Our approach

One decade to make the difference

With less than 10 years to achieve a pathway to deep decarbonisation, we must combine policy and regulatory innovation, technology, transformation finance and civic participation. This will exponentially grow cities’ ability to accelerate climate action and realise the many co-benefits this creates, whether job creation, health improvements or social inclusion.

A radically better everyday

Urban decarbonisation needs go hand in hand with creating the conditions for human thriving and new forms of economic value creation in our cities. The changes required can create a better everyday life in our cities as well as greater resilience amidst complex risks of our time. But the pathways to achieving this require unprecedented action across multiple levers of change and several domains of interventions. This requires a portfolio approach.

Systemic interventions

To grasp the opportunities, cities need portfolios of connected, systemic interventions: across deep district retrofitting, sustainable mobility, nature-based solutions and circular economies. A portfolio approach enables action at multiple levels, taking the steps required now to learn about what next actions are possible and needed within the decade ahead.

Finance and participation at the core

Seeing decarbonisation as a portfolio of connected interventions enables a deeper social contract with citizens; it enables a wider range of investors to participate; and it enables cities and their local partners to learn together about what works now and in the future, and how they need to change as organisations to be successful.

Tomorrow’s Cities Partnership brings together an approach that is rooted in our close collaboration with EIT Climate-KIC in its Deep Demonstration on Healthy Clean Cities. We have worked in 15 cities across Europe on an integrated portfolio approach, as well as collaborating globally with partners like UNDP, Viable Cities, and McConnell Foundation.

Supported by EIT Climate–KIC