Creating a community-inspired roadmap to climate neutrality
The EU-funded NEUTRALPATH(opens in new window) project is forming community labs in five European cities to empower local voices to drive climate change. These citizen-driven labs are helping to transform climate goals into actions that can expedite the path to climate neutrality. NEUTRALPATH presented its model for these climate-neutral labs at the Sustainable Places 2025 conference held in Milan, Italy, in October 2025. The aim is for communities in each of the five cities – two lighthouse cities, Dresden (Germany) and Zaragoza (Spain), and fellow cities Ghent (Belgium), Vantaa (Finland) and Istanbul (Turkey) – to work together on localised strategies that can effect actual change.
The power of citizen engagement
“The core idea is about engaging citizens, NGOs, public authorities, industry and academia from the start: defining vision, governance and action plans together results in solutions that are more likely to be accepted,” reports Federico La Torre, Communication and Dissemination Officer at Italian project partner ICONS, in his article(opens in new window) posted on the ‘Enlit’ website. Interactive tools used to engage tenants, homeowners and vulnerable groups and bring to light their real needs include board games, digital totems and world cafés (structured conversations on a particular topic held at several small tables). “The power of local engagement is well exampled by the Zaragoza open day,” writes La Torre. This event held earlier in the year at the Spanish city – one of NEUTRALPATH’s two lighthouse cities along with Dresden – attracted over 150 participants committed to creating more liveable urban environments. In Dresden, an Innovation Challenge held in September provided the opportunity for people from different professional backgrounds to work together in mixed teams in order to find creative solutions to current climate and energy issues. Through innovative collaboration, the teams developed prototypes for an immersive experience space in Dresden. These included an energy usage monitoring unit with a traffic light display, an illuminated stepping field, and a bicycle-powered generator to make energy consumption visible and interactive for residents. The plan is to replicate and upscale the strategies and best practices developed, so that more cities across Europe can adopt a lab-based approach and build positive and clean energy districts as a means towards accelerating the net-zero transition. “When citizens are empowered and governance is truly collaborative, cities can move from strategy to action, creating lasting benefits for communities across Europe,” explains La Torre. In November 2025, NEUTRALPATH was featured in an ‘Icons Innovation Stories’ podcast. Titled ‘NEUTRALPATH – The road to climate neutrality: reshaping urban mobility’(opens in new window), the podcast focused on how some European cities are tackling congestion, emissions and other mobility challenges. Invited speakers discussed how local authorities are testing new technologies, while also dealing with driver shortages, tight budgets and complex regulations. The NEUTRALPATH (Pathway towards Climate-Neutrality through low risky and fully replicable Positive Clean Energy Districts) project ends in December 2027. For more information, please see: NEUTRALPATH project website(opens in new window)
