Cities applying for EU's 'Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities' Mission announced

The list of eligible applicant cities for the EU's Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities Mission has been released by the European Commission. The Mission is one of several that has been set by the EU to deliver concrete solutions to the challenges that the EU is currently facing. 

As cities will be of fundamental importance in achieving climate neutrality by 2050, and that making cities smart will be an important enabler of this, the EU created the Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities Mission. The aim is to have 100 cities in Europe climate neutral and smart by 2030, and that these will act has innovation hubs to support all European cities in achieving smart climate neutrality by 2050.  

The Commission received 377 Expression of Interests (EoIs), of which those from 362 cities were considered to be eligible. These hailed from each of the EU-27 Member States as well as 8 associated countries, including the UK and Norway. The list of applicant cities that chose to make their name public can be found here. The evaluation of eligible EoIs has now started with the announcement of the 100 planned for April 2022.

There was a lot of interest from national authorities, city networks and from cities themselves to know the names of applicant cities now, i.e., ahead of the selection, to enable them to begin to exchange ideas, share information and to begin forming support networks, irrespective of which cities will eventually be selected to participate in the Cities Mission.

Therefore, the European Commission’s Mission team decided to make public the names of the cities applying that: (a) are eligible; and (b) have expressly agreed to the publication of their name. The European Commission wished to underline that not all of the cities whose names have been published will be selected for participation in the Cities Mission.

This article was originally posted on the European Commission website.