Author: Joanna Trimble Slovakia’s Košice – a European Capital of Culture – is an old city with fresh ambitions. Stirred to refashion energy governance, the city set out to establish dedicated energy teams, renovate municipal buildings, and tackle energy poverty – where heating, electricity, and hot water consume a large share of already stretched incomes. With some residents facing impossible trade-offs between energy, food, and rent, city leaders turned to local partners who broke new ground for Slovakia to tailor assistance to people’s needs.  “How much energy does the washing machine or the oven use?” asks Petra, a single mother of two living in Košice. Every day, energy bills are weighed against other needs, like paying rent and food for her family. “In the winter, we all sleep in one room under blankets, so I don't have to heat the whole apartment.”    Petra [...]

Author: Joanna Trimble Every sector faces the pressing need to outpace climate impacts for economic and environmental security. In France, Bordeaux Métropole teamed up with Bordeaux University to turn this challenge into an opportunity. By forging alliances across business, government, research, and civil society, they hope to build a foundation capable of catching cascading climate risks in their tracks.   “Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations. Complementarities are positive sum.”   With this message at the World Economic Forum, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney urged that decades of prioritising efficiency over resilience [...]

Author: Barbara Jarkiewicz Across the continent, cities know their climate plans far outstrip their budgets. Facilitated by NetZeroCities, many participating cities acknowledge that municipal coffers can typically cover only a fraction of what is needed to deliver climate neutrality, often closer to a fifth than to half once the full cost of transforming buildings, transport and energy systems is on the table.  That gap will not close through grants and city budgets alone. Cities understand that this demands new financial mechanisms and coalitions between public authorities, private investors, citizens and European institutions, and that is exactly what is starting to take shape. In the past two [...]

Author: Joanna Trimble The Swedish city of Lund is testing how high a city can soar by rethinking how it governs the climate transition. By pulling dozens of initiatives into a single portfolio, the city is charting a common path to accelerate the pace of change. Now, this city is set to forge an innovative and adaptive model for governance, pushing the boundaries on what people can achieve together and how to activate collective impact for the long term. Lund has made great strides towards decarbonisation, with emissions falling 45% compared to 2010. But the city needs to reach [...]

Author: Joanna Trimble Porto’s ambitious pledge to reach climate neutrality by 2030 is on the cusp of a citywide effort: one that embraces its people power, the ancient city’s spirit of innovation and its tradition of reimagining itself for two thousand years of continuous urban life.   “Porto is a city where the past gives depth to the present, and where innovation is not a break with history, but a continuation of a long-standing ability to adapt, reinvent, and move forward,” says Catarina Araújo, Vice Mayor and City Councillor for Porto’s Urban Planning, Public Space, Environment and [...]

Author: Barbara Jarkiewicz In Europe, the green transition is often illustrated by solar panels on roofs, wind turbines on the horizon and cyclists on busy streets. Yet a huge share of urban energy still disappears into something far less visible: the heat that keeps homes, schools and offices warm. How and when that heat is produced, distributed and used can determine whether a city meets its climate targets.  Copenhagen has already taken significant strides on the visible aspects of its green transition. Wind turbines on the horizon, cyclists in every lane, district heating in most homes. With its Flexumers4Future project under the NetZeroCities Pilot Cities Programme, the city is now turning to [...]

Author: Barbara Jarkiewicz On a warm afternoon in Tei neighbourhood, in Bucharest’s District 2, the city feels like many other capitals in Europe. Traffic crawls along busy roads, tower blocks face Lake Tei — one of the six lakes that form a chain across the district - and students hurry across the campus of the Technical University of Civil Engineering.  Not far away, the atmosphere is different. Inside a nearby hall, long tables are covered with maps, tracing paper and markers. Residents, students, planners, NGO staff and municipal officials sit together in mixed groups. They talk about how climate change is showing up in their neighbourhood and what could be [...]

Author: Barbara Jarkiewicz In city halls across Europe, climate teams are rewriting the cast list for the transition. They still track emissions and technology options, but the key work now starts with a different question: which businesses, utilities, investors and employers have to be in the room if any of this is going to happen in the real world?  More and more cities are realising that they cannot achieve net zero alone. This shift in mindset is becoming increasingly apparent. Climate neutrality is no longer framed as something city halls impose on businesses and citizens, but as something that they work on together.   Recent NetZeroCities work shows that a climate-neutral future is achieved by residents, public servants, the private sector and other actors. One of the [...]

Author: Barbara Jarkiewicz Visitors arriving in Espoo often notice the scenery first. The city sits on 58 kilometres of seashore, with 165 islands and forests around. That landscape is not a postcard backdrop. To protect it, the city has committed to becoming climate neutral by 2030. Its strategy has been to make climate action a shared effort across the city, bringing businesses, civil society and citizens into the work, while developing an investment framework that helps turn green ambition into investable projects.  The scale of the task is stark. Espoo’s target is an 80% cut in emissions by 2030, but updated scenarios show current measures delivering only 60%. The city’s population has almost [...]

Author: Barbara Jarkiewicz In cities, every tram line, courtyard and renovated apartment block is ultimately about the daily lives of residents, not about abstract climate targets. As Europe races towards 2030 climate neutrality goals, and cities are growing exponentially, one lesson from the Pilot Cities Programme is becoming clear. The cities that move fastest tend to be those that treat citizens as partners in the transition, rather than relying only on big budgets or smart technology.  Across the first cohort of 52 Pilot Cities, more than 184,000 people took part in activities that ranged from citizen assemblies and neighbourhood workshops to digital apps [...]