What is the Climate Smart Cities Challenge?

The Climate Smart Cities Challenge harnesses the creativity and energy of innovators to work with cities to help achieve global net zero pollution, creating a better future for everyone.

Launched by the UN and Sweden, this innovation competition will accelerate the shift to climate neutral cities, by empowering innovators and communities to collaborate in designing and demonstrating solutions and reinventing how cities innovate.

Our ambition is to mobilize over $300 million in smart climate investments for real change for cities. Over the last year, UN-Habitat, the UN agency for cities; and Viable Cities, the Swedish national city innovation programme, have established a strong partnership of more than 15 public and private organizations working closely with the cities of Bogotáa, Bristol, Curitiba and Makindye Ssabagabo.

In this phase of the initiative, we are inviting teams of innovators – startups, SMEs and other organizations – with climate smart solutions to join our diverse consortium. We will build a portfolio of connected innovations, targeting different aspects of the cities’ climate and sustainability challenges with the purpose of achieving multiple, large-scale and transformative outcomes that help cities become climate neutral while improving the lives of residents.

What is the competition?

The Climate Smart Cities Challenge is an open innovation competition to identify climate smart solutions to reduce the climate impact of Bogotá, Colombia; Bristol, United Kingdom; Curitiba, Brazil; and Makindye Ssabagabo, Uganda, while creating a better future for all.

45 finalists have been selected to work closely with these four cities, learn more about their challenges, collaborate on solutions, and ultimately form teams to demonstrate solutions in real-world environments. The winning teams will share up to 300,000 Euro to leverage further investment and build towards system demonstration in 2023. This is an opportunity to be part of a global United Nations initiative to bring climate smart solutions to cities and help them in their quests to achieve climate neutrality. 

Our finance mobilization ambitions are high. We have a strong group of organizations part of the Challenge already, and by adding teams of innovators with relevant solutions, we believe that we have a compelling proposition to investors and funders. We want you to work with us to pitch your solutions to multilateral donors, investment funds, development banks and other funders. We are confident that our diverse group of organizations can create transformational change together.