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Cities are critical hotspots for climate mitigation and have ambitious visions to reap the multiple co-benefits of climate action, yet gaps still persist between local action plans and the pace of current transformations.
The Urban Transitions Mission Centre (UTMC) is a global platform that promotes urban sustainability and facilitates climate-neutral transitions. The UTMC helps cities to bridge knowledge and capacity gaps by linking cities with policy, implementation, and funding solutions via exchanges that transcend national and world Regions’ borders.
Building on the European Mission for Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities, the UTMC supports the activities of the Urban Transitions Mission of Mission Innovation, and it enables a wide international knowledge and practice network of cities and urban stakeholders that helps drive transitions globally. It will enable cities to build their capacity in a networking environment with access to knowledge and tools on urban systems integration, technology developments, successful policies, investment and funding opportunities, as well as the cobenefits, mistakes and trade-offs that cities encounter in the pathway towards a net-zero urban environment.
The UTMC makes available evidence-based solutions and good practices to accelerate urban transitions and promote financing and funding opportunities to implement integrated urban climate action. It offers advanced frameworks and moderated learning across governance levels to raise awareness of and capacities for climate neutrality policies. The UTMC also establishes a forum for international exchange and cooperation on climate-neutral and net-zero urban transitions by organizing global and regional events and comprehensive dissemination measures to raise visibility of EU and international good practice and strengthen international cooperation.
Finding synergetic uses for energy and nature-based actions can improve outcomes for both, whether by improving the use of space through co-location, providing general well-being improvements for users, identifying alternate sources of finance and business models to allow for simultaenous uses, and generally improving the use cases for both options. Contagem, in Brazil, is one such example of a city undertaking both energy and nature-based action.
Download the policy brief here.
Cities can do a lot to reduce the energy intensity of their biggest energy-consuming sectors, namely buildings and transport, given the powers at thei disposal. However, various actors must work together to address the unique financial, technical, and socioeconomic barriers. The example of Zhytomyr, Ukraine, illustrates the benefits of improved energy efficiency, including greater resilience.
Download the policy brief here.
The UTMC is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe. Since December 2022, a consortium of urban experts from organizations such as the Austrian Research Promotion Agency on behalf of JPI Urban Europe, the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL), Eurocities, the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (GCoM), ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and LGI Sustainable Innovation, is facilitating the set-up and roll out of of the UTMC’s activities.
UTMC has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme under the Grant Agreement n°101095976 — Call: HORIZON-MISS-2021-CIT-02 — Project name: Global Knowledge Exchange Centre (GKEC) for Urban Climate Neutrality
