CapaCITIES: Urban Climate Resilience Programme

The basics

• CapaCITIES stands for the Capacity Building Project on Low Carbon and Climate Resilient City Development in India.
• It was launched in 2016.
• The Embassy of Switzerland to India and Bhutan funds it.
• ICLEI South Asia, South Pole and econcept implement it.
• The National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) is the knowledge partner.

Why it exists

• It supports India’s target of net-zero emissions by 2070. See India’s Climate Change Policy.
• It builds climate skills directly inside city governments.
• Cities are where most future growth and emissions will sit. See Why Big Cities Attract More Migrants.

Scale

• It has worked with 8 Indian cities, including Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Vadodara and Coimbatore.
• It also worked with the state governments of Gujarat and Tamil Nadu.
• It ran in three phases between 2016 and 2026.

What it delivered

• Net-Zero Climate Resilient City Action Plans in all eight cities.
• Permanent Net-Zero and Climate Action Cells inside six city governments.
• The cells keep climate work going after the project ends.

Pilot projects

Spread abroad

• The approach has been taken to Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Malaysia.

Governance, not only technology

• CapaCITIES treats climate action as a governance problem.
• Its real legacy is the permanent cells, not the pilot projects.

The investment gap

• Its city plans identified over ₹7,142 billion in possible climate investment.
• The project itself spent only about ₹120 million on pilots.
• The gap shows how much money cities would need to find elsewhere.

An unusual funding path

• The money comes from Switzerland and runs through ICLEI, a global city network.
• It skips the usual chain of Centre to state to city.
• Compare with India’s own urban missions in Smart Cities and AMRUT.
• Other related reading: Climate Change, EIA and Renewable Energy, Global Climate Change Alliance and Maharashtra.

The 14 July 2026 event

• The event “Scaling Urban Climate Resilience: The CapaCITIES Legacy and Way Forward” was held at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi.
• ICLEI South Asia and NIUA organised it to mark the decade.
• MoHUA’s Gopal Prasad and Swiss Ambassador Maya Tissafi attended.
• Three knowledge products were launched: a Net-Zero Climate Resilient Cities toolkit, an Energy Transition guidebook for Urban Local Bodies, and a white paper on financing the low-carbon transition.
• Source: PIB, 14 July 2026.