The European Commission’s Mission for “100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities by 2030” (“the Cities Mission”) seeks to accelerate Europe’s climate action commitments as part of the European Green Deal, whose ambition is to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. The Cities Mission’s central tenet is to elevate and deepen the commitment to pursue systemic change through research and innovation, setting an ambition for cities of unprecedented scope and scale. In order to achieve such effects, a demand-driven Mission Platform has been established to provide tailored assistance and services to participating cities and those learning from them. As a part of the Horizon 2020 Work Programme, Building a low-carbon, climate resilient future: Green Deal call, the “LC-GD- 1-2-2020: Towards Climate-Neutral and Socially Innovative Cities” topic selected the four-year project NetZeroCities to establish the Mission Platform, which began work at the same time as the formal establishment of the Cities Mission, in October 2021. The scope of work presented herein will comprise the second Specific Grant Agreement (SGA2-NZC) development under the Framework Partnership Agreement FPA-NZC for the Mission Platform to scale and continue operations through 2027. Activities primarily focus on two objectives: the first to reinforce the support received by cities selected to participate in the Mission on financing their roadmap of activities towards climate neutrality, and the second to develop basic Mission Platform services for cities who are willing to commit to climate neutrality on a longer timescale than the Cities Mission.

This SGA provides comprehensive programming and support for the European Commission’s Mission of 100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities by 2030. It builds on the NetZeroCities (NZC) project, coordinated by CKIC. Combined, these two projects set out actions as follows: (a) Create and operate a Cities Mission Platform as a ‘one-stop-shop’ to access the expertise, capabilities, services, and solutions necessary to achieve climate neutrality. This Platform will provide tailored and intensive support to cities participating in the Mission and will ensure open access to the knowledge and resources of the Platform. (b) Help all Mission Cities with the co-creation and use of Climate City Contracts (CCC) to enable an ambitious pursuit of the goal of climate neutrality by 2030. This SGA expressly seeks to ensure all Mission Cities are supported and builds directly on the initial scope of NZC. In addition, support will be offered to additional cities seeking to follow the Mission closely. (c) Assist Mission cities in the development of tailor-made investment plans, project preparation and finance for the cities participating in the Mission. (d) Deliver substantial resources to Mission cities for ongoing research and innovation activities critical to achieving climate neutrality by 2030. This support will be in the form of ‘pilot’ funding to test and demonstrate actions needed to deliver climate neutral outcomes. This pilot activity will work together with the Platform and CCC processes in the cities, operationalising emerging knowledge and insights about how cities can achieve the Mission objectives.

NetZeroCities (NZC) is designed to pursue the ambition of the report from the Mission Board for Climate Neutral and Smart Cities, as part of a broader European ambition to achieve climate neutrality before 2050. This ambition represents a substantial elevation of the degrees of decarbonisation and the timescale for achieving it. For all cities achieving this level of impact is an extraordinary undertaking and would require profound changes in how policies, projects and programmes are advanced by cities, with the direction and support of senior governments. NZC connects and builds beyond established programmes and experimental initiatives. The NetZeroCities consortium is build based on partners? expertise, experience, and access to a very large network of cities of all sizes and maturity throughout Europe. It has an excellent balance of partner typologies, a great geographical coverage allowing presence and activity all throughout Europe, and thanks to that, its approach goes beyond current state-of-the-art. NetZeroCities will create a programme tailored to the specific conditions of each city. All the services and thematic expertise will be aggregated and co-designed through a NZC one-stop-shop Platform and the digital portal and smart repository for impact measurement, capacity building and knowledge/tools dissemination. Cities will benefit from an intensive support relationship of dedicated City Guides to navigate the platform and ensure city needs are adequately understood and addressed. NetZeroCities will support pilots in 30 European cities and, in subsequent rounds of engagement, more than 100 cities to achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 (medium-term) and 2050 (long term) respectively, by developing and deploying an integral approach to support climate-neutral transformation in cities. This will be achieved through the co-design and organisation of services, including the Climate-neutral City Contract as an enabling instrument.

URBREATH vision is to develop, implement, demonstrate, validate and replicate a comprehensive, community participation and NBS-driven urban revitalisation, resilience and climate neutrality paradigm that will ultimately radically enhance the social interactions, inclusion, equitability and liveability in cities. Specifically, the aim of the URBREATH project is to implement hybrid/Natural Base Solutions putting at the heart of the decision-making process the communities within a city. Advanced techniques, particularly Local Digital Twins and AI, and social innovation will facilitate the achievement of its vision. The project will have four phases: 1. Inception, 2. Development, 3. Piloting, 4. Transition. The preliminary results of a single Phase are evaluated within the following Phase so to allow for feedback before releasing the final version. The Inception phase will define the methodology to be followed for the project development and will deliver the project functional and technical requirements. The second phase will release the URBREATH technical framework, consisting of tools to manage the whole data value chain and to support end-users to collaborate on the design and creation of NBS to be used in the city/district. It will be used to monitor and take decisions on the NBS to be implemented/deployed in the Piloting phase (evidence-based decision making), that involves 4 Front Runner Cities in 4 different climatic zones: Cluj-Napoca (RO - Continental), Leuven (BE – Atlantic), Madrid (ES – Mediterranean), and Tallin (EE – Boreal). During the Transition phase, all the information, results and lessons learnt from the previous steps will be collected and analysed to provide recommendations and foster replication activities and the uptake of project outputs at the end of its lifespan. To this aim, 5 Follower Cities are involved: Aarhus (DK), Athens (EL), Kajaani (FI), Parma (IT), Pilsen (CZ), linked to the Front Runners for climatic zone and/or dimension.

This FPA provides comprehensive programming and support for the European Commission’s Mission of 100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities by 2030. It builds on the NetZeroCities (NZC) project, coordinated by CKIC. Combined, these two initiatives set out actions as follows: (a) Create and operate a Cities Mission Platform as a ‘one-stop-shop’ to access the expertise, capabilities, services, and solutions necessary to achieve climate neutrality. This Platform will provide tailored and intensive support to cities participating in the Mission and will ensure open access to the knowledge and resources of the Platform. (b) Help all Mission Cities with the co-creation and use of Climate City Contracts (CCC) to enable an ambitious pursuit of the goal of climate neutrality by 2030. This FPA expressly seeks to ensure all Mission Cities are supported and builds directly on the initial scope of NZC. In addition, support will be offered to additional cities seeking to follow closely the Mission. (c) Assist Mission cities in the development of tailor-made investment plans, project preparation and finance for the cities participating in the Mission; (d) Deliver substantial resources to Mission cities for ongoing research and innovation activities critical to achieving climate neutrality by 2030. This support will be in the form of ‘pilot’ funding to test and demonstrate actions needed to deliver climate neutral outcomes. This pilot activity will work together with the Platform and CCC processes in the cities, operationalizing emerging knowledge and insights about how cities can achieve the Mission objectives; and (e) Ensure ongoing monitoring and evaluation of cities in their progress toward climate neutrality and deploy peer-based learning to ensure full appropriability of the result from the Mission. The FPA periods extends through 2027 and provides for two planned Specific Grant Agreement (SGA) phases, where a precise plan, targets and metrics will be established.