NetZeroCities ECT2: Enabling City Transformation 2

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Cascade funding open call run by the Horizon Europe project SGA3-NZC — Specific Grant Agreement n°3 to the FPA to reinforce the operations of the Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities Mission Platform. ECT2 will expand the existing portfolio of whole-city transformation activities and interventions by focusing on implementation barriers shared by cities across the Mission. The core shift introduced in this call is a move away from broad, domain-based support towards a more focused model that organises action around clearly defined systemic barriers and bottlenecks. To this end, ECT2 is organised around six challenge areas which represent critical city-wide implementation barriers that currently prevent cities from translating Climate City Contract ambitions into replicable and scalable outcomes. The challenge areas are: Place-based heating and cooling Nature Based Solutions at city scale Urban energy systems City finance innovation for climate neutrality Large-scale building retrofits and renovations Decarbonising urban mobility and logistics All applicants must: Choose the challenge area that resonates most and anchor the rationale for intervention within this area. Within their chosen challenge area, formulate an adequate context-specific impact pathway following the impact framework. While the impact pathway describes how the proposed intervention is expected to create change, the Impact Framework provides the progression from problem to impact and the structure for how that change will be monitored, evidenced and reported. Across all challenge areas, ECT2 aims to enable cities to move from constrained implementation to durable, city-wide transformation by combining activities which remove diagnosed systemic blockers and accelerate progress to climate neutrality. To this end, the programme aims to ensure that Mission Cities can: Deploy and scale climate‑neutral solutions by addressing institutional, policy, financial, governance, market or social bottlenecks that limit uptake or speed. Translate research, innovation and evidence into operational policy and delivery systems, ensuring that scientific and technical knowledge is effectively embedded into city decision‑making. Strengthen city capacities and capabilities so that climate‑neutral delivery becomes business‑as‑usual, independent of individual champions or one‑off projects. Cover a broad range of levers for change (policy, green technology, finance, governance, behavioural change, social innovation, multi-actor collaboration, procurement, new business models as circular economy, etc.) Enable collaborative governance and citizen engagement models that support systemic, cross‑sectoral climate action and deliver just transition outcomes. The selection of proposals will result in multiple implementation-enabling innovations focussing on resolving key implementation challenges. Interventions will work individually and in combinations/clusters to generate resolutions for shared barriers.…