The Climate Smart Cities Challenge is making an open call to city governments and agencies around the world to join an open competition that aims to stimulate and scale innovative ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in cities while creating other social benefits.

The Climate Smart Cities Challenge seeks to help cities address emissions as a strategy to overcome interconnected sustainability challenges stemming from rising inequalities including a lack of affordable housing and transport options, food and energy insecurity and other problems exacerbated by the climate crisis. Potential solutions will reach across sectors and could address everything from how neighborhoods, schools and offices are designed in a post-Covid world to how people travel, what their green spaces look like and how their buildings are heated and cooled.

The open call invites city governments and agencies to identify shared issues experienced by cities around the world. It asks cities and key stakeholders to highlight the significant problems they face and are struggling to overcome, to develop solutions that transform the way cities grow, develop, change and respond to human and environmental needs in the coming decades.

They are looking for cities to partner with them to run city-based open innovation competitions. These competitions will help the selected cities reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create other social benefits, by matching their needs with partners from across the world to develop and scale solutions suitable to their context. 

The Climate Smart Cities Challenge is an opportunity for cities to participate as implementation partners in a city-based open innovation competition that will invite a global pool of technologists, businesses and investors to develop, test and scale cutting-edge solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and create a better future for all. 

Why Cities should enter?

If your city is selected as a partner, you will get:

• The opportunity to co-design an open innovation competition based in your city around your specific problem, supported by a team of experts in innovation, challenge prizes, climate change, cities and sustainable development from UN-Habitat, Viable Cities and Nesta Challenges
• A pool of solution-providers competing to solve your challenges
• Access to potential investors and partners to implement projects in your city
• Peer learning opportunities with other cities facing similar challenges
• Profile-raising opportunity of being part of a global challenge, including being featured in the World Expo in 2021 and being profiled in a major media campaign over the course of the challenge

Eligibility Criteria

• Applicants can be a single entity or a partnership, but there must be one lead applicant organization.
• The lead applicant may be city/municipal government or equivalent, or a private-sector agency or a public-private partnership with responsibility for public services. If the city is not the lead application, the relevant city/municipal government or equivalent must be a partner on the application.
• A ‘city’ can be a settled place of any size population (there is no minimum population size), which may include a multi-city region or metropolitan area comprising more than one contiguous municipality or local authority or equivalent.
• Your proposal must include a problem/challenge/barrier in reducing or eliminating greenhouse gas emissions in your city and creating other social benefits.

For more information, visit UN Habitat.