The Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge (MITECO), has launched the Collaboration Platform for Climate Neutrality of Spanish Cities, an initiative to help Spanish cities become climate neutral by 2030. Thus, Spain has been a pioneer within the European Union when it comes to promoting the creation of a Mirror Group of the Mission of Cities in Spain, which will support the joint definition of solutions to achieve this objective. The platform is proposed as an infrastructure for public action and is aimed at providing services to localities to facilitate and accelerate their transition towards decarbonisation and resilience.

In this way, the platform will have as its main beneficiaries the City Councils of Spanish cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants or provincial capitals that have the will to achieve total or partial climate neutrality by 2030. In addition, it will offer training services and access to information to cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants.

The platform will develop training, learning and capacity-building initiatives and facilitate citizen participation and activation processes. It will provide support and accompany cities in the search for financing formulas and attracting financial resources in their territories. It will also provide support for the design of transformative climate change mitigation and adaptation project portfolios.

The Supervisory Board is made up of the MITECO Biodiversity Foundation together with the Spanish Office for Climate Change, which supports this initiative as a key tool to address the climate emergency from urban environments. EIT Climate-KIC will be in charge of the operation of the platform, in collaboration with the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), which will contribute with its technical knowledge in climate neutrality and collaborative organisational models in the framework of the ecological transition.

Through the European Commission’s European Cities Mission and its implementation project, NetZeroCities, coordinated by EIT Climate-KIC, a special connection will be fostered with other pioneering European cities in the field, and with other existing platforms such as Viable Cities in Sweden or those being developed in other countries such as Austria. France, Greece, Holland and Italy. Likewise, synergies with the European Commission’s Climate Adaptation Mission will be facilitated, to make Europe a more resilient continent.

In addition, this platform is complementary to and will be coordinated with others developed in the field of city networks – such as, for example, the Network of Cities for Climate of the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces, UN-HABITAT, or the INNPULSO network – to which it will provide a space for dialogue and collaborative action between the public sectors, private and social for Spanish cities on the road to climate neutrality.

The European Commission coordinates the Mission for Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities initiative, which includes seven Spanish cities (Madrid, Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Valladolid, Vitoria-Gasteiz and Zaragoza), which is a great opportunity for Spain and a recognition of the important work that these cities are doing, strengthening their leadership in climate action.

These seven cities, which are part of the citiES 2030 initiative, intend to be an example, within the framework of this platform, to accelerate the implementation of solutions with social, economic and environmental impact, bringing together public and private efforts for urban transformation.

TRANSFORMATIVE MULTI-CITY PROJECTS
Among the services offered by the platform is support for the design and implementation of simultaneous actions in several Spanish cities, with the aim of facilitating the exchange of knowledge between them and thus accelerating learning and scaling up initiatives. To this end, it will promote, among others, the massive energy rehabilitation of homes, the development of “regulatory sandboxes” and the creation of a climate accelerator.

Thanks to the connection of this Spanish platform with the European platform of the Mission of climate-neutral and smart cities, which is one of the main instruments for putting innovation at the service of the ecological and digital transition of cities, synergies and exchange with other pioneering European cities in the field will be facilitated.