Decarbonising Europe: Navigating Heating and Cooling Transition Challenges in Seven Pioneering Cities

Over the past three decades, the role of cities in climate governance has gained significance, with urban climate policies attracting increased attention. While cities were initially seen as potential innovators capable of overcoming policy stalemates at the national level, this optimistic view is now contested. Nevertheless, cities are once again recognised for their crucial role in the decarbonisation of urban heating and cooling systems (H/C transition), a sector gaining prominence due to its pivotal role in achieving climate goals outlined in the Paris Agreement and the European Green Deal by 2050. The recent geopolitical energy crisis resulting from the Russian war against Ukraine has added pressure to decarbonise heating systems, necessitating the phase-out of Russian oil and gas. Approximately half of the European Union’s total gross final energy consumption is attributed to heating and cooling, with fossil fuels, particularly natural gas, dominating the energy supply. Renewable energies account for only about a fifth of this supply across EU Member States. In response to these challenges, the European Commission initiated a major revision of EU energy policy through the European Green Deal in 2019 and the Fit for 55 Package in 2021. Currently, the Directive on Energy Efficiency, revised in 2023, mandates the development of local heating and cooling plans for municipalities. However, the H/C sector was introduced relatively late in EU energy policies, and decarbonisation efforts in this sector were lagging behind. Several European cities, including Bilbao, Bratislava, Dublin, Munich, Rotterdam, Vienna, and Winterthur, have taken the initiative to plan for the H/C transition since 2019. These cities are among the pioneers in their respective countries, navigating the complexities of decarbonising heating and cooling systems. The H/C transition is characterised as an urgent infrastructural transformation, marked by complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Socio-technical systems are built for longevity as well as embedded in urban processes and specific spatiotemporal contexts that create regimes susceptible to technical, economic, political, and social path-dependencies. The H/C sector seen holistically as a socio-technical system comprises therefore various dimensions. While the literature on the H/C transition has primarily focused on economic and technical dimensions, the socio-political sphere has been overlooked. This study aims to fill this gap by mapping the emerging challenges for the seven cities in the H/C transition: Which challenges do cities face in governing the H/C transition? How do cities navigate challenges in governing an urgent infrastructural transformation? Through expert interviews, participant observation, and written feedback from key city administration representatives, the study identifies challenges in different dimensions of H/C regimes and explores how cities navigate them. The analysis emphasises the complexity of the H/C transition and contributes to the broader debate on the transformative role cities can play in urgent infrastructural transformations. First results show that the H/C transition creates trade-offs with broader sustainability goals in the technical dimension because of urgency, and reveals the impact of regulatory policy gaps at the regional and national level on urban governance that is coupled with infrastructural spatiality.