Sarajevo
Greater Sarajevo is the geostrategic and administrative centre of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The region covers both Entities together with 32 local municipalities and has about 700,000 citizens (about 500,000 in the functional urban area).
Sarajevo
Faces many well-documented challenges, both historic and current, but community commitment is growing to find a way through these to a better collective future. Initiatives like the City Mind Lab have started to create synergies, put together people and resources and drive very much needed mission-led changes.
Sarajevo suffers from some of the worst air pollution in the world. Solving this demands the same rapid transition as climate change mitigation – away from fossil fuels and inefficient energy and mobility systems. In pursuit of this transformation, the many local government actors in Greater Sarajevo got together in 2022 to commit to the EU Mission for Climate Neutral cities by 2030.
Sarajevo is vulnerable to climate impacts of increased drought, heat waves and floods (for example the catastrophic floods in 2014). Rivers in the region are degraded, especially in the heart of the city, but their regeneration offers a transformation opportunity that the whole community could get behind.
Achieving radical change in Sarajevo will be hard. The extremely complex governance arrangements for the city have left the community numb to parallelisms, fragmented projects, wasted resources, and inaction. But the need to break this cycle is clear to everyone.
Sarajevo is rich in diversity, human capital, forests and renewable energy potential. It is surrounded by mountains with countless mineral water springs. The goal is to leverage these assets and create a new pathway towards a thriving, healthy 21st-century community in Sarajevo.