The Vienna Climate Package – Foundation for the Climate Model City Vienna
From strategy to implementation
The Smart Climate City Strategy is the long-term umbrella strategy for the city’s climate package. It sets concrete goals and broad fields of action to achieve climate neutrality in 2040.
The Vienna Climate Guide points the way to achieving goals in the areas of climate protection and climate adaptation. It specifies the priority instruments and the most important measures on an operational level, whereby these can be continuously supplemented or adapted. With the resulting collection of measures, the Vienna Climate Guide also represents a link between the city’s Smart City and climate goals and the future Vienna Climate Budget.
The Vienna Climate Budget will be used to decide each year on the financing of climate-relevant measures. The potential measures will be subjected to a quality criteria check in order to select the most effective implementations from different aspects at the respective point in time. In addition, the Vienna Climate Check is intended to evaluate larger projects such as construction projects at an early stage on the basis of their climate impact.
The role of the Smart Climate City Strategy in the Vienna Climate Package
The Vienna Climate Protection Act, which is currently being drafted, is intended to anchor climate-relevant objectives and targets, definitions, instruments and governance structures at a legislative level.
Everyone is involved – climate governance with the participation of society and science
While the overarching Smart Climate City Strategy Vienna sets the goals, the Vienna Climate Guide describes the path, and the Climate Budget ensures the corresponding financing, this implementation needs corresponding control and governance. This consists not only of the city administration itself, where a new unit at the administrative level has been created with the Director‘s Office for Climate Affairs but also of an advisory body from science and society: the Vienna Climate Council (German only).
The Vienna Climate Council was established in 2019 to advise politicians and administrators of the City of Vienna on the development of climate policy projects. The Vienna Climate Council is composed of more than 40 members in 3 boards, which work together in different constellations. The core consists of an independent group of domestic and foreign high-ranking experts from science and research (Advisory Board Science). They develop their recommendations together with key persons from Vienna’s administration, city-related companies and members of the coalition parties (Sounding Board City of Vienna). They also consult with representatives of business, civil society, interest groups and opposition parties (Sounding Board Society) on necessary measures, projects and partnerships for the implementation of climate policy activities in the city’s sphere of influence.
Participation at implementation level
However, civil society is not only involved at the level of the Climate Council, the Vienna Climate Teams (German only) offer the population an opportunity to participate. Viennese citizens are invited to contribute project ideas for climate protection and climate adaptation. Particularly promising proposals are elaborated together with experts of the City of Vienna. A representative jury of citizens will select the winning projects, which will be implemented by the responsible departments within two years.