A two-day workshop on climate-smart capital budgeting under the Sustainable Cities Integrated Approach Pilot (SCIAP) project of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), in association with the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs for the officials of the Mysuru City Corporation, got off to a start here on Monday.
Mayor Sunanda Palanetra inaugurated the workshop while Nand Pal Singh, Senior Technical Advisor, UNIDO, spoke about the project.
The SCIAP is being implemented in Mysuru and four other cities – Vijayawada, Guntur, Bhopal and Jaipur – by UNIDO with funding assistance from the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The technical assistance activity supports MCC 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 decisions for the investment plans, a release said.
UNIDO has partnered with the University of Washington (Seattle) in executing the capital budgeting exercise. The team of Janice Whittington, Adrienne Greve from California State Polytechnic University, and Sujatha Srikumar 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 select projects of MCC, according to the release.
Day 2 of the workshop will focus on cost effectiveness analysis of the projects, and how to prioritise capital projects against various criteria and indicators, including measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The team will also focus on the design strategies for engineers to reduce the impact of hazards on each project, screening of projects for public-private partnerships and sources of revenue from the proposed projects.
The officials of MCC from engineering, planning, financing and revenue departments participated in the workshop.
Senior MCC officials Savitha, Roopa, Chief Health Officer D.G. Nagaraj and others thanked the UNIDO team for closely working with the MCC and providing the GEF grant of ₹10 crore towards the waste management projects in Mysuru.
