On the road to climate-neutral cities, there is a lack of concrete, climate-friendly refurbishment solutions that are widely applicable. Small and medium-sized municipalities in particular play a key role here: 60% of the Austrian population lives in municipalities with fewer than 20,000 inhabitants. Small municipalities have flatter decision-making structures and a more bundled distribution of competencies, and yet they must be able to implement innovative concepts for decarbonization in existing buildings.

This is where the research project comes in, in order to develop innovative and holistic renovation solutions for selected example areas of small and medium-sized municipalities that make use of today’s technical possibilities and derive economic and ecological benefits from the energy-efficient neighborhood network – in such a way that owners and users can see an advantage in it.

The concept of the climate community is a bundling of different requirements in connection with the achievement of the climate targets: it combines political, communicative and knowledge-based elements. climate communities fulfill the future requirements of a climate-neutral Austria in an exemplary manner and offer solutions that do not have to be expensively retrofitted in ten years’ time. To ensure that this is the case, the project is also developing a methodological framework for assessing and verifying this “climate fitness”.

To ensure that this does not remain with exemplary individual solutions, the Austrian municipalities are first examined to determine how the initial situation of frequent settlement types can be characterized in order to identify “typical” refurbishment cases and to find out how they can best be classified using existing data.

Based on this, an easy-to-use web tool is being developed that can identify suitable areas in any municipality to which at least one of the “climate community” concepts can be applied. For this purpose, only data that is already available to the municipalities today or that is derived from it in the project is used in order to best tie in with existing processes and workflows and reduce the additional effort required for replication. The data created for the spatial energy planning classification of settlement structures and the associated methods will be made publicly available as open data and open source. This means that future research and development projects, service providers and specialist planners can also benefit from the project results.

The direct proximity of mayors, municipal mandataries and the municipal administration is used as an essential link between citizens and the state organization: Especially in the case of smaller municipalities, the necessary measures for decarbonization can be accelerated and multiplied using the method of climate communities.