Report on city needs, drivers and barriers towards climate neutrality
All EU Member States have committed to the European Green Deal aimed at turning the EU into the f irst climate neutral continent by 2050. They have also set an intermediate target of 55% emissions reduction by 2030, compared to 1990 emission levels (European Commission, 2021). As cities are responsible for approximately 75% of global emissions (UNEP, n.d.), they are central to meeting these targets. It is also evident that action needs to be taken urgently.
In response to this urgency, the commission took forward the recommendations of the Horizon Europe Mission Board in the “100 Climate-neutral Cities by 2030 – by and for the Citizens” report (DirectorateGeneral for Research and Innovation (European Commission), 2020). The report calls for substantial intensification of decarbonisation of cities and acceleration of existing efforts. To achieve this is not going to be easy for cities; it will require profound changes in how they develop and approach their policies and portfolios of projects and programmes. While the ambition is present, the pathway to meeting it is not laid out yet.
The NetZeroCities (NZC) project is designed to support the Mission for Cities, by enabling European cities and citizens to show the way forward towards an inclusive, thriving, climate resilient and sustainable future. To be successful, NZC future services will need to respond to existing city needs, to help address – or be aware of – barriers that cities face, but also to leverage existing opportunities in cities towards neutrality. In this context, NZC takes a socio-technical transformation approach to address this intricate challenge (see Figure 1 showing the need for multilevel intervention).
Taking the above into consideration, the project naturally kicked off with an early engagement process of cities to capture their experience – i.e. explore what they feel their needs are, what barriers they face and where their opportunities lie. This city engagement will ensure that service design and delivery is fit for purpose. The engagement process involved a series of focus group meetings as well as the distribution of an online survey to which cities responded. The methodology of the engagement process is described in detail in Chapter 2, while the engagement assessment outcomes are described in Chapter 3.
It is worth noting that cities articulate needs, drivers and barriers within their own context of understanding (mental maps) and, therefore, significant effort has been placed in coding, structuring and synthesizing those in a way that is coherent across focus groups and cities so that the reader can easily understand them, and the project can ultimately use them. As a result, Chapter 3 is comprised of five key integration areas that capture the full picture of needs/drivers/barriers, namely:
1. Policy and governance
2. Implementation practices
3. Culture, social innovation and participation
4. Finance and business models, and
5. Strategic learning
The generated knowledge is a synthesis using input from diverse European city contexts, considering the wide geographical cover of cities participating in the focus groups and contributing to the survey. This allows the NZC project to draw sound, albeit qualitative, conclusions for the development of its services, whose ultimate user will be cities themselves.
This is not the first attempt to map cities’ needs, barriers and opportunities and this analysis corroborates previous findings. National legislation is not always supportive of the transition, with burdensome regulations and complex administrative procedures creating legal barriers for public and private sector investment. Cities are also facing a lack of technical expertise that will help them undertake long-term climate and energy actions (Covenant of Mayors, 2017). According to previous research by the Covenant of Mayors, local authorities lack financial resources to implement projects.
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