Europe’s urban areas face significant challenges to ensure the availability and consumption of healthy, affordable, safe and sustainably produced food. Such challenges converge within local food environments, but are often neglected by public planners. Promising initiatives taken by municipalities to change the architecture of food choice often fail to become embedded in the wider policy context and to reach deprived and vulnerable groups. Key factors responsible for this are: (1) siloed ways of working and (2) fragmentation of knowledge on facilitators and barriers related to food system transformation. These factors hinder the development and implementation of integrated urban food policies. FOODCLIC will create strong science-policy-practice interfaces across eight European city-regions (45 towns and cities). The backbone of such interfaces will be provided by Food Policy Networks, which will manage real-world experimental Living Labs to build a policy-relevant evidence-base through learning-in-action. Activities will be informed by an innovative conceptual framework (the CLIC), which emphasizes four desired outcomes of food system integration (sustainability co-benefits, spatial linkages, social inclusion and sectoral connectivities). Capacity-building and direct support for intensive multi-stakeholder engagement (including deprived and vulnerable groups) will enable policy actors and urban planners across partner city-regions to develop continuously evolving integrated urban food policies and render planning frameworks food-sensitive. Results will be communicated and disseminated amongst others by extending the novel policy practices to another eight city-regions in Europe and Africa, an online Knowledge-Hub, a high-level Think Tank and partners’ networks. In these ways, FOODCLIC aims to contribute to urban food environments that make healthy and sustainable food available, affordable and attractive to all citizens (including deprived and vulnerable groups).

The project SOLUTIONSplus aims to set up a global platform for shared, public and commercial e-mobility solutions, and to kick start the transition towards low-carbon urban mobility. The project work-plan encompasses city level demonstrations to test different types of innovative and integrated e-mobility solutions, vehicle and user-level demonstrations complemented by scaling up and replication activities. To appropriately address the call topic LC-GV-05-2019 and maximise its impact, SOLUTIONSplus brings together highly committed cities, industry, research, implementing organisations and finance partners. Through numerous synergistic projects, networks and a strong technical experience, the SOLUTIONSplus consortium will be able to deliver a highly ambitious project. Direct co-funding contributions will be provided by partner cities and SOLUTIONSplus works closely with UN Environment and the International Energy Agency (IEA) on a joint global urban e-mobility programme that will significantly boost replication and impact of this Innovation Action. Through the regional platforms, a global programme and local teams, the project aims to develop highly effective and innovative approaches to urban e-mobility ensuring that mobility systems and interventions from this project deliver on the Paris Agreement, meet the Sustainable Development Goals and address the New Urban Agenda. The Urban Electric Mobility Initiative (UEMI, launched by UN-Habitat) is the project coordinator, collaborating closely with the MobiliseYourCity and Decarbonising Transport partnerships. The consortium has developed a collaboration with a partner programme led by the IEA and UNEP funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which will turn the overall partnership into the leading global platform on urban electric mobility.

SESA will facilitate a structured co-development process, which starts with the co-development of energy access innovations that have a high potential for take-up and are tested, validated and later replicated. Each technology will be demonstrated in the living lab, and a corresponding information and training package is created. Each of the living lab team will consist of technology experts, local implementation partners (members of the consortium) along with local authorities (associated partners) and innovators (recruited through the seed-funding call), guided by business development, finance and policy experts. Demonstration actions will aim to test innovative technologies and services in different contexts that have a high level of replicability and a high potential for long-term sustainability. The project aims to achieve a high level of replicability of actions. As part of an effort to go beyond the state of the art and maximise the project?s impact, the project will co-develop innovations with local partners and cooperate closely with sister projects to exploit synergies. Solutions that will be tested in this project have been selected on their basis of their replication potential. Demonstration concepts aim to integrate several solutions to provide essential energy services to rural and urban communities and create easily replicable business opportunities for local entrepreneurs. The co-developed demonstration actions will be initially tested in the Kenya living lab and based on the initial learnings, various aspects of the tested innovations will be validated in living labs in different socio-economic operating environments (Ghana, South Africa, Malawi and Morocco). The learning from the validation living labs will strengthen the applicability and replicability of the technologies as well as the basic business concepts, which will be shared in the SESA toolbox and incubator programme.

The ambition of the Global Knowledge Exchange Centre (GKEC) for Urban Climate Neutrality is to mainstream actions towards climate neutral and net-zero urban developments on a global level. In this sense, the GKEC will provide support in terms of global outreach for the European Cities Mission as well as contribute to the Urban Transition Mission of Mission Innovation. It will provide effective support and knowledge for local governments and international stakeholders and through this, support European policy such as the European Green Deal and work towards the international commitments of the Paris Agreement. The GKEC will make available evidence and good practice for urban climate neutral and net-zero transitions globally and facilitate capacity building, knowledge exchange and moderated learning for municipalities and key stakeholders. In operational terms, the GKEC will set up actions according to the three impact pathways: 1.Mainstream knowledge and good practice to accelerate urban transitions: The mission platform will be extended towards global use, making available international solutions and good practices and promote financing and funding opportunities to implement integrated urban climate action and net-zero pathways. 2.Offer advanced frameworks and moderated learning across all governance levels to raise awareness of and capacities for CN and NZ policies: Policy advocacy for climate neutral and net-zero approaches will allow aligning of global policies. Capacity building measures for local and regional actors will provide guidelines and support mutual learning to drive systemic change. 3.Establish the GKEC as a forum for international exchange and cooperation on climate neutral and net-zero transitions: Global and regional events accompanied by comprehensive dissemination measures will raise visibility of EU and international good practice and strengthen international cooperation on climate neutrality and net-zero pathways.

RethinkAction puts citizens and decision-makers at the core of the climate change action, by developing a cross-sectoral user-friendly decision-making platform tailored to the needs of different end-users for delivering clear and valuable information on climate change, increasing awareness and attractiveness of mitigation and adaptation solutions centred on land use as a key driver, even critical, to sustain life and to reach objectives in the context of climate change. RethinkAction moves beyond just informing them about the desirable future and what needs to be changed, but guiding them in the decision-making process by showing how to do it through practical land-use based solutions, while at the same time building awareness and attractiveness of new lifestyles and behavioural change, and how barriers can be overcome. By co-creating of the solutions through participatory processes, RethinkAction will unquestionably promote climate change action and acceptability of the measures. RethinkAction platform will allow users to assess land use-based adaptation and mitigation solutions, understand climate change impacts over time, linking local, EU and global scales based on 6 representative case studies, covering the main regional differences related to climate change.