This support pathway helps your city define and implement forward-looking innovation based on the knowledge gained both in your climate transition journey and your digital and technological innovation agenda. It is designed to guide and support the implementation of advanced technologies and innovative solutions while maintaining a focus on a just transition.
This Support pathway focuses on:
- Technological adequacy: Offering support tailored to each city’s technological maturity and capacity.
- Local experimentation playground: Encouraging exploration of new digital and technological solutions, fostering partnerships, exploring funding and financing methods, and promote behavioural and cultural shifts in values, attitudes, perceptions, and assumptions.
- Strong strategic commitment: Strengthening strategic commitment within your local ecosystem by attracting resources from public, private, and civic sectors, while ensuring careful planning and investment strategies to drive effective action.
Addressing Just Climate transition within an innovative digital and technological environment.
Key challenges
- Limited capacity-building support: Existing services may not fully address your city’s specific needs, particularly in building expertise in technological and digital solutions for decarbonisation.
- Lack of integrated support: While peer learning and collaboration opportunities are available, the absence of financial advice reduces the overall effectiveness of the support your city receives.
- Knowledge gaps among city staff: Your city urgently needs to upskill staff in designing effective mitigation actions and solutions, ranging from early-state feasibility to finance-ready solutions, as well as in digitalisation and smart city solutions for climate neutrality.
- Insufficient financial resource mobilisation: Your city faces a significant challenge to attract the diverse financial resources necessary for implementing these technological solutions.
- High initial capital costs: Implementing technology-based solutions is challenging in your city due to significant operational challenges, particularly the high initial capital costs, which create significant barriers to advancing your climate agenda.
Stages of the Climate Transition Map
This support pathway relates to the following stage of the Climate Transition Map:
- Take action
- Co-design a portfolio
Through the services and resources offered by the Technological Solutions and Innovation Pathway, your city can explore various approaches, emerging technologies, and innovative digital solutions to accelerate your climate transition in each of the stages covered by the Climate Transition Map.
This pathway encourages and inspires experimentation in your city, enabling your city to test new digital solutions and key enabling technologies, build partnerships within an innovative ecosystem, and explore new methods for resourcing and investing while promoting behavioural and cultural changes (values, attitudes, perceptions, assumptions). Effective action also requires strong strategic commitment across the local ecosystem, attracting resources from the public, private, and civic sectors, and ensuring careful and detailed investment planning.
A concept is a principle or an idea, which supports climate neutrality city targets, that can combine several solutions together.
- GHG emissions / Scope 1, 2 & 3
- Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) / Negative emissions
- Urban heat island (UHI) effect mitigation - Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (NZEBs)
- Near Zero/ Positive Energy Districts (PEDs)
- Positive Energy Buildings (PEBs)
- Eco-districts / Green neighbourhoods
- Urban heat island effect mitigation - Evaporate Cooling
- Smart Grid
- 15-minute city
- Industrial symbiosis
- Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystem (WEFE) Nexus approach
- Urban green space ecology
- Carbon capture and storage (CCS) and utilisation (CCU)
Learn
State-of-the art on technical solutions to achieve climate neutrality
On this page you can find the list of all NZC resources on technical solutions to achieve climate neutrality in cities: (1) Thematic areas for services definition; (2) Catalogue of solutions & co-benefits; (3) Expert services for deploying climate neutral city actions; and (4) Deliverables.
Catalogue of solutions & co-benefits
The whole catalogue of solutions, including co-benefits, impacts, enabling framework (policy, regulatory, technical, social enablers), and examples from cities, is included in NetZeroCities deliverable D10.3, called Design environment of solutions.
Technical Innovation for Climate Neutrality Quickread
Achieving net zero emissions across cities requires transformative action in all sectors, targeting emission sources in areas such as buildings, industry, transport, waste management, agriculture, forestry, and fossil fuel energy. The quickread provides a concise overview of essential NetZeroCities concepts in a practical, visual format, with additional links to tools and resources for exploring technological innovations that support emission reductions.
Act
Finance guidance tool
This tool has been designed to help you find the right funding for your projects. It is based on a questionnaire that will help you define your financing needs and filter the types of funding that are appropriate.
NetZeroCities Solution Bundle
This tool inspires technological solutions and supports the co-creation of the cities’ portfolios of solutions, fostering inclusive participation. The tool also provides an interactive visualisation of city systems. Furthermore, the portal includes a variety of resources such as factsheets, case studies, and documents that deliver comprehensive information on decarbonisation technologies and innovations.
NetZeroCities Barometer
The NetZeroCities barometer provides quantitative information on cities’ progress toward climate neutrality, allowing them to view greenhouse gas reduction progress and emission reduction efforts for selected Mission Cities, along with key indicators such as stakeholder engagement and invested capital.
To exchange
Capability-building programme
A structure for the capability-building program, an online learning platform designed to help cities accelerate their transition to climate neutrality, already exists on the Mission Portal, but NetZeroCities will conduct a gap analysis of the current six thematic modules to ensure they meet the needs of new cities joining the Mission Platform.
Online Discussion Groups
Discussion groups, although domain specific, will also address citizen and stakeholder engagement, and social innovation. This would enable cities to learn from Mission Cities, particularly those with pilot projects focusing on stakeholder engagement, to share their experiences and best practices.
Group Study Visits
The study visits will enable cities to learn directly from Mission Cities that have successfully implemented projects and initiatives focused on ecosystem engagement. Cities will learn from Mission Cities’ practical experiences with collaborative multi-stakeholder approaches, co-creation methods, and innovative multi-stakeholder governance structures that empower stakeholder involvement.
Twinning Programme
The Twinning Programme between Mission Cities and other cities enables all cities to partner with peers for guidance and support. This collaboration supports in implementing more integrated climate planning, creating portfolios of transformative actions, and connecting various systems to better understand challenges and opportunities for change. Calls for twin cities are launched periodically, join the NetZeroCities Portal and newsletter to stay updated on collaboration opportunities.
NetZeroCities Community of Practice
While engaging local partners in their climate actions, cities can also connect these non-city actors to the broader Community of Practice of NetZeroCities. This group includes private companies, universities, NGOs, and independent entities. The Community of Practice activities foster peer learning among these actors, encouraging innovation and collaboration.
Get inspired
Co-Producing a new Air Quality Plan for Krakow Technology Park
The Krakow Technology Park led the development of Malopolska's Air Protection Program, co-created with stakeholders, including citizens, to significantly reduce emissions by 2023, and initiated a hackathon that inspired a digital platform for transparent, publicly accessible industry emission data.
Further reading:
Cities that are not part of the Cities Mission will have the opportunity to connect with other projects and initiatives such as Horizon Europe projects funded under the Cities Mission, the Covenant of Mayors, CIVITAS, and the Smart Cities Marketplace. These connections will assist cities in addressing emissions from specific sectors, networking with like-minded cities, joining communities, setting targets, developing action plans toward achieving climate neutrality by 2050, and obtaining guidance on funding and financing for climate initiatives.