Empowering Cities with Sustainable Finance Solutions

Get inspired by innovative financial tools and strategies, fostering collaboration and alignment with stakeholders to overcome financial barriers and drive climate action.

The Finance and Business Model Pathway equips your city with the financial knowledge and strategies needed to support climate action. By providing knowledge on rerouting public investments and exploring innovative finance mechanisms, this pathway helps align urban finance with your sustainability goals, and can guide collaboration with key financial stakeholders.

This support pathway focuses on:

• Information on financial tools and strategies: empowering your city with instruments such as participatory budgeting and climate budgets to drive and support climate action implementation.
• Leveraging innovative finance mechanisms: if your city is focusing on optimising public investment and utilising private and participatory finance mechanisms, you can learn from approaches implemented in Mission Cities to ensure the long-term viability of climate projects.
• Exploring funding opportunities: specific tools developed by the Mission Platform and information on EU funding opportunities will help you identify resources to implement your projects.
• Capacity building: build expertise to effectively navigate and apply financial tools in alignment with your city’s sustainability objectives.
• Collaboration with stakeholders: your city seeks enhanced dialogue with financial stakeholders and authorities to align policies, address regulatory barriers, and overcome financing constraints.

This Support Pathway equips cities with the financial knowledge and strategies needed to support climate action.

Key Challenges:

• Navigating independently complex sustainable finance: your city is struggling to independently navigate the complexities of sustainable finance without sufficient guidance.
• Overwhelming and non-mediated information on financial tools: your city may find existing financial tools overwhelming, requiring adaptations to create a more user-friendly, self-guided approach.
• Limited availability of practical case studies: with many case studies still under development, cities face a challenge in accessing concrete examples that provide practical insights for applying sustainable finance solutions.
• Barriers to leverage complex financial instruments: the introduction of highly complex financial instruments presents a challenge for cities lacking advanced financial expertise, making it difficult for them to fully leverage these resources.
• Need for specialised training and expanded support: addressing the knowledge and expertise gaps will be challenging without developing specific training modules and exploring additional avenues of support offered by EU initiatives like the Smart Cities Marketplace and EU City Facility.

Finance and Business Model Pathway and the Climate Transition Map

This support pathway relates to the following stages of the Climate Transition Map:

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This pathway will provide your city with the expertise to navigate and employ these financial tools effectively, fostering an integrated approach to urban finance that aligns with their sustainability goals. By doing so, your city will be able to overcome financial barriers and enhance its capacity to implement comprehensive climate action plans.

Moreover, the finance and business model pathway will foster collaboration between your city and other cities, as well as various financial stakeholders, including regional and national authorities, private investors, and community groups. This enhanced dialogue and cooperation are essential for aligning financial policies and investments across different governance levels, thereby addressing regulatory barriers, financing constraints, and capacity-building challenges.

The services provided through the finance and business model pathway can also benefit your city in other phases of the Climate Transition Map, as effective financial governance is a critical issue throughout the climate transition journey. By integrating these innovative financing and funding approaches, your city will be better equipped to achieve its decarbonisation objectives.