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Developing Europe’s most advanced climate roadmap, with the city of Malmö

Manon Morel Mon, 16 May 2022

ClimateView is delighted to partner with Malmö – Sweden’s third largest city – to help create the most advanced and most evidence-based climate roadmap to date, with the aim of providing a blueprint for other cities globally to accelerate climate action.  

 

Cities today are tasked with the difficult mission to create concrete, credible and ambitious climate plans to contribute to the Paris Agreement. 

These concrete and verifiable plans are hard to come by. Cities lack the guidance to deal with the enormous challenge of transitioning their entire city economy to a low-carbon economy, while maintaining sustainable growth and improving quality of life. 

 

What do climate action plans look like today? 

First, it’s worth noting that while many cities have pledged to make a dent in emissions, many do not yet have climate action plans. 

And even among those that do have climate action plans, there is usually a lack of specificity and substance. Plans have a tendency to either include few actions, or many ‘fluffy’ actions, whose impact cannot be quantified. Cities run short of the decision-making intelligence they need to concretely link an action back to a target and to the actual emissions reduction it will generate. This in turn does not provide the confidence that investors and other city stakeholders need to get involved and see projects through to completion. And that is the case for even the most progressive cities and is precisely why climate action fails to materialize. 

 

What does the ideal climate roadmap look like? 

The ultimate climate roadmap is the most precise, evidence-based and actionable of its kind. 

This is essential because if you cannot see, understand and communicate the full impacts (financial and social) of your climate action plan, then it becomes very difficult to gain broad support, to attract finance and to ensure that you’re making the right investment decisions. 

Building a climate action plan is not about the quantity of actions but about the quality of the reasoning of the planned actions and policies. This is what aligns stakeholders and makes investing in projects easier.

 

How will Europe’s most advanced climate roadmap be built? 

In January 2022, ClimateView initiated a two-year collaboration with the city of Malmö, a city that has been very progressive and cutting edge in climate action planning for some time. 

The city of Malmö already possesses lots of data, analysis, a strong team and experience. Yet, the complexity of the challenge requires new tools and processes to help them bring together all the puzzle pieces and people, to accelerate the pace of change.

Malmö’s climate roadmap – Europe’s most advanced – will be the result of developing, together with ClimateView, fully documented best practices and technology-supported organizational processes for city climate action planning, with the aim of accelerating the pace of change. It will also be about developing new ways of introducing data on the economic and social effects of emission reductions in climate action plans. 

As Jonas Kamleh, senior strategist at the environmental administration in Malmö city puts it, “We are convinced that smart digital solutions create new conditions for working on Malmö's climate transition. We get increased transparency and efficiency in climate planning and this creates new opportunities to include the societal effects of climate work. We work hard to accelerate the transition in Malmö, and now we are also putting our learnings in a scalable platform to help accelerate climate action in cities across Sweden and Europe.”

In Malmö and globally, it is important that climate change should also lead to societal benefits. It can be about a better living environment for children and young people, more jobs and strengthening the competitiveness of business and industry.

It is only by demonstrating the full economic and social effects of various climate decisions that cities will gain broad support, attract funding and ensure a fair transition.

Discussing the collaborative project, Tomer Shalit said, “Malmö strives to be more than just a positive example or case study, but wants to contribute to best practice by actively working to develop the ClimateOS platform and organizational processes that belong to it. The investment will not only result in Europe's most comprehensive climate action plans for Malmö, but will give other cities better tools to do the same. Together with Malmö, we will help Europe's cities to achieve the ambitious goals in the Paris Agreement.”