NetZeroCities: 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030

European cities are at the forefront of efforts to achieve a climate-neutral Europe by 2050. Cities of all sizes and regions in Europe have a leadership role in driving climate action, ecological transition and transforming European urban spaces. In this framework, the EU’s Mission of “100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030” involves local authorities, citizens, businesses, investors as well as regional and national governments to deliver 112 climate-neutral and smart cities by 2030 and ensure that these cities act as innovation hubs to enable all European cities to follow by 2050.

The Net Zero Cities (NZC) platform supports the EU’s mission implementation by acting as a service-oriented platform supported by world-class practitioners and researchers. Frankfurt School of Management and Finance (FS) is one of the partner organisations of NZC, supporting the capital needs and financing capabilities and products necessary for cities to achieve climate neutrality. The support encompasses knowledge transfer and development of capabilities, and to align with and ensure effective delivery of services to cities.

Frankfurt School of Finance and Management has been supporting the following tasks:

i) analysing of success, failures, and obstacles in current funding landscape and then creating financing structures for use by cities, both accessible through the platform and tested/deployed in cities,

ii) creating an innovative knowledge tool, correlating users’ financing needs with available financing options while considering the value of broader co-benefits of actions,

iii) investigating finance policy needs from the Financing Institutions’ perspectives and how cities can access finance and funding resources,

iv) interreacting with multi-level funding agencies, banks, investors, foundations, and other climate finance and municipal finance-related actors, to address the city finance framework, barriers and access to climate finance issues faced by cities in the EU27,

v) developing a regulatory landscape framework (listing, mapping and analysing relevant policies, laws, regulations, and technical standards) to help create an overview of the applicable regulatory context of climate neutrality and social innovation, and an understanding of policies they relate to each other.

Additionally, FS is heavily involved in the support to cities’ development of their Investments Plans.

**Additional information:. Project website: https://netzerocities.eu/