The city of Vienna and its wholly-owned energy provider are testing a range of participatory approaches to meet the city’s decarbonisation goals. From sustainable urban planning, through geothermal engineering to blockchain technology, Vienna is contributing new ideas and sustainable solutions for the city of tomorrow.
Rijeka is Croatia’s most important seaport, and, with a population of 128,000 people, the country’s third-largest city. The city’s economy is largely dependent on shipbuilding and logistics. Selected as the European capital of culture in 2020, Rijeka is working hard on an energy transition. In 2009, Rijeka became one of the first cities in Croatia to join the Covenant of Mayors and committed to reducing its carbon emissions by at least 20% by 2020. The city achieved a reduction in CO2 emissions of 38 kilotons, or around 10%.
Rijeka has seen the largest number of renovations of apartment buildings in Croatia: the programme is under way and at least 123 apartment buildings will be retrofitted, with the help of EU funds (60% grant rate). While there is an increase in energy consumption due to newly built facilities, there will be an overall reduction in CO2 emissions.
Nottingham is a historic English city in the East Midlands region with about 331,000 inhabitants and a wide range of sporting and cultural venues. The city and its Council have made headlines in recent years for leadership and innovation around the low-carbon and energy agendas.
Building on recent successes, the City Council declared a climate and ecological emergency, and set a nationally leading target to reach sustainable carbon neutrality by 2028, 22 years before the nation-wide goal.[1] To reach this ambitious target, the Council has been taking bold steps: it introduced a levy on workplace parking spaces to help fund the expansion of a low-carbon tram network, continues to engage citizens in a year of carbon neutral thinking and the ongoing development of their 2028 Carbon Neutral Action Plan, and is committed to planting 50,000 new trees.
The Croatian city of Križevci is becoming a national pioneer in the fight for clean energy and against energy poverty. Located not far from the capital Zagreb in central Croatia, the municipality is home to about 21,000 people, half of whom live in the city itself and half in the surrounding rural areas. Križevci is the first Croatian city to implement a crowdfunded renewable energy project, an endeavour that has made it a beacon in the country, with many others now looking at how to replicate the success story.
A growing number of electric cooperatives are caught between their members’ demands for more renewable energy and restrictive, long-term contracts with power providers that rely mostly on coal. Over the past few years, co-op directors, staff, and members in rural Colorado and New Mexico have pressed one major power provider, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, to replace its coal plants with clean energy, and allow co-ops to build more local renewable energy projects.