C40 Cities is a global non-profit dedicated to advancing climate action. To support its Green and Thriving Neighborhoods (GTN) program—which promotes 10 core principles for healthier, more climate-resilient communities—the organization needed a user-friendly tool to monitor neighborhood-scale interventions.
As part of CCA's Social Lab program, our team collaborated with C40 to design a web-based tool that helps cities identify KPIs, track project outcomes, and visualize progress over time. The design has been handed off to C40 and is now in development. It has received strong support from both stakeholders and city staff during testing, feedback confirming that the tool aligns with GTN goals and meets the practical needs of city governments.
As the project and design lead, I oversaw the entire process encompassing strategy, research, UX/UI design, and prototyping.
DESIGN TEAM
Anna Bang, Samyak Aggarwal, Rutal Deshmukh, Sanvithi Saya
MY ROLE
Project Lead
MY CONTRIBUTIONS
Strategy, UX/UI design, Design System
The Problem
Despite understanding the value of the GTN framework, cities lacked a clear process to translate it into measurable, real-world action.
The Solution
We built an accessible online tool that equips cities with a clear process for applying GTN principles, from setting projects to monitoring impact.
The Process
The process began with a close review of GTN materials, followed by stakeholder and user interviews to understand what was needed to make the framework more usable in real-world contexts.
One of the main insights was that the existing GTN Excel tool and guidebook felt overwhelming, difficult to navigate, and lacked a clear structure to support decision-making or track the progress of projects C40 was encouraging cities to pursue.
Throughout the research phase, we worked closely with C40 and Arup to stay aligned with the program’s strategic goals while also advocating for the needs of city staff. In a co-creation workshop, we identified the importance of following a clear logic model that served as intentional guardrails preventing users from drifting away from GTN principles, while still maintaining enough flexibility to adapt to local contexts. This balance became the foundation of our design approach.
The Product Experience
The web tool covers the core flows: setting up projects, selecting and inputting KPIs, tracking progress, and exporting reports.
A central dashboard provides an overview of project activity and collective impact. The "KPI Completion Rate" keeps users accountable by highlighting how consistently they update their indicators, while the “Impact Score” is designed to encourage ongoing engagement by showing overall progress at a glance.
When setting up a new project, users are prompted to choose whether they want to start with goals or actions. The setup flow is broken down step by step to make an otherwise complex framework, easier to follow.
Once a project is created, users can visualize and monitor progress on the project page. Color is used to indicate if the project is on track or falling behind. Each KPI page provides a detailed view of a single indicator, where users input ongoing values and visualize progress toward their targets.
Supporting Global Climate Accountability
The GTN Tracker helps government officials align on and track climate actions with potential for wide-scale impact. If all of C40's 94 member cities, representing 700 million people, adopt it, the tool could drive concrete policy changes and ultimately global climate accountability.
I’m proud to have worked on a project that turns climate expertise into a practical, user-focused solution. Collaborating with our stakeholders and climate experts made sure the tool reflects real-world priorities. A GTN framework that was once a static resource is now an actionable system that addresses key challenges faced by city officials who previously struggled to integrate it into their workflows.
Future opportunities include an Explore mode, allowing users to browse GTN-aligned projects from other cities to learn from existing examples and create new projects more efficiently. We also see potential for responsible AI integration. A lightweight language model trained on a limited dataset could power a chatbot to guide project setup while relying on preloaded content to reduce environmental impact.
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