User:Daniellaperriere/sandbox

Summary
The Cities Climate Finance Leadership Alliance (CCFLA) is an action group formed at the UN Secretary-General’s Climate Summit in 2014. It represents a coalition of public organizations, including the French and some United States local governments, the World Bank and United Nations Environment Programme; as well as private institutions such as Citibank, European Investment Bank, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The goal of this organization is to increase the knowledge, understanding, and investment opportunities in cities for low-carbon producing and climate resilient infrastructures. According to the CCFLA, to reform the cities’ infrastructure around the globe to accomplish this goal, they estimate necessary investments to total approximately 4.3 trillion dollars, and an increase of the total budget for climate change related issues worldwide. A strategy of the CCFLA is to create an Annual State of the City Climate Finance Report to bring global attention of how low current investments are for this type of urban infrastructure compared to what they argue is necessary.

History and Establishment
On September 23, 2014, the first of the UN’s Climate Change Summits occurred in preparation of a new global, coordinated climate change strategy. This was the first of such meetings not to be held under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that was established as a Rio Convention at the Rio Earth Summit in 1994. This convention was one of three sister groups aimed to combat environmental problems, the other two being Biological Diversity and Desertification. On December 11, 1997, this convention established a binding resolution for participating members to adhere to emission reduction targets, known as the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol and the yearly UN Climate Change Conferences were the UN’s principal actions and meetings regarding climate change until the 2014 Summit. Hosted by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, this Summit differed from past meetings as public and industry leaders in finance, business and civil society were invited to bring their own new ideas on how to combat climate change and facilitate change in public and political will to create new climate change policies. This Summit addressed emission reduction and climate resilience in areas such as, “agriculture, cities, energy, financing, forests, pollutants, resilience and transportation.” and was a preparation for the UN to finish establishing the goals and targets for the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

Purpose
To address the role cities play and their impacts on climate change, whereas of the 2014 Summit was 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions according to the UN. Out of this focus, the CCFLA was established. The climate related issues coming from cities regard the increase of their populations and subsequent emissions, as well as infrastructure concerns as many aging water and transportation systems would be ill-equipped to handle increased flooding and natural disasters. Thus the reduction of and the resilience to the impacts of climate change are the goals for cities. In their the first action statement, the CCFLA affirmed that the majority of costs to prepare for climate change, as well as the majority of economic losses due to climate change will occur in cities. With an estimated five billion people living in urban areas by 2030, this creates a major cause of greenhouse emissions and larger target of climate change related disasters. Thus the need arose for an updated and coordinated climate change approach for cities to update infrastructure, decrease damage of climate change related disasters, and reduce the actions that increase those effects. The main mission of the CCFLA is to facilitate increased public and private investment for these areas. This will be done by addressing and reversing the investment gap of what is currently put into climate related urban infrastructure and what is needed to effectively deal with climate change. Reasons for this investment gap, according to the CCFLA, include lack of essential information, regulations that limit access to financial assistance, difficulty for affordable municipal level credit, small scale and high costs of investments, inadequate city-wide project planning, and other shortfalls.

Strategies
The private and public members of CCFLA work together to spread awareness of the investment gap and look to remove the reasons it exists, while facilitating both large and small-scale investments. The CCFLA use a variety of strategies to achieve its broad agenda. Like the 2014 Summit, it encourages the participation of city leaders and organizations, different kinds of financial institutions, and both governmental and non-governmental organizations. This participation takes the form of increased dialogue and exchanges of information between these mutually concerned groups through regular Alliance-wide and region specific meetings. These meetings establish policy ideas and solutions to the financing and investment issues to establish climate change appropriate urban infrastructure. The strategy is to create more incentive and safer investment opportunities so that the actors will be more willing to invest their limited resources for creating a new, future-oriented infrastructure. Much of these funds and projects will be controlled by local entities so that they have the capacity to create effective and profitable projects. The CCFLA sees importance in groups and organizations that serve as third-party intermediaries in coordinating efforts, ideas, and available relevant knowledge to all groups participating in this agenda. The goal of this is to ensure cost and time effectiveness of efforts, as well as creating opportunities for more partnerships and different avenues for investment. The Alliance also stays up to date on researching current issues and challenges regarding poor infrastructure and limitations of acquiring adequate investment. To gather and share this information, the Alliance developed an annual report and knowledge-sharing platform on the internet so all the relevant stakeholders can be informed on current projects, strategies, relationships, and opportunities. These strategies aim the serve the main goal of the CCFLA of creating low-carbon and climate resilient urban infrastructure projects that both protect people against the harms of climate change, and also create a modern, sustainable, and profitable urban environment that produces wealth and employment in a way that protects from and reduces the effects of climate change.

