These savings will contribute to strengthen Luxembourg’s resilience and support new employment especially in the priority categories of the government. With this favourable ecosystem, Luxembourg can aspire to be “A Knowledge Capital and Testing Ground for the Circular Economy”, to produce positive impacts at social (improve the quality of life for citizens, partners and visitors) and economic levels, (diversify its economy with a waste management industry on all the value chain). The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and the European Investment Bank launched also the Luxembourg-EIB Climate Finance Platform38, aiming to gather investments for projects with a strong impact in the fight against climate change. This platform is a step towards compliance with both Luxembourg’s international commitments and the EIB’s Climate Strategy. “It is the first time a Member State enters into such a partnership for innovative climate finance with the EIB and it establishes further Luxembourg as a green financial centre”. The Luxembourg government will make available € 30 million of funding over the next three years for investment vehicles based in Luxembourg financing high impact climate projects and the EIB will co-invest with third-party investors from the private sector. We should hope that these projects will take place at the local and regional level to improve the citizens’ quality of life for the Grande Region, and especially in the frame of Grande Region Presidency with the territorial planning at the regional level39 (SDT-GR). If these investments focus on high-impact climate friendly projects with the best impact criteria being environmental ones, by 2060, this type of funds should be further extended in order to attract additional finance and to produce a multiplier effect on operational environmental projects. What about the well-being? The cities are unequal – in wealth, quality of life and carbon footprints, amongst other factors. For instance, many socio-economic inequalities are derived from a spatial dimension, especially when population is grouped by race and ethnicity40. The income inequality tends to strengthen with city size and with per capita income levels41. So, inequality is often reflected at the urban scale in the spatial sorting of groups according to income (socio-spatial segregation). Neighbourhoods with lower incomes typically have lower levels schools and local amenities and often suffer from poorer access to transport
38 http://www.bei.org/infocentre/press/releases/all/2016/2016-249-luxembourg-and-the-eib-pioneering-inthe-field-of-innovative-climate-finance-to-support-high-impact-climate-action-projects.htm . 39 http://www.gouvernement.lu/6698527/Programme-de-la-Presidence-LU-du-XVIe-Sommet-de-la-GrandeRegion-_PDF_.pdf . 40 https://www.oecd.org/gov/regional-policy/resilient-cities-report-preliminary-version.pdf . 41 Baum-Snow & Pavan (2013), Vol. 95, No. 5, p. 1535-1548.
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