Committed to go Climate Neutral by 2030? What Next?
So, your city is pursuing the EU Climate Neutral and Smart Cities mission? Great! Here are some suggestions on what to do next.
Summary
Thriving Communities is a collective initiative with a mission to help communities create radical enough change to thrive in the 21st century. We are excited to work with any community in SE Europe to pursue a mission of climate-neutrality by 2030.
If you and your community are planning to pursue this mission, then as early steps we recommend that you:
- Co-create an overarching community mission that anchors the climate mission within the priorities of local citizens.
- Convene citizens’ assemblies to start deliberating on potential pathways towards the climate-neutrality mission
- Start developing local investment mechanisms that will be able to invest €6–9k per citizen in the next 8 years.
- Collectively confront what has limited your community’s progress in the past, to learn what needs to be done differently to make this radical change real.
- Establish a Mission Incubator to anchor the mission process, and secure circa €5 million/year to properly resource this team’s work.
We can put together a team to help coach, guide and support you on this epic journey. We hope that you will join the Thriving Communities collective and we can work on this challenge together.
We would also highlight that the EU Commission and national governments have an important opportunity to help city communities to fund their Mission Incubators. Otherwise there is a critical early-funding gap that we expect will slow progress on the EU Climate Neutral and Smart Cities mission in south-east Europe.
We estimate that cities need operational funds in the order of €5 million per year for their Mission Incubators. €40 million per city over the 8 years of the mission. This investment in Mission Incubators is less than 2% of the total investment need and less than 0.7% of the potential economic benefits to communities. It is essential to really unlocking rapid work on the mission.
We are keen to work with communities, national governments in SE Europe, the EU Commission, other funders and Net Zero Cities to design practical programmes that can quickly mobilise this much-needed resource.
Background
As part of the European Green Deal, the EU Commission has set a mission to create 100 Climate Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030.
In January 2022 the EU Commission received 377 expressions of interest from municipalities committing to the climate-neutral cities mission, and they have selected a short-list of 112 these cities that the EU plans to support more actively.
In south-east Europe, cities from all EU countries have applied as well as cities from Albania, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Some of these cities are already active as part of the Thriving Communities collective, including Križevci, Sarajevo, Maribor and Nova Gorica. Only some have been short-listed by the Commission at this stage, but the commitment of all to the mission should be celebrated and supported.
As part of the mission, the Commission expects each city to develop a City Climate Contract. These agreements will need to set out plans for the city to achieve climate neutrality by 2030, an investment plan and commitments to implementing these plans from the EU, national and regional authorities, businesses and citizens.
The Commission plans that a pan-EU Mission Platform will provide technical, regulatory and financial assistance to help the selected cities to pursue the mission. The first phase of this platform is being run through the NetZeroCities project (which shares many interconnections of partners and history with Thriving Communities). The Horizon Europe programme will also invest €350 million in research and innovation projects linked to the mission in the period 2021–23.
Our previous work to analyse the economic case for decarbonisation in SE Europe suggests that radical progress by 2030 will require capital investments of €6–9k per citizen in the next 8 years. Combined health and energy cost savings will provide communities with an excellent 2–300% return on this investment. You can see examples of this analysis for the cities of Skopje, Niš and Maribor - and Slovenia on a national scale.
Suggested Next Steps Towards the Mission
The Commission’s expression of interest process has demonstrated a hugely exciting level of commitment from cities to the climate-neutrality mission. Now the challenge is to turn this commitment into the action that is really needed in the next 8 years.
The Thriving Communities initiative is designed to help with exactly this type of radical mission-led change. So here are some of our suggestions on what needs to happen next.
Mission-led change is hard. Committing to such a mission forces us to focus on doing what must be done to achieve the mission, rather than an incremental ‘what can we do next?’ approach. This is a big and important mindset shift for most communities and municipalities.
Pursuing a mission does not mean doing much the same things with a bit more ambition. Making a city climate-neutral in 8 years is going to mean doing everything differently. We know this. We know this because we have known that we should eliminate greenhouse gas emissions for ages. By ‘keeping calm and carrying on’ with incremental actions we have failed to respond sufficiently. We must now urgently change tracks and find a much better way. The mission helps us to make that commitment. Now we must find a way to do it.
What to do differently? Each community must embark on an honest process to collectively confront what has limited progress in the past and learn what needs to be done differently to make this radical change real. We can only start to rectify our shortcomings and build a better approach once we bring to the surface the underlying issues that are holding us back. This is not simple, nor will it happen overnight, but this learning process must start now if you are serious about the mission.
The climate-mission is critical, but perhaps it is not going to be the first priority that will come to many citizens’ minds when they think about the future. For many communities we see that they find it more meaningful to say “we will create…, …and become climate neutral at the same time.” So, we suggest that communities get to work to imagine and co-create an overarching community mission that anchors the climate mission within the priorities of local citizens. This framing of a community’s mission should resonate widely and support local storytelling about the better future that is the overall goal. This process of mission co-creation needs to be properly resourced, so that it can be done patiently, iteratively and creatively.
‘By and for citizens’ is an explicit tagline of the EU climate neutral cities mission. We agree. An important approach to help make this real is to convene citizens’ assemblies to deliberate on potential pathways towards the climate-neutrality mission. Several cities and countries are already using this model to test and shape their climate action plans in ways that traditional public-sector strategy development processes have failed to do effectively.
