Kitakyushu's City-to-City Model — Exporting Japanese Waste-Management Expertise to 78 Cities in 16 Countries

Kitakyushu itself recovered from severe industrial pollution in the mid-20th century, and the city later built its Asian Center for Low Carbon Society to package that recovery experience into an exportable service, delivered through city-to-city technical cooperation with Japan's development agency JICA and the Kitakyushu International Techno-cooperative Association (KITA).

The programme aims to transfer Kitakyushu's own pollution-recovery experience to other Asian cities across waste management, water supply, wastewater treatment and air pollution control.

A flagship example is the multi-year Municipal Solid Waste Management project with Davao City in the Philippines: a first JICA-backed phase (2017-2020) focused on source reduction and segregation, followed by a second phase whose results were presented at a closing forum with JICA, Davao City and KEPA in February 2025.

According to UNEP, Kitakyushu has carried out more than 192 projects on waste management, water supply, wastewater treatment and air pollution control in 78 cities across 16 countries since 2010. The second Davao City phase's results were described at the February 2025 closing forum as delivering measurable social and environmental gains.

The public evidence base is strong on programme reach (project and city counts confirmed by UNEP and JICA press releases) but is largely output-based; there is no independent, controlled evaluation isolating Kitakyushu's specific contribution to environmental outcomes in each partner city, and results plausibly depend heavily on local implementation capacity from city to city.