Markku Markkula is Vice-President of the European Committee of the Regions (CoR), having previously served as its President from 2015 to 2017. Within the EU policy sphere, he acts as rapporteur on innovation, digitalisation, research, industry policy, start-ups, SDGs and climate, and he recently led work on EU Missions, the New European Innovation Agenda and future climate policy.
As Markkula tells SustainabilityOnline, Europe will be unable to meet its climate targets without enabling its most advanced cities – particularly those that have received the EU Mission Label for Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities – to drive meaningful transformation.
Empowering Mission Label cities
“Europe’s climate success now depends on systemic transformation led locally – 70% of mitigation and 90% of adaptation actions happen locally,” he says.
“To hit the 2030–2050 targets, we must fully empower Mission Label cities as co-orchestrators with industry. Working through Local Green Deals – with support from the Committee of the Regions – they can mobilise universities, VET providers, utilities, citizens, and financiers in one coherent delivery system.”
As he explains, Mission Label cities can act as platforms for multi-actor collaboration, and bridge the gap between technological readiness and commercial viability. Europe needs to step up its efforts to equip pioneering cities with the ability to deliver moonshot-standard climate and competitiveness outcomes.
“The ambition is sufficient; the operating system is not capable to answer the question ‘how’,” he says. “Fragmentation across EU, national, and regional levels keeps mandates, budgets, and data in silos, so cities struggle to align power, heat, mobility, land-use, and skills. Permitting and grid/heat readiness are unpredictable – investors value certainty more than subsidies, yet time-to-permit and time-to-connect are still volatile. The technology readiness index shows the huge TRL-to-market gap.”
Markkula adds that Europe currently lacks the shared technology infrastructures and simple participation rules to advance promising pilots to first commercial orders; in addition, finance stacking tends to be ad-hoc, rather than appearing as a single package.
“Local Green Deals (LGDs), backed by the CoR, are the delivery frame that lets cities convene industry and universities as co-orchestrators and break these bottlenecks,” he says.
Climate City Contracts
Climate City Contracts (CCCs), collaborative agreements under which cities create a roadmap toward becoming climate-neutral, should be structured to make them more attractive to potential investors, he adds.
“First, organise the contract as mission portfolios – clean heat, flexible grids, circular construction, heavy e-mobility – with clear milestones, KPIs, and risk-sharing,” says Markkula. “Second, embed a standard finance stack – municipal capex/opex, cohesion funds, InvestEU/EIB guarantees, and private equity/debt – so projects can move to final investment decisions. Third, co-create and commit on a predictability package: pre-zoned sites, one-door permitting SLAs, grid/heat connection timelines, and open access to testbeds and data spaces.
“Pair this with visible household benefits – lower bills, cleaner air – and CCCs become both bankable and legitimate.”
‘The missing middle layer’
Cross-platform collaboration in Mission-Label cities can be accelerated through Local Green Deals and industry-led ‘Springboards’, focused hubs where anchor firms, SMEs, utilities, universities, and cities can coordinate before specific products are defined.
“Think of a Springboard as the missing middle layer between the EU Missions and company offerings – it’s an industry-led, technology-assisted capability-building community that turns public purpose and private advantage into bankable portfolios,” says Markkula. “Springboards compress the time from pilot to first commercial orders and speak the investor’s language.”
An example of this is a private data centre building and heat recovery programme in Espoo, Finland – Markkula was chair of Espoo city board when the plans were adopted – where the “city, utility, and hyperscaler planned as one portfolio, so waste heat will cover roughly 40% of the whole city’s building heating – scalable impact, not isolated pilots,” he adds.
Financing can often be a bottleneck to the development of such platforms. Cities can integrate municipal capital EU instruments, and private capital by embedding finance into Climate City Contracts or LGDs, says Markkula.
Each mission track should define public anchors (municipal budgets and national co-funding), EU windows (cohesion funds, InvestEU/EIB guarantees, Horizon-linked pilots), and private layers (equity, project finance, green bonds), while efforts can be accelerated by adding standard risk-sharing templates (off-take, performance, availability) and SME-friendly access to shared technology infrastructures.
Cities should also “publish a quarterly pipeline dashboard with time-to-permit and grid/heat readiness,” says Markkula. “Transparency lowers the cost of capital and speeds final investment decisions.”
Tangible benefts
City leaders should also connect systemic climate actions to tangible, local benefits that households can experience on a personal level.
“Make benefits local, visible, and fast,” he adds. “Tie each mission to household value: retrofits and waste-heat recovery that cut bills; electric logistics that quiet streets and clean the air; nature-positive design that cools neighbourhoods.”
Engagement through citizen panels, open dashboards displaying before-and-after indicators, and procurement directed to local SMEs with associated training pathways further ensures visibility and inclusion.
“Heartprint builds trust; trust accelerates permits; faster permits unlock investment,” Markkula adds.
Moonshot-level ambition
Empowering Mission-Label cities to ‘moonshot level’ requires the creation of a structure that provides financing for breakthrough activities, fast-track permitting pilots, flexible state-aid interpretations, and rapid co-financing for CCC or LGD pipelines that meet de-risking criteria – a ‘Mission Cities Delivery Pact’ – as Markkula describes it.
In addition, the CoR’s Green Deal Going Local working group should take a delivery role, co-creating a Benchlearning Alliance to enhance collaboration, while city-run Springboards should be recognised as demonstrators of technology infrastructure.
“Give the best-prepared cities legal and financial fast lanes, and they will turn labels into moonshots that scale across the Union,” says Markkula. “This is how Mission-Labels become moonshots; how CCCs become contracts for competitiveness; and how citizens experience the European Green Deal as prosperity and possibility, not just obligation.
“We need political entrepreneurship – it really matters. Political entrepreneurs treat societal challenges as innovation fuel, convene the quadruple helix, and turn local insights into priority investments. In other words, they use global knowledge and de-risk uncertainty by building coalitions and aligning rules, data, and finance around shared missions.”
About The Author
Markku Markkula is Vice-President of the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) and served as its President from 2015 to 2017. He is a longstanding member of the Espoo City Council, where he has held several leadership positions, including Chair of the City Council, Chair of the City Board, and Chair of Espoo’s Urban Planning Board.
Learn more about the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) at cor.europa.eu/en.
