The recently concluded H2020 project CURE prepared the ground for exploitation of Copernicus Core Services in urban planning. Achieving climate neutrality requires a city that has joint the EU Mission on “Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities” (the Cities Mission), to reduce the Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions from all sectors within the city’s boundary to net zero by 2030, including emissions within the city boundary, from: combustion of fossil fuels in buildings and facilities; combustion of fossil fuels for all vehicles and transport; and changes in land use (agriculture, forestry and other land uses). All the above are considered as Scope 1 GHG emissions (direct emissions) and the Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), based on the CURE method for CO2 emissions monitoring, holds promise in aiding cities to achieve the ambitious goals of the Mission, by assisting in monitoring the efficiency of efforts to trace the advancement towards climate neutrality. The proposed project CLMS-Cities (Copernicus responding to EU Cities Mission) aims to improve CLMS with new elements and products, capable of being integrated into land planning decisions with regard to climate change mitigation at local scale. CLMS-Cities will contribute to CLMS evolution, as it is expected to lead to more evidence-based urban planning activities related to climate change mitigation, resulting in improved GHG emissions inventory methods and outputs to support cities to meet the Mission’s ambitious objectives. It will focus on the ten cities of the Mission that were recently (2023) labelled, providing the Mission’s community with spatially disaggregated environmental intelligence at a local scale and a proof-of-concept that urban planning and management strategies enhancing the GHG inventories can be supported by CLMS. CLMS-Cities method will be modular and scalable, delivering consistent products across the cities of the Mission and developing synergies between CLMS and third-party data sources.

SmartEnCity’s main Objective is to develop a highly adaptable and replicable systemic approach towards urban transformation into sustainable, smart and resource-efficient urban environments in Europe through the integrated planning and implementation of measures aimed at improving energy efficiency in main consuming sectors in cities, while increasing their supply of renewable energy, and demonstrate its benefits. The underlying concept of the proposal is the Smart Zero Carbon City concept, where city carbon footprint and energy demand are kept to a minimum through the use of demand control technologies that save energy and promote raised awareness; energy supply is entirely renewable and clean; and local energy resources are intelligently managed by aware citizens, as well as coordinated public and private stakeholders. This approach will be firstly defined in detail, laid out and implemented in the three Lighthouse demonstrators (Vitoria-Gasteiz in Spain, Tartu in Estonia and Sonderborg in Denmark). The three cities will develop a number of coordinated actions aimed at: • Significant demand reduction of the existing residential building stock through cost-effective low energy retrofitting actions at district scale. • Increase in RES share of energy supply, through extensive leveraging of local potentials. • Enhance the use of clean energy in urban mobility, both for citizens and goods, by means of extensive deployment of green vehicles and infrastructure. An extensive use of ICTs is planned to achieve integration and consistency in demo planning and implementation, and to enable further benefits and secure involvement of citizens. These actions will be aligned to city-specific Integrated Urban Plans (IUPs), and the process will be replicated in two Follower cities: Lecce, (Italy), and Asenovgrad (Bulgaria) to ensure adaptability and maximize the project impact. Additionally, a Smart Cities Network will be setup to support project replication at European scale.