Cities are playing a crucial role to fight climate change and achieve the EU Green Deal objectives. Covering only 4% of the EU’s land area, the cities are the home to 75% of EU citizens. Furthermore, cities consume over 65% of the world’s energy and account for more than 70% of global CO₂ emissions. The European Commission is targeting cities to accelerate their green and digital transformation with the Mission “100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030”, launched as part of the Horizon Europe Programme.

The objectives of the Mission are to achieve 100 climate-neutral and smart European cities by 2030 and to ensure that these cities act as experimentation and innovation hubs to enable all European cities to follow suit by 2050. To  achieve the Mission’s objectives, the Horizon 2020 NetZeroCities project has been designed to help cities overcome the current structural, institutional and cultural barriers they face in order to achieve climate neutrality by 2030. The project will work as a service-oriented platform providing tailor-made services and comprehensive support to help the “100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030”. NetZeroCities will design dedicated services to provide them with the support and solutions they need to achieve their Net Zero goal in a socially inclusive way.

A NetZeroCities one-stop-shop Platform will be accessible to all cities, aggregating new and existing tools, resources and expertise. NetZeroCities will also support a series of Pilots to help drive rapid learning about how to achieve climate neutrality at city scale and run a Twinning programme to enable peer-learning.

See the EU factsheet for more information.