This support pathway provides your city with the essential knowledge and resources to build a solid foundation for embarking on your journey towards climate neutrality.
This Support Pathway focuses on:
- Systemic approach to change: Understanding that emission reduction actions are interconnected and adopting a holistic approach for systemic change.
- A collaborative approach: Actively engaging the local ecosystem in climate action, ensuring their involvement from the very beginning is crucial to achieving climate neutrality.
This Support Pathway helps to address challenges related to getting started on your climate neutral journey, foundational elements of the journey, and to understand the Mission approach.
Key challenges:
- Insufficient administrative capacity: Your city faces significant gaps in administrative and operational capacity, creating obstacles to effective climate action. Addressing this challenge requires building staff knowledge and skills to design and implement mitigation policies and plans.
- Unclear definitions: Your city requires greater clarity around the definitions of various key climate targets and metrics, such as carbon neutrality and absolute-zero.
- Lack of integration: Your city has not adopted cross-sectoral and systemic approaches to climate planning, limiting its ability to set actionable and ensure effective implementation.
- Limited Resources: Your city experiences a shortage of resources and support, making it challenging to overcome existing barriers to climate action.
Stages of the Climate Transition Map
This support pathway relates to the following stages of the Climate Transition Map:
- Understanding the system
- Co-designing a portfolio of actions
Here, you will learn the importance of identifying barriers that hinder transformation and how addressing these obstacles is crucial for progress. You will also gain an understanding of analysing value chains, sectors, and scales - from micro to macro levels - to uncover critical interdependencies among different challenges, connect various systems, and foster a collective understanding of key challenges and opportunities.
Lastly, you will learn about the significance of portfolio thinking, which consolidates existing policies, actions and programmes with new or accelerated interventions into a cohesive set of transformative actions aimed at achieving climate neutrality. A portfolio of transformative interventions bridges efforts across departmental silos and engages diverse stakeholders. See more detail on portfolio thinking with the Climate Transition Map.
Connect
Capability-building programmes
to develop cross-sectoral, long-term climate mitigation strategies and implement a systemic approach to climate neutrality, incorporating digital resources from partner initiatives to support cities at the start of their climate journey. Join the Capability-building groups on the NetZeroCities Portal to receive the latest updates and learning opportunities.
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 the implementation of more integrated climate planning, the creation of portfolios of transformative actions, and the connection of various systems to better understand challenges and opportunities for change. Calls for twin cities are launched periodically.
Get inspired
Case Studies
The case studies available on the Mission Portal enable all cities to analyse successful climate action initiatives from other cities, providing valuable insights into best practices and common pitfalls. Connect to the NetZeroCities Knowledge Repository and filter case studies by theme to find practical examples that relate to your context.
Other relevant initiatives and programmes
The Covenant of Mayors offers various thematic resources to guide cities toward climate neutrality:
- The SECAP process, step-by-step towards low carbon and climate resilient cities by 2030 and Policies, key actions, good practices for mitigation and adaptation to climate change. Step-by-step recommendations are provided for the entire process of elaborating a local energy and climate strategy, from initial political commitment to implementation and monitoring of the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan. The guidebook is providing a set of flexible but coherent principles and recommendations, allowing both local authority front runners and newcomers to take local level climate action, while considering site specific circumstances and capabilities.
- GET READY FOR 2050 – Webinar series: The Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy – Europe, H2020 projects C-Track 50 and PentaHelix designed a joint event series for local/regional public authorities and their stakeholders, entitled “GET READY FOR 2050”. The two first webinars are focusing on building effective collaboration processes and (successfully) planning for the future.
- Case study - Glasgow’s Climate plan (November 2022): Glasgow has created the Glasgow Climate Plan to smooth the transition to a low carbon and resilient city and to improve the quality of life of its people while achieving climate neutrality by 2030. Featured by a strong involvement of its citizens perspectives and needs, the city advances towards a greener future.
- Case study – Brasov, Developing and Implementing a 2050 Roadmap to Climate Neutrality (January 2022): The historic city of Brasov has bold ambitions to become the ‘Green Capital of Romania’ and a model for urban climate transition in the Central-Eastern European Region. The city was one of the first in Europe to publish and implement an ambitious roadmap to achieve climate neutrality by 2050.
- Uppsala Climate Protocol – an inclusive co-design approach to climate neutrality (June 2020): In Uppsala, local government is working with public and private organisations to design climate goals and the way to reach them together. The Climate Protocol is an inclusive co-design model that has resulted in a concrete climate strategy.