Doing climate neutrality the Polish way

Krakow is one of several prominent Polish cities that have joined the EU Mission 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030 and is striving for climate neutrality with support from the EU-funded NetZeroCities project. The city – along with Łódź, Rzeszów, Warsaw and Wrocław – is taking part in NetZeroCities’ Pilot Cities Programme, where participating cities test and implement innovative approaches to rapid decarbonisation over a period of two years.

An estimated 70 % of Poland’s five million single-family houses fail to meet energy efficiency standards, and its residential and service buildings are a major source of emissions. If they are not modernised, achieving EU-wide climate targets will be even more difficult than it currently is. Recognising the need for a collaborative approach to this problem, Krakow joined forces with its fellow Polish cities under NetZeroCities’ NEEST project to tackle energy-inefficient buildings through the development of a shared digital tool.

Better together

“We applied for the project together with other cities, rather than competing with individual projects, because we value cooperation very much,” reports Grzegorz Grzybczyk, Senior Specialist in the Department of Municipal Economy and Climate, Krakow, in a news item posted on the NetZeroCities website. “As a consortium of five cities, we share the good practises, but also the unsuccessful ones, and this requires a high level of trust between the partners. We can talk openly with each other, point out the advantages but also the disadvantages. This means, firstly, that we can look at certain things in other cities and replicate them at home, and secondly, that we can see what has failed in other cities and not try it at home.”

Krakow’s emissions have mainly come from buildings, transport and waste. Having already taken significant steps towards dealing with the waste and transport sector emissions, the city sought to tackle the energy-inefficient building problem through the NEEST project that provides a comprehensive model for building revitalisation using a digital tool. The aim is to reduce residential and service building emissions to zero, but not by focusing only on thermal improvements. It is mainly about changing how residents think, revitalising urban space and adapting the environment to residents’ needs.

“The tool will work in such a way that, for example, a city that wants to start the process of deep thermal modernisation of buildings will receive a package of ready-to-use solutions developed as part of the project which entails a simulator for the city’s energy system that provides direction for action and typical technical and financial solutions for different types of buildings. The next step is to input data for a specific building and get recommendations on what to do and how to do it. And finally, the regular investment process – building permit, applying for financing, introducing business solutions,” Grzybczyk explains.

Expected benefits of the actions taken include higher resilience to climate change, improved accessibility to buildings and greater social inclusion. The NetZeroCities (Accelerating cities’ transition to net zero emissions by 2030) project ends in September 2025.

MORE INFORMATION

CORDIS project factsheet

NetZeroCities project website

This article was originally published in © CORDIS - EU Research Results