The Urban Transitions Mission launches its City2City Programme to scale real-world climate solutions

The City2City Programme of the Urban Transitions Mission (UTM) is a new global twinning initiative. It connects cities in dynamic peer learning to co-create practical solutions for net-zero, resilient and people-centred urban futures.

Following a call for expression of interest that closed on 7 September 2025, 28 cities were selected from the growing UTM city cohort and from among cities looking to join the cohort. The selected cities will exchange with their peers in 11 groupings of up to 3 cities on selected priority topics of mutual interest, as follows:

• Ablekuma (Ghana) - Belo Horizonte (Brazil) - Salvador (Chile)
• Cuenca (Spain) - Mendoza (Argentina)
• Darkhan (Mongolia) - Istanbul (Türkiye) - Valencia (Spain)
• Braga (Portugal) - Tegucigalpa (Honduras)
• Guimarães (Portugal) - Renca (Chile)
• Miami-Dade (United States) - Porto Alegre (Brazil)
• Bandirma (Türkiye) - Cascais (Portugal)
• Barranquilla (Colombia) - Córdoba (Spain) - Quelimane (Mozambique)
• Kisumu (Kenya) - Sakarya (Türkiye) - Surat (India)
• Çorlu (Chile) - Sekondi (Ghana) - Zhytomyr (Ukraine)
• Baguio (The Philippines) - Chefchaouen (Morocco) - Leh (India)

With funding from the European Commission, the new twinning programme aims to improve cities' capacity to design, implement and manage sustainable and innovative urban practices in integrated and participative ways. The programme should help cities identify and scale new joint pilot actions, with support from the UTM Global Innovation Alliance. It should also help identify viable and bankable projects that the city could implement in the short-medium term through fostering cooperation with key city partners (public and private).

Experienced facilitators from the UTM team will coordinate each twinning and organise the City2City group sessions and study visits. This approach builds on the experiences and lessons learned from European projects and initiatives such as World Cities, URBACTthe International Urban and Regional Cooperation (IURC) programme, and the NetZeroCities Twinning Learning Programmeof EU Cities Mission Platform.

The announcement of the City2City Programme was made at the UTM Global Innovation Summit in Rio de Janeiro on 6 November 2025, held on the theme of Unlocking investment for cities: blended finance for urban transitions. The summit was co-hosted by the European Commission, the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy (GCoM). the Prefecture of Rio and Brazil's Empresa de Pesquisa Energética (EPE), in collaboration with Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) and the Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) European Partnership.

At the summit in Rio, it was confirmed that a second call for expression of interest under the UTM City2City programme is now open until 8 January 2026, with the aim to expand the membership of the programme to up to 50 cities.

Background

The Urban Transitions Mission (UTM) is one of the seven missionsof Mission Innovation, a global initiative that champions action and investment in research, development and demonstration to make clean energy affordable, attractive and accessible for all, thus accelerating progress towards the Paris Agreement goals and pathways to net zero. 'Missions' are public-private innovation alliances that catalyse global action behind ambitious and inspirational innovation goals.

The UTM was launched at COP26 in Glasgow by its co-leads: the European Commission (DG Research & Innovation), the Global Covenant of Mayors and the Joint Partnership Initiative (JPI) Urban Europe. The global mission builds on the European Mission on 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities and receives support from the Urban Transitions Mission Centre, a hub for global knowledge exchange on cities and climate launched in December 2022 with EUR 2 million in EU funding under Horizon Europe.

The Urban Transitions Mission also relies on expertise and support from its Global Innovation Alliance. In addition to the co-leads, the growing alliance includes Austria, Brazil, India, Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Sweden, the UK and the MI Innovation Community on Affordable Heating and Cooling of Buildings as core members. The UNFCCC Global Innovation Hub, IEA, IRENA, ICLEI, EIT Climate-KIC, ENoLL, the Doughnut Economics Action Lab, GeSI and Student Energy participate in a supporting role. The alliance also includes private sector partners such as Signify, T-Systems and Google.

The UTM city cohortnow includes 118 cities from 48 countries, and it is set to grow to 300 cities by 2030. Based on the targets they have set compared to a business-as-usual scenario, the UTM cities could collectively reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by more than 280 MtCO2e annually by 2030 and by more than 500 MtCO2e annually by 2050. This is roughly equivalent to the carbon footprint of 1.1 million round-trip economy class flights between Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Mumbai, India.