Organization
The CCFLA is overseen by a UN Steering Committee and Secretariat. The Secretariat is comprised of the Untied Nations Development Program (UNDP), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the Global Fund for Cities Development (FMDV), an NGO that assists and enables development for local, metropolitan and regional governments, and R20-Regions of Climate Action (R20), an NGO that supports the implementation of sustainable infrastructure projects. While the Steering Committee has twelve seats, two each from from six different groups that comprise the CCFLA, including national governments, NGO’s and foundations, city networks, public finance institutions, private finance institutions, and UN agencies. This Secretariat assists with the day-to-day coordination, communication and operations of the large multi-actor Alliance. This comes in the form of organizing periodic meetings, managing of the CCFLA website, and assist with fundraising efforts. The Steering Committee is responsible for interpreting the inputs, recommendations, and endorsements of all CCFLA members and deciding a direction of action and funding for certain projects and products. The Steering Committee leads the working group meetings where, by consensus, the members of the Alliance will make the final decisions on the allocation of their fundraising efforts to the different projects on their agenda to create low-carbon and climate resilient urban infrastructure.

comment
A great start and a much better introduction tot he topic than the existing stub. This promises to be a useful addition to Wikipedia on an important topic.

'''I am aware that I have used the same source on multiple citations. As finding academic sources for the group's strategies and organization proved difficult, I used a couple of well detailed sources that came from the group itself or from the UN. Would this be a big problem? As i further edit this draft, I will attempt to find that information from more and different sources'''

Peer Review: Junru Bian
Dear Daniel,

You have written an informative article with considerable coverage of the organization being addressed. There are clear divisions of sections and comprehensive descriptions.

The article has the potential to improve both its substance and structure. Here are some suggestions for you to take into consideration during the next phase of your drafting:

- Substance - - Sources/Reference -
 * There seem to be some level of repetition of content throughout the article: sometimes what is addressed in the beginning of the article would be re-mentioned at later points of the article. It is not a major problem and sometimes repetition is necessary, but I would suggest you to review your draft and eliminate content repetitions that are not rudimentary.
 * Your structure is clear - however, the order of different subsections might deliver clearer descriptions of the organization if more strategically rearranged: it is always a good idea to think as a reader: what are the most important information that needs to be mentioned upfront, and what are those that can maybe wait till later?
 * The rhetoric utilized within the article reads quite casual sometimes - although Wikipedia's contents should be understandable to the general public, it is always a good idea to remain with some level of professional diction.
 * Maybe a Title with the organization's name on the top?

As Dr. Webster has previous addressed, the article re-uses references that are sometimes from sources directly related to the organization being addressed, which might make the article less credible. Sometimes official governments or embassies publish related press releases with regards to particular organizations of the UN, so there might be more sources in that direction. Sometimes media sources can be used if there is an absence of academic or journalistic sources.

Aside from these minimal suggestions, your article as a whole is off to an impressive and contributing conclusion. Congratulations!

Thank you. Junrubian (talk) 23:19, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

2nd Peer Review

Hi Daniella, I think this is a great article, so I do not have a lot of criticism but more advice and suggestions.

Evidence :

-	Secondary sources: As you mentioned, you are aware that you have used the same resources for various citations, mostly the ones linked to the official website. However, I don’t think it’s a big problem so far because you have been able to use reliable sources afterwards which compensate. Moreover, you are referencing to the official website when presenting the group which gave us the envy to know more about it and click on the official page.

-	Concerning the structure (look at the contents table), I think you should divide the different parts because I do not see the link with the summary and the strategies for example. I would advise you to make 4 distinguished parts instead: 1. Summary 2. History and Establishment (instead of 1.1), 3. Strategies. In addition, I would write the name of your group at the top of the page so that the reader knows exactly what he is going to read about when entering on your page, instead of reading first your table of contents.

Content: I think your argumentation is very good and gives a good overview of the topic. Your writing style is fluid and easy to read. Maybe you can insert a link when you have a technical word, referencing either to a Wikipedia page or to an external web page, to permit to the reader to click on it if he doesn’t understand a word or a concept. It might be useful. You have done an impressive job by staying as neutral as possible, congratulations!

Overall, I think your article is remarkably good and relevant, I have learned so many things! Good job!