Ghent is a port city located in Belgium, 50km north of Brussels. It has 260,000 inhabitants and an additional 75,000 students. Ghent is a young and vibrant city with a medieval-looking city centre.
The city has implemented a sustainable urban mobility plan, which has doubled the size of the pedestrian area in the city centre. And, in 2020, Ghent put in place a Low Emission Zone that covers the whole city centre. Ghent is also a pioneer in the fields of sustainable fashion, liveable streets, food policy, cycling policy and resident participation.
Ghent’s sustainability work occurs alongside ongoing challenges. Sustainable housing, for example, poses quite a challenge in the city, which has a beautiful historic centre, with heritage buildings that present unique challenges for refurbishment. The city is made up of many individual houses, which makes group retrofitting nearly impossible. Plus, half of these are rented homes; this poses an extra challenge, as homeowners do not always see the direct benefit of investing in energy retrofits.
Ghent was one of the first signatories of the Covenant of Mayors and is active on the European policy level.
Over the past ten years, Ghent has launched a number of small- and large-scale projects to help make the food system in the city more sustainable. These have been taken on with close involvement of residents and other stakeholder groups. The sustainable food policy “Ghent en Garde” has brought significant change to the local food system. Through participative governance models, including a food policy council, Ghent’s food system has moved from launching small-scale initiatives to bringing broad structural change. It is decreasing food waste, making food procurement more sustainable, scaling up short food supply chains, promoting sustainable dietary habits and improving access to food. Ghent Policy Officer, Hannelore Herreman, explained the impact of such initiatives in a recent episode on the ICLEI Europe podcast, Local Voices for Sustainability.
Among the city’s successes in this field is Foodsavers (pictured), a programme that supports organisations and social enterprises who make use of food surpluses to attain social goals. The programme distributes an average of 617 of food annually, that would otherwise have been thrown away by wholesale markets and supermarkets, and shared it among social restaurants and organisations working with those living in poverty. What’s more, 60 percent of all food redistributed by Foodsavers is fresh fruit and vegetables. A special focus within this work lies on de-stigmatising food donation and enabling healthy and sustainable diets for everyone despite their social or financial situation.
A new logistics platform called Vanier connects local farmers with restaurants, caterers and retailers in the city through a multi-stakeholder cooperative model. Ghent is also piloting new ways of leveraging city-owned agricultural land for city-oriented sustainable food production.
Since 2009, Ghent has been working on the protein transition. It started with the launch of “Thursday Veggie Day”. This campaign encourages citizens to give up eating meat and fish for at least one day each week. The initiative was copied by cities across the world, including New York (United States), Sao Paulo (Brazil), Bremen (Germany), San Francisco (United States), Cape Town (South Africa), etc.
In 2019 the city signed the cool food pledge. From 2018 to 2022, the city was able to reduce 38% CO2 emissions from the school meals served daily to 4,500 students. Due to the introduction of half-half meals. Half-half meals consist of a minimum of 50% plant protein on a weekly basis. Reducing the purchase of red meat had the most impact in reducing the CO2-emissions.
The city of Ghent is a partner in two Horizon Europe projects. In FEAST, Ghent is a Living Lab where they create interventions to make sustainable food accessible for people in vulnerable positions. In the SchoolFood4Change project, they make school meals more sustainable through the Whole School Food Approach and sustainable procurement.
In 2023 Ghent joined the Urban Agenda for the EU partnership on Food, reflecting its commitment to engage in the international debate around food.
"Since the launch of Ghent en Garde in 2013, Ghent has been recognised as a European trendsetter in sustainable city food policy. The big challenge now is to keep living up to our pioneering role. We can absolutely make that happen through exceptional cooperation with the many partners who are involved in the Ghent food strategy.”
Tine Heyse, Deputy Mayor of the Environment, Climate, Housing
Ghent has been an ICLEI Member since 2014 and is active in the Procura + and the GLCN (Global Lead City Network on Sustainable Procurement) subnetworks. Ghent won the Procura+ Award in 2019, the Procura+ Award for Procurement Initiative of the Year in 2022 and the Transformative Action Award in 2018.
Banner image by Bas Bogaerts, © Stad Gent-Dienst Toerisme. All body images provided by the City of Ghent.
