As cities across Europe work towards climate neutrality, the question of how climate transitions are happening has become as important as what is happening. Two recent NetZeroCities webinars have explored how just transition principles are being applied in practice. The first webinar, as part of NetZeroCities Communities of Practice, focused on action in the built environment from a neighbourhood, city and industry-led lens. The second, as part of the Online Planning Lab for Mission-minded cities, was centred on how Valencia and Stockholm embedded equity and social justice into municipal operations. Together, the sessions highlighted the complexity, realities, and promise of delivering climate action that is effective and fair.
Webinar 1: Orchestrating the Just Transition in the Built Environment
The Community of Practice webinar brought together city authorities, community organisations and private-sector actors to explore how justice can be operationalised in the built environment—one of the largest sources of urban emissions and a major driver of social inequality.
The session opened with a framing from NetZeroCities partners on just transition as more than harm mitigation. Speakers stressed the need to recognise historical inequalities, ensure participation, distribute benefits fairly, and build long-term adaptive capacity within communities.
Examples from Madrid illustrated how justice can be delivered at neighbourhood scale. The cooperative group Tangente presented its Transition Blocks initiative in a low-income area, where a Fair Transition Office embedded in a neighbourhood association supports residents with energy renovation, collective solar projects, and community activities. Demonstrator blocks, thermographic walks, and school-based climate adaptation projects showed how technical measures can also rebuild trust, social ties, and collective agency.
From the private sector, Morgan Sindall Construction shared how a large construction company is responding to the just transition challenge. Recognising that much of the workforce affected by decarbonisation sits within construction and its supply chains, the company created a Just Transition Fund to address skills, ethical procurement, and place-based inequality. By convening public authorities, NGOs, and investors in long-term local partnerships, Morgan Sindall demonstrated how companies can act as orchestrators—not just contractors—of equitable transition.
The city perspective was represented by Barcelona, which showcased how justice is being embedded into urban transformation at scale. Through measures such as climate shelters for heat-vulnerable residents, superblocks prioritising care and pedestrians, greening of residual urban spaces, and large-scale affordable housing retrofits, Barcelona is aligning climate adaptation and mitigation with social inclusion. Crucially, the city emphasised neighbourhood-level planning and cross-departmental coordination to avoid green gentrification and ensure benefits reach those most exposed to climate risks.
Webinar 2: Embedding Just Transition into Municipal Operations – Valencia and Stockholm
The Online Planning Lab session on Just Transition focused more deeply on how justice becomes institutionalised inside municipal systems, through an exchange between Valencia and Stockholm.
In Valencia, Dr Victoria Pellicer presented a justice-led energy transition centred on vulnerable households. The city’s Energy Offices provide direct support to residents facing energy poverty, while innovative use of public buildings ensures that renewable energy investments deliver social returns. Solar installations on sites such as a municipal cemetery and port buildings generate clean energy that is shared with hundreds of low-income households via energy communities. Valencia also links justice to employment through a program which trains socially excluded residents as energy agents working in the Energy Offices.
Stockholm’s Björn Hugosson described a different but complementary approach, focused on governance, planning rules and long-term policy frameworks. In large redevelopment projects such as the Royal Seaport, the city applied equity principles from the very beginning of the planning process, combining strong public land ownership with early and meaningful participation—including walk-throughs with residents and children. This approach enabled Stockholm to achieve a successful outcome of 52% rental housing, demonstrating how social objectives can be embedded into major urban developments while still engaging private developers. Stockholm is also integrating justice into its climate governance through a carbon budget that accounts for consumption-based emissions—an approach that raises difficult political questions, particularly because higher-income groups tend to contribute the most to emissions.
Both cities discussed the challenges of just transition: internal coordination across departments, resistance to redistributive policies, and differing public perceptions of fairness—such as tensions around energy prices, mobility restrictions, or low-emission zones.
Key Takeaways for Cities
Across both webinars, several shared lessons emerged:
- Just transition is operational, not abstract: it can be delivered through buildings, land, budgets, procurement, and everyday municipal services.
- Public assets are powerful levers: cities can use land, buildings and planning powers to redistribute benefits and protect vulnerable groups.
- Participation must start early: involving communities from the outset builds legitimacy and better outcomes.
Cross-sector collaboration is essential: cities, communities and companies each control different pieces of the transition puzzle. - Justice takes time, capacity and political courage: but framing climate action around wellbeing, affordability and care helps build support.
Together, these discussions demonstrate that applying a just transition lens is not an optional addition to climate policy but rather an integral way to reshaping how cities plan, govern and invest - ensuring that the path to climate neutrality strengthens social cohesion rather than undermining it.