MOBILITIES FOR EU and NEUTRALPATH join forces at the at the IEEE Summit Dresden 2024
On 14 May 2024, the NEUTRALPATH and MOBILITIES FOR EU projects co-organised a policy session, titled “Towards Climate-Neutral Cities: Integrating Sustainable Energy and Mobility Solutions,” at the IEEE Summit Dresden 2024. The aim of the session was to improve knowledge transfer, support replicability efforts, and foster collaboration among relevant EU-level projects and initiatives.
The two projects jointly involve a total of 12 cities across Europe, all of which contribute to the EU’s Cities Mission for achieving climate-neutral targets through their pilots, lessons learned, and best practices. 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 is able to achieve climate neutrality on its own. Getting cities to work together is crucial for generating win-win solutions. Svea also commented that “its' 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 four European cities that are involved in the two projects—Dresden, Vantaa, Madrid, and Espoo. They shared their experiences in achieving climate neutrality, and discussed solutions to reduce carbon emissions and finance the green transition.
Financing was indeed one of the threads connecting all of 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" and that "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 developed and 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.
Author: MOBILITIES for EU
