NetZeroCities — Helping European cities reach net zero by 2030

Demos Helsinki is a partner in NetZeroCities, a project supporting cities in finding new ways to drastically cut their emissions by 2030. The project works as a service-oriented platform to support the EU’s Mission of “100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030” (“Cities Mission”) launched in 2021 as part of the Horizon Europe programme. Together with other leading European actors, city networks, research organisations, and urban stakeholders, Demos Helsinki helps city practitioners and decision-makers identify root causes and barriers to change, and provides experimentation and innovation hubs to test and share new methods, knowledge, and approaches.

We need societal transformation to tackle the climate crisis and other crises societies face. Demos Helsinki focuses on helping governments at all levels to build the capacities and tools and capacities to tackle societal challenges and to strengthen public sector leadership in steering collective action. In NetZeroCities, we provide agile city support to ensure that the work is based on a wide variety of cities’ needs. Our expertise lies in the role of governance when driving societal transformation and we provide cities with hands-on support in just transition, citizen and private sector engagement, social innovation, multilevel governance and policy innovation.

As well as directly supporting cities, the Cities Mission is also an ambitious operationalisation of mission thinking which provides insightful learnings of how to design and steer governance to tackle complex challenges in the EU context with diversity of cities. We are enthusiastic to extend this thinking based on our previous experience (see Missions for governance: Unleashing missions beyond policy) by facilitating two-way learning dialogues between cities, European Commission and the Mission Board, to continuously improve mutual alignment across the Mission and its implementation.

Cities account for over 70% of global CO2 emissions and are home to 75% of EU citizens. They have a profound impact and role in the lives and wellbeing of people, and are also centres of economic activity, knowledge generation, innovation and new technologies which are key infrastructures for the private sector and civil society. The Cities Mission is currently one of the largest single climate initiatives globally and NetZeroCities is central to supporting it. The diversity of city contexts and needs is a remarkable inspiration but also a significant challenge. Demos Helsinki plays an active role in translating learnings into impactful interventions and vice versa. We help different actors in and beyond city organisations to develop an understanding of what missions can look like when put into practice and what is in for them; and explore how NetZeroCities as the Mission Platform can better support cities in their climate journey now and in the future.

For more information, please contact:
Yu-Yi Huynh
yu-yi.huynh@demoshelsinki.fi

Feature Image: Google DeepMind / Pexels