Building the Skills to Become Ukraine’s First Climate-Neutral City

The city of Rivne, in western Ukraine, has long been ambitious on climate. After completing its first Sustainable Energy Action Plan in 2020 and cutting emissions by 18%, the City Council set an audacious goal, to become the first Ukrainian city to achieve climate neutrality by 2030.  

But ambition is only part of this story. As part of the Net-Zero Cities Twin programme, a mapping exercise revealed a clear obstacle, a green-skills gap across the city’s civil service. Officials had an overview of the challenges but lacked the current knowledge of the energy landscape, the existing strategies, and above all the practical, systems-thinking tools their workforce needed to drive an energy transition.

The illegal invasion by Russia made that gap more acute. It exposed long-unresolved problems, including energy dependence on Russia and Belarus.

The initiative was conceived to close this identified skills gap by equipping professionals with the capacities required to promote innovative climate projects and lay the foundation for a long-term climate neutrality strategy.

Climate KIC designed and delivered a bespoke Academy in Ukrainian for a first cohort of 25 professionals from Rivne City Council, combining four expert-led workshops with systems-innovation courses, peer-to-peer leadership coaching and policy-innovation practice. Local partners United for Ukraine and Rivne City Council provided context and support, alongside local and international experts in sustainable energy, policy and economics.

Baseline and final surveys measured the shift directly. Before the Academy, civil servants lacked the tools and capacity to move beyond general awareness of the city’s energy transition challenges,  but afterwards, the same measures showed participants had gained what they needed to actively promote and deliver innovative climate projects, and the city had moved from an overview of its problems to a working foundation for a long-term climate neutrality strategy. City leadership described the change as a shift in the basic approach of the council and its teams, not just new theoretical knowledge.

The timing mattered as much as the training. The Academy landed alongside Ukraine’s national push for green recovery and EU accession, giving the civil service both the legitimacy and the urgency to prioritise the transition now. It also modelled a shift from a reactive public administration to a proactive one, built on leadership spanning government, business, civil society and international partners. This is a model that Rivne and Climate KIC see as transferable to other territories facing their own transformations, well beyond energy.