Innovation isn’t scarce in cities, but what they do lack is time and energy dedicated to helping it flourish, argue Amelia Kuch and Joshua Stehr from NetZeroCities’ partners Dark Matter Labs. Based on a conversation with Anette Olovborn, an expert who has worked for more than ten years with innovation and change in municipalities and city networks, they unpack the persistent misconceptions about scaling that shape policy design, funding, and governance, and suggest how cities can change this approach.   Across Europe, cities continue to test innovative climate solutions like low-traffic zones retrofitting public buildings, reforming school [...]

Getting citizens more involved in city actions isn’t easy – especially when action is needed beyond the life of a project. Alongside the University of Parma and the Italian Space Agency, the municipality of Parma’s smart city initiative will involve citizen scientists and so faces these engagement questions directly. Alfredo Cosco from its department of digital transition writes here about what a city needs to consider when looking for lasting collaboration.    Almost every European project aimed at cities includes work on citizen engagement.  However, the risk is that a process presented as collaborative only collects opinions, [...]

Over 100 European cities met this year in Torino to pursue a common goal of climate neutrality. Each city faces similar obstacles but is benefiting from shared solutions and learning through the Cities Mission. NetZeroCities' partners ICLEI Europe, with support from LGI and Climate KIC, have brought the key learning and actions from that major conference into one piece of essential reading.  Every city working towards climate neutrality runs into the same four challenges sooner or later:  how to finance the transition, how to organise city hall internally to deliver it, how to shape conditions beyond its control, and  how to prove what´s working and adjust the course.  Helpfully for Mission cities, Mission-minded cities [...]

Kozani is part of “a region in transition,” says the Greek city’s climate lead, as it plans for a future without the mining industry that until recently sustained it. Showing citizens the value of clean energy to their finances, as well as to the climate, is crucial – and finance experts from NetZeroCities’ Capital Hub are working closely with the city on the numbers. Michail Kastanaras is “quite new to the struggle” that Kozani began a few years ago, he says, but he and his colleagues are now playing a special role within the local climate [...]

In this second blog on city innovation, NetZeroCities partners TNO show how cities – after identifying their challenges, outlined in part one – can follow five strategies to make innovation not a ‘nice to have’ but an inevitable part of their results. In our first blog, we described 15 recurring challenges that quietly stall innovation in cities, showing up as slow progress, unfinished pilots, fragile initiatives, and innovation that depends on personal energy rather than organisational support. But naming challenges is only half the battle. In our work on addressing complex societal challenges with public organisations [...]

European cities are working together and engaging national governments to meet their climate goals, but a clear picture of city activity presented country by country was lacking. Newly launched National Mission Ecosystem pages, compiled by NetZeroCities, will bring clarity and opportunities, our partners from UPM, the Technical University of Madrid, explain.  Cities working towards climate neutrality don’t operate in isolation, and understanding the many forms of support available to them under the EU Cities Mission isn’t always easy.   Who is involved? Where do you go to connect? And how do local and national efforts link together? Questions that should be straightfoward to answer but would have required a lot of effort to search for different sources.  To address this, NetZeroCities, the EU Cities Mission platform, has launched the first version of its National Mission Ecosystem pages, now available for 35 countries. These pages aim to offer a clearer and more accessible way [...]

Cities are trying to rapidly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and reach net zero, but why ‘net’ zero? This is where negative emissions come in. Paul Barton from NetZeroCities’ partner ICLEI Europe explains how critical these are for cities’ climate neutrality goals. A less considered part of the terms “net zero” and “climate neutral” is that they imply that some carbon emissions can’t be mitigated by 2030. These leftover or “residual” emissions therefore need to be cancelled out through actions that remove carbon from the atmosphere. Why do cities need negative emissions? The removal and storage [...]