Climate crisis:how to become a climate-neutral city

The transformation of cities is essential to respond to the climate crisis, and this not only because half of humanity (3.5 billion people) lives in cities and by 2030 this will become 60%, but also because urban settlements are important centers for the production of climate-altering emissions.Cities occupy just 3% of the earth's territory but they are responsible 60-80% of energy consumption and 75% of CO emissions₂, as well as 70% of greenhouse gas emissions.If we want to achieve a real energy transition, many things will have to change.

Starting from these considerations, within Horizon Europe the mission has been defined:reach the number of 100 cities with zero climate impact by 2030.The cities involved, selected from 377 candidates, will have to bring forward the global climate neutrality goal to 2050 by 20 years.Among the selected urban centers there are 9 Italian capitals:Bergamo, Bologna, Florence, Milan, Padua, Parma, Prato, Rome, Turin.

The mission will also involve cities outside the European Union, in particular Elbasan in Albania, Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Reykjavík in Iceland, Eilat in Israel, Podgorica in Montenegro, Oslo, Stavenger and Trondheim in Norway, Istanbul and Izmir in Turkey, Bristol and Glasgow in the United Kingdom.

Each of them will have to sign a "Climate City Contract", a document that takes into account the territorial context of reference and is produced starting from an open process.With this contract, cities will commit to three specific components:strategic commitments, actions and investments.For each of these the path includes processes shared with local, regional and national actors;analysis of the strategies currently under consideration;definition of investment plans, with evaluation of costs and benefits, to understand how to divert public funding on the one hand, and attract private capital on the other.

The identified cities will continue their path benefiting from community consultancy through the platform NetZeroCities, as well as a series of ad hoc grants and financing.

In Italy there are no Net Zero Cities south of Rome

Looking at the list of Italian cities involved, the geographical composition immediately catches the eye:they are almost all in the North and, in any case, the southernmost one is Rome.

The choice to focus on large cities that had already started territorial planning, even if not necessarily at advanced levels of execution, had an impact on the selection.As Francesco Luca Basile, professor at the University of Bologna and editor, together with Andrea Tilche and Michele Torsello, of the book 'Cities with zero climate impact.Strategies and policies':

“The Commission certainly favored large cities to make it clear that the challenge could also be taken up by complex cities, with significant impacts.We must take into account the fact that in 2050 75% of the world's population will live in urban areas, so if we manage to decarbonise cities, especially large cities, where more people will live, the climate challenge will be easier to face."

Furthermore, few cities in the South presented their candidacy even though the large centers in the South could have applied:just 10 out of 43.Basile explains further:

“Cities like Naples or Taranto could have made it, also because the Commission was looking for members of symbolic places, cities that present characteristic elements on which it would have been interesting to imagine a pilot route.Probably if they had applied they would have been selected.It could have been a good opportunity, also because the route would have covered urban areas on which cities have the possibility of intervening.I'll give you an example:if Taranto had joined, the Municipality would not have been asked to decarbonise ILVA, but to intervene in the chapters for which there was room for the administration to implement decarbonisation policies".

Not only the inadequacy of a series of plans, therefore, but also a lack of ambition:the main urban centers of Southern Italy could have had the opportunity to participate in processes that would have put public affairs at the service of the ecological transition, involving citizens, institutions and interest groups in an innovative experimentation, but it did not happen.

Not all is lost though:“We are asking the Commission to reopen the applications - adds Basile - there is the possibility that this will happen, with different time objectives, in 2035.This could be an opportunity to include further centres, perhaps in the South, to imagine the development of political practices with new objectives and approaches".

After all, the Commission is already working to forms of support for the 277 cities not selected, through the Horizon Europe programme.

How do you become a climate-neutral city?

In their book Basile, Tilche and Torsello suggest some strategies and policies that cities that aspire to have zero climate impact should adopt.“For our book we deliberately chose an ambivalent title - explains Basile a Blue suitcase - choosing to talk about zero climate impact:we are talking not only about cities that do not have an impact, but also that are not impacted."The intention of the text is in fact to be an instrument at the service of both the central government and the administrations.Commissioned by the Minister of Infrastructure and Sustainable Mobility of the Draghi Giovannini Government, the text served to understand the point from which the candidate cities for the EU Mission started to implement the correct decarbonisation paths.

