The governance of urban heating and cooling decarbonization

Strategies, obstacles and innovations

To meet the EU’s goal of becoming climate neutral by 2050, the urban heating and cooling (HC) sector needs to dramatically reduce its energy consumption and cut use of fossil fuels. This presents a profound urban governance challenge for urban policy-makers and planners, who must navigate: variable procedural frameworks, different technical options, existing heterogeneous infrastructures, fragmented markets, and the sometimes conflicting needs of different stakeholders.

The complexity of this decarbonization challenge has been recognized by the EU Horizon 2020 funded project ‘DECARB City Pipes 2050’ (DECARB), of which Utrecht University (UU) is a funded partner. This Transforming Cities Hub seed funding project provides an opportunity to adapt and expand this research in the post Covid-19 academic context.

DECARB involves seven participating European cities. The project aims to analyze and inform cities’ governance capacity to develop timely, sustainable and equitable HC decarbonization strategies, through the production of local ‘Transition Roadmaps’, experimentation, change-management workshops, and peer-to-peer exchange.

Within the DECARB project, UU is investigating the distributed, and often contested, governance capacity for zero-carbon urban HC transformations in European cities.

The seed funding award enables this research to go beyond the original scope of UU’s involvement on the DECARB project in two ways. First, it allows for in-depth qualitative research to inform production of comparative ‘City Reports’ that will assess the socio-technical constellations and governance arrangements required for timely urban HC decarbonisation.

Second, it enables development of additional policy/practice-focused deliverables: i) a comparative policy/practice report that summarizes comparative findings across the participating European cities, and ii) a policy-brief for Dutch urban decision-makers which summarizes key learnings on the governance of urban H/C decarbonization. All deliverables will be designed, made publicly available and circulated through  European city networks via Energy Cities - a network of over 1000 local governments.

Back to Transforming Cities