From Climate City Contract to Implementation: What’s next for cities with the EU Mission Label?

Cities have been working hard to form their Climate City Contracts, or ‘CCCs’ – an innovative governance tool that helps them to chart and navigate a path towards climate neutrality – and many more cities are now passing this important landmark in the EU Cities Mission.

The creation of a CCC involves outlining interconnected Commitments, an Action Plan, and an Investment Plan, but it is more helpfully thought of as a process that helps cities to continually identify, investigate, and address obstacles to rapid transformation of their approach to climate actions in their city. As a ‘living document’, cities will develop and iterate their CCC based on learnings they discover during implementation and progress on climate action.

When a city’s CCC reaches an advanced stage of development – signified by high ambition and detailed, interconnected planning – it is submitted for review with the aim of having these plans endorsed by the European Commission with the award of the ‘Mission Label’.

This is an important milestone and recognises the substance of a city’s plan, but it also offers leverage for its implementation, acting as a kind of trustmark for the direction and ambitions the city has set, showing citizens, stakeholders, and potential investors that it is a plan worth getting involved with.

In recent months, 23 additional Mission Cities have received the Mission Label, joining an initial ten awarded at the end of 2023.

“We have 25 climate partners that we have already collaborated intensively and with the Climate City Contract and work we have done in the Mission, it’s even more intensified. We have also intensified collaboration with the other Finnish mission cities and the collaboration with the national level.”

Niina Nousjärvi, Development Manager for climate issues at the City of Espoo.

From label to lift-off

To support implementation, NetZeroCities, the initiative helping 112 Mission Cities on the road to climate neutrality as part of the EU Mission for “100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030”, is also shifting gear.

This next phase focuses on helping cities with the learning and capabilities needed to put their plans into action, and building on work so far, cities are being supported via an agile, collaborative, and flexible approach, and in multiple ways:

1. Tailored support from new City Support Groups (CSGs) that bring together dedicated City Advisors, City Support Officers, and other specialists, to identify and target specific challenges that cities face. This is the core mechanism that keeps city support running effectively and helps to direct the right forms of support and capability building to cities.
   
2. Bringing together specialists within the consortium via Domain Working Groups to enhance the core CSG support by connecting expertise and focusing on specific themes or domains needed to achieve climate neutrality. Although Domain Working Groups focus on a specific domain, they do so from a systemic point of view, showing how that area intersects with key systemic levers such as governance, citizen engagement, finance, and learning. Currently, momentum is building around domain working groups such as ‘Just Transition’ and ‘Citizen Engagement’, which were a key part of the discussion at the recent Spring School in Stockholm (read more here).
3. Enabling peer-to-peer connections between cities in structured and unstructured ways to help share learnings and gather around common challenges or topics. Cities are experts in the work they do so having the chance to share their journeys is key. One of the structured ways this occurs is through twinning (you can read some recent examples of this here).
4. Supporting Pilot Cities to learn and experiment on specific interventions. This is one of the most overt examples of cities implementing a specific action that connects and contributes to their CCC and wider mission. They receive dedicated support in this process and connect with other pilot cities to exchange learnings and can use the learnings from this process to contribute to implementing other actions in their CCCs.
5. Elevating and expanding discussions on policy innovation and how it can help cities translate their CCC to action and develop new ways of approaching wicked problems. Policy is key to driving forward cities’ missions and implementing their CCC, but it can also be a complex topic to unpick and make actionable. Various forms of support are available to tackle exactly this, including in the form of policy labs where cities can gather and produce ideas for policy on a specific topic. Read some of the policy briefs here.
6. Helping cities to focus on how to finance climate actions via the Climate City Capital Hub (CCCH), which helps support cities via technical assistance and capital facilitation programmes. Cities need to generate finance from different actors to help implement their actions and they will be provided with expertise directly on this by the new City Finance Specialists that will offer tailor-made public and private sector financial expertise, particularly in their local context. The CCCH links with the City Support Groups in various ways to ensure support is interconnected, including by having a finance specialist in the core groups.
7. Continuing to support more cities to draft their CCCs and receive the EU Mission Label!

Even without diving into the intricacies of each form of assistance and the examples, we can see that the network of support for cities is ambitious and interconnected. Each element has been designed to support cities towards their journey to climate neutrality, focusing both on the details and the bigger picture of the approach they will take.

Overall, the achievement of the Mission Label and advancement of CCCs is a key stage in cities’ journeys to climate neutrality as it signals an ambitious, detailed plan. Shifting the plan into implementation is an exciting moment that brings new challenges and opportunities for cities to tackle with the support of NetZeroCities.