Municipalities are important drivers for the implementation of sustainable development as outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). “All 17 Sustainable Development Goals are directly or indirectly related to the tasks of a municipality,” explains Dr. Werner Schnappauf, Chairman of the German Council for Sustainable Development (RNE). So far, however, there is no uniform standard against which municipalities can evaluate and report on the implementation of their sustainability strategies and projects.

For this reason, the German Council for Sustainable Development, together with the mayors represented in the Sustainable City Dialogue, the Regional Sustainability Strategy Network (RENN) and a large number of other stakeholders, has developed a “Sustainable Municipality Reporting Framework” (BNK). The BNK as a result of the stakeholder process can be downloaded here. The reporting framework will be tested in joint projects with the Service Agency Communities in One World (SKEW) and many RENN partners starting in March 2021. In the process, the city of Aschaffenburg will be the first of an expected 20 pilot municipalities from all over Germany to produce its own sustainability report based on the BNK.

corsus was commissioned by SKEW to support the city of Aschaffenburg together with Julia Pfinder in the preparation of the sustainability report according to BNK. For this purpose, a first internal workshop with the administration will be held on Monday, 07 June to bring together important projects, strategies and concepts of the city. Until the end of 2021, the sustainability report of the city of Aschaffenburg will be developed and presented in a final event.

“The city of Aschaffenburg sees itself as a municipality with the responsibility to perform all its tasks in terms of sustainability and thus to be a role model. This responsibility is seen as a cross-sectional task in the administration and the council, in which all citizens participate, and has a long tradition in Aschaffenburg,” said Jürgen Herzing, Mayor of the City of Aschaffenburg and member of the RNE’s “Sustainable City” dialog.

The BNK is composed of nine steering criteria, nine municipal fields of action and a supplementary set of indicators. The criteria and fields of action serve as an instrument for reflecting on one’s own municipal sustainability performance. Aschaffenburg can use the BNK to initiate and accompany transformation processes in the city, so that reporting becomes directly action- and impact-oriented.