Cities are responsible for almost 75% of global energy use and 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, making them crucial players in advancing the goals of the Paris Agreement and achieving net-zero emissions. To meet global climate targets, it is essential for national and local governments, businesses, local stakeholders, and civil society to collaborate swiftly and effectively in implementing a comprehensive transition to a net-zero future. To help facilitate this transition, local and regional governments are invited to join an initiative, Urban Transitions Mission (UTM), aimed at showcasing integrated pathways to holistic, people-focused urban transitions centred on clean energy and innovative net-zero carbon solutions.
The Urban Transitions Mission Centre (UTMC) project, of which ICLEI is a partner, is a global platform that promotes urban sustainability and facilitates climate-neutral transitions. UTMC helps cities to bridge knowledge and capacity gaps by connecting them with policy, implementation, and funding solutions via exchanges beyond national and regional borders. ICLEI is supporting this work by analysing methodologies and approaches that cities employ on their path to climate neutrality, organising peer-to-peer exchanges between local and regional governments to benefit from one another.
The project enables cities to build their capacity in a networking environment with access to knowledge and tools to address opportunities and challenges that cities encounter on the path towards a net-zero urban environment.
Building on the European Mission for Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities, UTMC supports activities of the Urban Transitions Mission of Mission Innovation. The UTM mobilises decision makers across all levels of government to prioritise climate-neutral and net-zero pathways enabled by clean energy and systemic innovation across all sectors and in urban governance. By accelerating capacity-building and closing the gap between research, development and deployment, the Mission empowers cities worldwide to adopt innovative solutions and help reach tipping points in the cost and scale of those solutions for urban transitions. Since 2022, the UTM has been working with a cohort of 97 ambitious cities, including many ICLEI Members. Learn more about what the UTM offers to cities here.
The Mission will welcome another 150 cities to join its cohort by the end of 2024 and is actively recruiting; cities that are signatories of the Global Covenant of Mayors, and have more than 50,000 inhabitants, are welcome to apply by filling the online application form (also available at: Join The Cohort – UTM).
City representatives, policymakers, urban actors and those interested in urban transitions can join the UTMC platform at https://www.utmc.app/ to learn more about evidence-based solutions, good practices to accelerate urban transitions, as well as financing and funding opportunities.