Urban efficiency is the key

• As planning, infrastructure, funding and delivery is often shared across federal, state and local governments must have a clear engagement strategy with higher levels of governments to help address policy divergences
• Act now. Lack of leadership, policy commitment, actionable plans, and regulation fails to stimulate the needed investment. Planning the journey toward the 1.5°C objective must happen now.
• Set ambitious and actionable short-, mid-, and long-term targets and a suitable regulatory framework to incentivize investments.
• Link energy use and air pollution. A 1.5°C pathway offers an opportunity for urban areas and cities to drastically and cost-effectively mitigate air pollution along with GHG through an integrated clean air strategy.
• Move early and set examples by investing in own assets e.g., lower the energy use of individual public buildings by at least 60% till 2040 while decarbonizing supply, electrify the full public transport fleet by 2030, and use excess energy through sector coupling and energy storage by 2040.
• Remove barriers for and implement pilot projects – to innovate, test, and showcase new technology, ensuring your city shines as an ambitious and inspirational regional front-runner, and creating attractive places to live and work while also creating spillover effects in suburban and rural areas.
• Prioritize 1) energy efficient heating and cooling of buildings (including district energy), 2) electrification of transportation, and 3) sector integration. A strategy in line with 1.5°C can be achieved cost-effectively only with a strong focus on energy efficiency and sector coupling, as this will ensure that expensive overinvestments in energy generation and energy infrastructure can be avoided.

Buildings account for one-third of the global energy-related GHG emissions and final energy demand.
If all urban areas invested in energy efficient heating and cooling of buildings, including district energy, they would bridge 20% of the gap in the urban GHG emissions reductions needed for a 1.5°C pathway.

• Set up long-term renovation strategies, including suitable regulation and incentives for deep and staged deep renovation, to boost renovation rates of existing buildings from currently often less than 1% to at least 2%-3% per year.
• Closely monitor implementation of plans and immediately act when needed to keep on track.
• Start with consequent optimization of technical building systems for heating and cooling of own public building stock now.
• Design and enforce mandatory building codes for new and existing buildings with a view to nearly zero energy buildings. This means ambitious minimum performance requirements for the whole building, including technical building systems, building envelope and heat generation
• Ensure that the real-life energy performance of new or upgraded technical building systems is assessed, documented, and passed on to the building owner.
• Ensure or facilitate access to funding for implementation, e.g., by supporting innovative financial business models, like ESCOs.
• Expand and decarbonize district heating and cooling, including large-scale heat pumps running on renewable power, and lead the way by connecting public buildings. Read more about district energy here

Transport accounted for 23% of global energy-related GHG emissions in 2015 and 26% of the final energy demand.

If all urban areas invested in electrifying cars, busses, trucks and vessels, they would bridge 28% of the gap in the urban GHG emissions reductions needed for a 1.5°C pathway.

• Start with electrifying the public fleet now; vehicles, buses, city boats, ferries and including investing in the needed charging stations. 
• Map the need for charging infrastructure for public and private transport modes; charging for EVs and buses, and shore supply for boats, ferries, and cruise ships - and regulate and incentivizes accordingly to ensure investments in the needed charging infrastructure. 
• Mandate the installation of charging stations in new builds and when renovation takes place (office buildings, residential, industry, hotels, supermarkets).
• Introduce environmental/low emission zones.
• Introduce parking incentives, tax rebates on charging infrastructure, and other fiscal incentives for moving toward electrification of transport. 
• Mandate the installation of shore supply in harbors and present a plan for how to address that all vessels use electric shore supply when at berth.

Sector integration is about connecting the electricity, heating, building, transport and industry sectors in order to better use synergies between these sectors, thereby enabling a more cost-efficient decarbonization of the energy system. This includes looking at how integrating sectors can improve the overall efficiency of the energy system through enabling reuse of excess/waste energy, storage of surplus electricity in batteries, thermal networks, buildings and transport as well as to incentivize clean electrification of sectors and interconnectivity.

• Rethink energy planning to consider and support sector integration. Prepare local plans on how to decarbonize the energy system, based on reliable data on heat demands, the status of the building stock, the availability of heat sources and infrastructure, as well as sound assessments of the potential of utilizing synergies between sectors, to ensure a cost-efficient decarbonization and avoid ineffective investments or lock-in effects.
• Leverage synergies, such as utilizing the waste heat from a datacenter for heating of buildings instead of investing in additional heat supply. Or reuse excess energy from a wastewater utility to power another sector. Or utilizing a district energy network to absorb energy from wind turbines in times of over-production.
• Allow urban regulatory free test zones to innovate and develop new energy efficient technology, through removing technical, regulatory and financial barriers for reusing energy between sectors.
• Ensure that power price signals incentivize/reward energy storage and other flexibility services.