CapaCITIES at the 10th European Conference on Sustainable Cities and Towns
The European movement of local governments dedicated to ambitious climate action has celebrated 30 years of progress and achievements in local sustainability at the 10th European Conference on Sustainable Cities and Towns (ESCT) in Aalborg, Denmark. Since the first ESCT was held in Aalborg in 1994, the conference series has led to remarkable landmarks in local sustainable development, including the groundbreaking Aalborg Charter (1994), Aalborg Commitments (2004), Basque Declaration (2016), Mannheim Message (2020), and finally Aalborg Conditions (2024). The CapaCITIES project directly contributes to the implementation of the Aalborg Conditions, which emphasize the relevance of shared governance and close collaboration between the national, regional and local governments on climate action.
CapaCITIES partners participated in the workshop “Local, regional and national governments together for climate neutral and resilient cities”, during which we talked about different innovative governance models such as Viable Cities in Sweden, CitiES2030 in Spain, M100 HUB in Romania and Climate Alliance in Denmark. These initiatives – to which we often refer as national platforms – aim at delivering tangible support to cities with climate neutrality ambition and fostering multi-level and multi-stakeholder collaboration for climate action at the local level.
The key takeaways for the future work are that we need to make a strong case for innovative governance initiatives and prove their added value. We also have to find an effective way to involve national authorities in innovative governance initiatives for climate neutral cities. Last but not least, we need to ensure that such initiatives can operate long term with sufficient resources.
The session featured such prominent guests as:
Katrin Stjernfeldt Jammeh, Mayor of Malmö, Sweden
Aitor Zulueta, Vitoria-Gasteiz City Council, Spain
Ovidiu Cimpean, State Secretary in the Ministry of Investments and European Projects, Romania
Philippe Froissard, Head of Unit at DG RTD
Tue Damsø, Project coordinator at the Climate Alliance, Concito, Denmark