New Delhi, October 29: The second edition of the ARISE Cities Forum ended in New Delhi with the “Delhi Declaration 2026 for Global Climate Goals through Local Action”, urging for immediate and coordinated multi-level climate action. The forum, which took place ahead of the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP31) in Antalya, Türkiye, attracted more than 200 participants from over 50 cities in 18 countries from the Global South, to ensure that sub-national urban priorities are central to the global climate agenda.
The two-day forum, with the theme “From Bharat to Antalya — Commit. Action. Outcomes.”, demonstrated how high-level national climate commitments can be brought to life in locally-led urban growth initiatives. The forum endorsed the Delhi Declaration 2026, which highlights priority areas such as direct access to sub-national climate finance, gender-inclusive public infrastructure planning, nature-based approaches to water security and sustainable energy transitions in urban built environments at the closing ceremony of the two-day event.
This provides a common pathway for the Global South municipalities to participate in international climate policy negotiations and a platform for strategic partnerships, including an MoU signed between the Global Buildings Performance Network (GBPN) and ICLEI South Asia, to help support net zero building transitions in regional municipalities.
Addressing the forum, Union Minister of State for Housing and Urban Affairs, Tokhan Sahu emphasized that the need of the hour was to create a policy-to-execution nexus.
“That should be our approach: resolve to planning, planning to implementation, implementation to results; development must go to all the sections of society,” he said.
“I wish to emphasize the key messages in a recent ESCAP regional discussion paper on the importance of localizing NDCs, which highlight the need to move cities to the centre of national climate action, to close the gap between national commitment and implementation, to have mayors at the table of national climate commitment, to have climate finance reach cities, to have cities be ready to use climate finance, and to have climate action not take place in sectoral silos, and national climate commitments to be translated into local climate action plans, and the need for South-South cooperation to help accelerate climate action,” UNESCAP Subregional Office for South and South-West Asia Head Mikiko Tanaka added.
