Member Cities want.", states newly-elected UBC President Mantas Jurgutis.
This marks a new era for the network and also the Sustainable Cities Commission is entering the next two-year period with a newly appointed Advisory Board and co-chairs. We are happy to have members with different types of experiences represented in the Advisory Board and we are looking forward to a successful two years of improving and developing our commissions work and the exchange between our member cities. We are also renewing some of our methods for exchange and networking with the aim of activating members and providing cities with new impulses to meet colleagues and to learn from each other. The new formats, organized in collaboration with the commission and member cities, include study visits, peer reviews and thematic workshops.
“These new ways of exchange will hopefully facilitate more concrete and active exchange between our member cities. We will approach you all with this new initiative in the coming weeks and hope that many of you will embrace this opportunity”, envisions our Communications and Network Manager Jutta Mäkinen.
We have modified the contents of our eBulletin as well, it includes now a section dedicated to news from our member cities. We hope you will be active in sending us your news so that also our eBulletin along with our website and other media channels will work as a platform to share and connect. A more local approach was also added to this year’s UBC-CDP cooperation report. Instead of comparing our member cities climate efforts to other cities on a global level, we instead dug deep into the specific actions our member cities are taking to tackle climate change, in order to share these best practices with our network. One of the best practices coming from St. Petersburg is the Clean Beach Campaign and we encourage all our member cities to join this initiative - let's keep our beautiful Baltic Sea beaches clean!
All in all, we wish that through these efforts we will be an active commission that brings an added value to the membership in the city network.
Björn Grönholm
Head of Secretariat
Union of the Baltic Cities – Sustainable Cities Commission