The study is a set of different contributions, in particular on urban mobility and energy efficiency of buildings, main impact factors on the part of cities, and analyzes a series of issues related to the mission, such as what could be the elements that stimulate virtuous behaviour, what are the psychological biases that lead to resistance to innovation or how to reason and plan adaptation and mitigation together by developing Natural Based Solutions.Even if the reference is to the candidate cities, the indications can be valid for each city.

“We tried to have an approach halfway between political and technical - continues Basile - imagining it could be useful to have the two areas dialogue when structuring a Climate Office, a place where the climate policies of the different sectors are coordinated and a dialogue between administrators and technicians.Each chapter is accompanied by a box with suggestions for local administrations, but the general idea is to develop innovative solutions useful for decarbonisation and best practices developed at European level in cities".

Three major areas are identified in the book:decarbonisation of buildings and mobility;energy, greenery and water:an efficient (and community) use of resources;the investments necessary to be cities with zero climate impact.

• Decarbonization of buildings and mobility

The solutions investigated concern first of all the decarbonisation of buildings, with a view to increasing efficiency which concerns both the structures and materials used for their construction (steel, concrete, wood and similar) and the plant systems.The buildings taken into consideration are civil ones, whether existing, under renovation or new construction.

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Ample attention is then dedicated to the decarbonisation of mobility, still in our country characterized by an excessive incidence of the use of private cars.The decarbonisation policies of this sector include, for example, the increase in zero-emission and electric vehicles and the encouragement of soft mobility and public transport systems.A space is also dedicated to mobility systems not directly relating to cities such as ports and airports, but the attention is concentrated above all on the analysis of the effectiveness of tools such as restricted traffic zones and roads at 30 kilometers per hour.From this point of view, the text was a precursor to the debate which, in recent months, has animated some cities and led Bologna to a profound urban transformation, with over 70% of roads at 30km\h.

• Energy, greenery and water:an efficient (and community) use of resources

In general, the decarbonisation of the energy system is an essential step and also involves the electrification of consumption and smart energy systems such as smart grids, information and electricity distribution networks that allow production and distribution to be optimised.But to build the cities of tomorrow, the inclusion and participation of citizens in energy production will also be needed, with positive energy districts and energy communities.These latter solutions, Basile underlines, are virtuous not only for the production of clean energy and with a view to decarbonisation but also because they have a very profound social dimension.

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An important part of the path to decarbonisation of cities will have to pass through Nature Based Solutions:innovations such as increasing greenery and urban forests and developing green roofs can in fact be useful for energy efficiency, helping to mitigate climate change, but also to improve adaptation performance such as the mitigation of heat islands in the management of heat waves. heat.Without considering that encouraging the spread of greenery in our cities has effects on reducing air pollution.

The same goes for the sustainable management of water resources, which sees the efficiency of infrastructure as a first fundamental step as well as, naturally, reducing consumption.

A tool under development in various cities, also thanks to PNRR funds, is the digital twin, the virtual creation of digital twins of physical resources, in order to study their properties, characteristics and capabilities.

The plan on which we need to insist most, according to the researchers, is that of building consumption:it is necessary to develop ad hoc tools and paths that facilitate the decarbonisation of buildings for civil use starting from a review of urban planning regulations that facilitate a greater diffusion of photovoltaic panels.

• Investments, not costs

To do all this you first need resources for significant investments.From this perspective, it is necessary to develop mechanisms that incentivize and support citizens' investments which will be amply repaid through a return or in terms of savings on energy spending (with the exit mechanism:energy saving company) or with the production of renewable energy.

Mechanisms of this kind are the flagship of the climate policies of the municipal administration of Grenoble, which has developed an energy production system managed by an in-house body of the Municipality which contributed to it being awarded the prize as a European Green City.

“I think that the mission objective of having 100 cities with zero impact by 2030 is challenging but - explained Basile - without waiting for the end of the decade, we have already achieved important steps forward.Almost all the cities involved have already set up their own climate office, signing a contract between public and private entities to carry out concrete projects for reducing emissions and producing renewable energy.Participation paths have been developed in various cities, including in the form of climate assemblies to define concrete plans and actions.In the cities of the Mission, decarbonisation policies are increasingly no longer on the sidelines of urban planning but are instead supporting pillars that gradually involve all the actors involved with potentially significant repercussions on cutting emissions".

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