Cities are confronting many challenges to reach their climate goals, but they also face being overwhelmed with possible solutions. NetZeroCities’ partners from the Tecnalia team, Carolina Garcia Madruga, Maider Arana, and Carolina Cantergiani, write here about an exciting online tool to help cities identify the best of those solutions and prioritise their decarbonisation activity.

Navigating the Challenges of Climate Neutrality

When creating a roadmap to climate neutrality, cities must not only have a clear picture of the obstacles they face but know which to prioritise and which solutions will be the most impactful to implement.

The NetZeroCities Solutions Outliner is therefore an exciting offer for Mission Cities and has been developed to help them decide the most useful package of activities for reaching climate neutrality, whether they are defining early plans or are already at an advanced stage.

Introducing the NetZeroCities Solutions Outliner Tool

Developed through the collective efforts of several NetZeroCities project partners – all with experience in the different domains of GHG (greenhouse gas) reduction – the tool presents the possibility to tailor solutions for each city and could go a long way to help municipal technicians define effective action plans. Below are some of the ways the Solutions Outliner Tool can help tailor solutions for your city.

  • Prioritisation of Actions: The tool helps define and prioritize the city’s portfolio of actions based on the local context, allowing for integration, synergy, and coordination between different actions.
  • Scenario Simulation: It offers the simulation of different scenarios and hypothetical situations, expanding the possibilities for analysis.
  • Reducing the Noise: The tool avoids overwhelming Mission Cities with additional requests, as information that is already known by the city can be used as a starting point.

After selecting key parameters, the web-based Solutions Outliner will automatically present a list of priority solutions, and the user can get more information on each. Cities can then connect their needs or other contextual information with the solutions included in the NetZeroCities Knowledge Repository – an online library of expertise for cities – providing them with a preliminary list of solutions from which to start working, making analysis more manageable.

Key Contextual Elements for Effective Climate Action

The possible projects or solutions for city practitioners, and the ones best adapted to the local situation, are considered via four key contextual elements: ambition versus decarbonization, co-benefits versus expected goals, barriers to ambition, and levers for systemic change.

Ambition identifies what sectors are included in the Action Plan of the city’s Climate City Contract (CCC) and establish its climate ambition. For each decarbonisation sector or domain, some solutions will be more optimal than others. The tool will help select those ambitions that best fit the city’s strategy.

Cities will also envisage the outcomes, or the co-benefits aimed from the Action Plan in their CCC. Each prioritised solution will have a different impact on the city and the citizenship, and the city must have a systemic and collective vision to identify what co-benefits will come from the different paths that they choose.

Barriers are the elements that can halt a city’s plans or thwart its ambitions. To implement a successful Action Plan, the climate transition team in each city must identify those obstacles or barriers that must be faced, both from a technical, social, or political point of view. Once again, the identification and mapping of these barriers must be defined collaboratively.

Enablers are the things that can serve as a lever or opportunity to promote the achievement of the ambitions proposed in the city’s climate transition map. As opposed to identifying barriers, recognising opportunities in the city’s Action Plan can make it a more robust and viable instrument for its climate transition.

Launching the Solutions Outliner Tool

Mission Cities can look forward to using the Solutions Outliner from this Autumn. If you’re interested in being part of our ongoing test group for the Solutions Outliner Tool contact us at blog [@] netzerocities.eu and we’ll put you in touch with the team.

If you liked this post, why not check out some of others, including one on the complementary ‘Solutions Bundle’ tool.