Earlier this year, ICLEI was pleased to welcome Murcia (Spain) as its newest Member. Murcia has a long history of rolling-out sustainability measures; this is perhaps best exemplified in its leading work on fostering circular economies.

As a signatory to the Circular City Declaration, Murcia has demonstrated its commitment to "use the levers at [its] disposal coherently across the organisation to transition from a linear to a circular economy." This work has included completing a Circular Economy Assessment Report for Murcia in September 2020, and ongoing work to launch a Municipal Circular Economy Strategy.

This strategy is informed by a series of six meetings that the city is holding with experts in different topics, including: consumption, water, urban spaces, mobility, waste management, and transversal politics. However, the city understands the critical importance of also meaningfully engaging citizens in strategy development. As such, they are also taking on a series of interviews and conducting a survey for citizens. The final strategy should be ready to launch later this year.

Before beginning work on this Strategy, Murcia conducted a detailed Circular Economy Diagnostic in order to catalogue and assess the current local state of circular economy, as well as all ongoing initiatives in the municipality. This ensured that the Strategy built on work already conducted, and that its impacts could be compared against a baseline of sorts.

Murcia is not doing this work alone. In keeping with ICLEI's core value of facilitating city-to-city networking and exchange, Murcia takes part in several European projects, through which it collaborates with and learns from peers. This notably includes the CityLoops project, which is led by ICLEI Europe, as well as the projects Valuewaste and HOOP. Through these projects, Murcia has already collaborated with ICLEI Members Ghent (Belgium), Espoo and Kuopio (Finland), Münster (Germany), Bergen (Norway), Porto and Cascais (Portugal).

To keep up to date with Murcia's work, be sure to follow Murcia at @AytoMurcia and @energiamurcia.