Start developing local transformative investment mechanisms that will be able to invest €6–9k per citizen in the next 8 years. This capital will need to come through a blend of public, community and private finance that is ready to work at the speed and scale needed. Analysing the specific economic case for decarbonisation in your community will help to clarify the investment required and total benefits on offer as you build these mechanisms.
These steps need to be launched in parallel. They will reinforce each other and there is not time to do them in series.
There is more from the Thriving Communities approach that can help you in the process of achieving this mission, but hopefully this overview gives you some useful suggestions for next steps.
Then, to establish the space and capacity to hold this work together for the community, we recommend that you…
Establish a Mission Incubator
Making a city climate-neutral in 8 years is an extraordinary task and anchoring such radical change is unlikely to be in the current day-job of any existing community organisation, including municipalities.
Our experience has proven that if the job of activating radical change becomes only an ‘add on’ to already-busy people’s workload, it will never work.
Therefore, we believe that all communities will need to create a new Mission Incubator model that is dedicated and empowered to be the ‘backbone’ of inspiring, activating and incubating radical change towards the community’s missions. Designing and establishing this model therefore needs to be an immediate next step towards the climate-neutral cities mission.
The purpose of these Mission Incubators is not to centralise and take over all of the work needed to pursue missions. That is not possible nor desirable. They should work like hubs of a wheel, playing a central role in creating and maintaining shape, without which the wheel would fail, but they are still only part of the whole.
Many other actors in the community will have important roles to play, and the Mission Incubator team can help them to see how they can perform their roles more effectively (developing the city climate contracts can help to clarify these relationships).
Our approach is that Mission Incubator models should be made up of three layers:
- A core acceleration team comprised of amazing, entrepreneurial people who are fully involved in leading, facilitating and activating change processes day-to-day.
- A suitable leadership and governance structure that keeps a safe space for the core team to function effectively.
- A network of community allies — people who can be reliably called on to help make the mission happen.
This model could potentially be organised to sit within a municipality structure, but in most cases we see that a more arms-length and independent organisation model works better. Leuven 2030 is a good example.
Proper investment in the Mission Incubator team will be critical.
Our starting model for the core Mission Incubator team covers about 30 roles, in order to cover the breadth of work and expertise needed. This will probably grow, depending on how responsibility for wider action and implementation is shared across community stakeholders. Budget is also needed for additional technical expertise and triggering small experimental actions. Indicatively, a Mission Incubator should therefore be set up with an annual operating budget of €5+ million to give it a strong chance of success.
Remember, this might be an investment of €40 million over 8 years to help unlock €1 billion of capital investment and €3-4 billion of ultimate community value (using Maribor as an example for a 100,000 person city). This is a great business case.
So, if you are planning to pursue the mission then we suggest that you immediately start preparing to establish a Mission Incubator to anchor the mission process, and secure circa €5 million/year to properly resource this team’s work.
The Early Funding Gap
Without this investment in Mission Incubators happening quickly, we fear that the Climate-Neutral Cities mission will remain in the abstract rather than action.
For the EU Commission, we believe that the challenge is to help get this catalytic investment quickly into place for all 100 cities selected for the mission (or ideally all 377 that are keen).
Taken from the top…. At €40 million per city over 8 years the total funding gap for Mission Incubators is €4 billion for 100 cities. Let’s say these cities have an average population of 200k, so a total of 20 million people. This means around €200 billion of capital investment is needed by 2030 (Material Economics estimated €10k per citizen for Europe overall). As noted above, previous economic case analysis shows that the social value of this investment is generally about 3:1, so €600+ billion of potential value. Looked at in this way, €4 billion of activation investment in Mission Incubators is only 2% of the total capital need and 0.7% of the mission’s potential upside. Plus each billion of capital investment is also worth about 10,000 job-years to EU communities, meaning that this seed investment helps to unlock an order of 250,000 fulltime jobs until 2030.
In this view, €4 billion for Mission Incubators is a small, sensible and essential investment.
Unfortunately there does not yet seem to be any EU programme in place to provide even a share of this needed investment in Mission Incubators. One solution seems to be for national governments to commit these resources to cities from their NextGenerationEU recovery funds. It seems like an obvious choice given the job creation potential, potential economic value and wider community benefits on offer.
We suggest that cities start lobbying their national governments to quickly create national Mission Incubator funds, and that the EU Commission team helps to make this happen.
We are also keen to hear and work on other suggestions to fill this early mission funding gap.
Conclusions
Thriving Communities is excited to work with any community in SE Europe to pursue a mission of climate-neutrality by 2030 — whether you applied to the EU mission EOI process, are selected for the EU short-list, or not. There is an enormous amount to do. But it is all possible.
As next steps we recommend that you start to:
- Co-create an overarching community mission that anchors the climate mission within the priorities of local citizens.
- Convene citizens’ assemblies to start deliberating on potential pathways towards the climate-neutrality mission
- Start developing local investment mechanisms that will be able to invest €6–9k per citizen in the next 8 years.
- Collectively confront what has limited your community’s progress in the past, to learn what needs to be done differently to make this radical change real.
- Establish a Mission Incubator to anchor the mission process, and secure circa €5 million/year to properly resource this team’s work.
We recognise that quickly funding the Mission Incubators can be a challenge. For the overall EU mission is it a €4 billion challenge. But the upsides are huge. We are keen to work with communities, national governments in SE Europe, the EU Commission, other funders and Net Zero Cities to design practical programmes that can quickly mobilise this much-needed resource.
If you would like to discuss this more, and explore how we can work together, please contact tim@korimako.org.
Updated 4 May 2022 to reflect the EU Commission’s selection process.
