Cities across Europe are working to accelerate their transition towards carbon neutrality and climate resilience – using joined–up systems innovation as a key tool.
Cities face an enormous challenge in becoming resilient, healthy places to live while reaching net-zero-emissions in just a few short years. Working with ambitious mayors, municipalities and city communities in Europe to design portfolios of joined-up innovations means they are capable of unlocking wholesale transformation across all city systems – from mobility to waste, from energy to health, and the built environment.
Our first cohort of partners includes the cities of Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Kraków, Križevci, Leuven, Madrid, Malmö, Maribor, Milan, Niš, Orléans, Sarajevo, Skopje and Vienna.
Our work is informed by more than 10 years of experience in urban sustainability gathered through EIT Climate-KIC‘s large-scale programmes and flagship initiatives, notably Smart, Sustainable Districts (SSD), City Finance Lab, and Building Technology Accelerator (BTA). Furthermore, EIT Climate-KIC brings the interdisciplinary professional expertise of the Cities team, including our design partners Bankers without Boundaries, Dark Matter Labs, The Democratic Society, the Global Covenant of Mayors and Material Economics.
Find out more about our work in the stories below. If you are interested in becoming a challenge owner, partner or funder, contact us at communitydesk@climate-kic.org
Read on for a lightly edited extract from BwB’s original blog post exploring how to reduce net energy consumption in the built environment, which contributes 30-40 per cent to a city’s total CO2 emissions.
Read on for a lightly edited extract from BwB’s original blog post describing interesting insights on innovative finance from BwB and other “design partners,” which emerged during their work on EIT Climate-KIC’s Healthy, Clean Cities Deep Demonstration.
Read on for a lightly edited extract from Dark Matter Labs’ original blog post detailing insights gleaned from its collaboration with EIT Climate-KIC’s Healthy, Clean Cities Deep Demonstration, and much more.
Read more about our work mobilising a community of experts to work with a broad coalition of city leaders, citizen groups and businesses to accelerate efforts to lower embodied carbon in new buildings in two of Europe’s largest urban regeneration projects: Madrid Nuevo Norte and Milan’s L’Innesto.
EIT Climate-KIC partner Democratic Society has launched its Democratic Climate Model—a model showing how democratic principles can lead cities and regions to respond differently to climate change, heavily informed by work done with EIT Climate-KIC’s Healthy, Clean Cities Deep Demonstration.
Following its Open Call, the New Accelerator programme has assembled a consortium of new and current EIT Climate-KIC partners to foster European entrepreneurship to tackle climate change.
For EIT Climate-KIC, it is of paramount importance to create the links between decision-makers and the public around climate action. Citizen engagement is therefore at the heart of our Deep Demonstrations programme.
A cross- KIC (Knowledge and Innovation Community) initiative is working on bringing data into the Spanish capital’s decarbonisation activities.
EIT Climate-KIC partner The Democratic Society has written an article on taking citizen climate action to the next level, featuring learnings from their work on our Healthy, Clean Cities Deep Demonstration.
EIT Climate-KIC is working with the city of Vienna to identify climate initiatives and to link them systematically to push beyond incremental change.
The 'Eco-fictions' installation is the brainchild of Instituto Mutante de Narrativas Ambientales, an environment-focused arts group - one of four core partners in the Madrid chapter of EIT Climate-KIC’s Deep Demonstration of Healthy Clean Cities, along with Madrid’s City Government, the transport infrastructure operator Ferrovial, and the Technical University of Madrid.
Trees as infrastructure: An open source model to support municipalities in transitioning toward resilient urban forest management practices.
Trees as infrastructure: An open source model to support municipalities in transitioning toward resilient urban forest management practices.
While the challenges of climate change and a global health crisis converge in cities, the economic conditions created by the COVID-19 pandemic now present an unprecedented moment in modern urban sustainable development.
Over the past year, Dark Matter Labs has been reimagining infrastructures with stakeholders throughout Europe, including the EIT Climate-KIC Healthy, Clean Cities Deep Demonstration.
