Fomenting climate resilience in the Mediterranean: MedCities getting ready to kick-off its Climate Urban Capacity programme at the 1^st Partnership Forum of 2025

MedCities participated in the annual Partnership Forum of the City Climate Gap Fund, where MedCUC, MedCities’s soon-to-be-launched Climate Urban Capacity programme, was presented to all the other Partners of the CCG Fund for potential future synergies.

Face with the urgency of climate change, many cities and local governments are taking steps to become low-carbon and climate-resilient. But to achieve these low carbon and climate-resilient urbanisation pathways, many face barriers in accessing finance and difficulties in planning and project preparation due to insufficient capacity or resources — particularly in the early stages of the project cycle. To remedy this situation, the City Climate Gap Fund supports regional networks, such as MedCities, to enhance their internal capacity and their members’ capacity to prepare climate-resilient and low-carbon urban projects.

On the 13^th and 14^th of January, the CCG Fund organised its annual Partnership Forum in Tirana, Albania. As one of the future beneficiaries of the Fund’s Capacity development for regional or national networks of municipalities, MedCities participated in this event aimed at getting to know the ecosystem of actors involved in the activities of the City Climate Gap Fund and foment networking between them. The overall idea was to identify potential synergies with MedCities’ soon-to-be-launched new line of activities:

MedCUC, a Climate Urban Capacity programme that offers Mediterranean municipalities and local governments a series of new services to improve their readiness to plan, implement and finance climate-resilient and low carbon infrastructure projects.

The Partnership Forum was also the opportunity to participate in a site visit to Elbassan where the Mayor explained the initiatives for energy transition and energy production in the city that the City Climate Gap Fund and the EU Mission Neutral and Smart Cities support.