On 14 May 2024 NEUTRALPATH and MOBILITIES FOR EU held a policy session titled “Towards Climate-Neutral Cities: Integrating Sustainable Energy and Mobility Solutions” Dresden on the occasion of the IEEE Summit Dresden 2024.
For the IEEE Summit Dresden 2024, NEUTRALPATH and MOBILITIES FOR EU European research projects co-organised a policy session to improve knowledge transfer, support replicability efforts, and foster collaboration with relevant EU-level projects and initiatives.
The two projects involve 12 cities across Europe in total, contributing with their pilots, lessons learned, and best practices to the EU’s Cities Mission for achieving climate-neutral targets. The joint event was possible thanks to Dresden’s active role in both initiatives, serving as the link between sustainable energy systems and mobility solutions for climate-neutral cities.
Insights from the session
The session explored the importance of collaborative actions and citizens’ active participation. Structured as a policy roundtable, the session started with a keynote speech from the Dresden City Advisor of NetZeroCities, Svea Heinemann.
Svea Heinemann stressed that no city can go climate-neutral on its own. Getting cities to work together is crucial to generating win-win solutions. She also commented, “It’s important to scale up and leverage these project results through policy advocacy occasions and tools across European cities.”
The keynote speech was followed by a panel of experts from five European cities involved in the two projects—Dresden, Vantaa, Ghent, Madrid, and Espoo. They shared their experiences in achieving climate neutrality, discussing solutions to reduce carbon emissions and finance the green transition.
Financing was indeed one of the threads connecting all the cities’ experiences. Useful insights into financing the urban transition towards sustainable energy and mobility systems were shared by Matthias Walz, financial expert at the United Nations University, Institute of Integrated Management of Material Fluxes and of Resources (UNU-FLORES). Collaboration was the focus of his intervention as well, as he stressed that “Getting together is key to being more attractive for funding. Cooperatives can generate synergies and economies of scale, have higher negotiation power, and enable risk pooling.”
Based on the session results, a policy brief on the transition to climate-neutral cities will be available soon.
This joint initiative demonstrates how NEUTRALPATH and MOBILITIES FOR EU are dedicated to advancing the EU’s Cities Mission and fostering significant advancements toward sustainable urban futures
