University of Klagenfurt receives over a million euros in funding for City Science Lab, supporting the capital Klagenfurt in its quest to become a climate-neutral city

Klagenfurt am Wörthersee is the only Austrian city to take part in the EU mission “100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities by 2030”. Numerous ambitious and financially intensive projects are being planned and implemented to help achieve the climate targets, from decarbonising the bus fleet to expanding the supply of green electricity. The University of Klagenfurt will support the city in its efforts to achieve climate neutrality by providing expertise from a wide range of disciplines in the social, cultural, economic and technical sciences. To this end, funding is being provided by the Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF) to establish the “City Science Lab (University of Klagenfurt): Climate & Cities Missions in Action”. Funds totalling more than one million euros have now been approved.

The University of Klagenfurt can showcase a wide range of achievements in research, teaching and third mission at the interface of the EU missions “Climate” and “Cities”. The topics addressed here are highly diverse: from energy supply and mobility to settlement and infrastructure development, from expertise in participatory processes with various stakeholders and public and target group-specific sustainability communication to the development of sustainable business models. The University of Klagenfurt has already contributed to the development of visions of a climate-neutral city. Now it is time to take the next step.

“The aim is to establish the City Science Lab as a university hub that coordinates, bundles and boosts activities and at the same time acts as a crystallising agent for joint initiatives and projects in order to make a decisive contribution to the implementation of EU missions in close cooperation and consultation with urban and regional stakeholders and civil society,” explains Martina Merz, Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Klagenfurt. The aim of the lab is to bring together scientists from the fields of cultural, social, economic and technical sciences in order to address the challenges of climate neutrality through inter- and transdisciplinary basic and applied research and to facilitate a Just Transition to the climate-friendly city of the future.

This latest funding approval was preceded by the confirmation of the FWF project “Competing urgencies: Climate Neutrality in the EU”, which is headed by Alexandra Schwell (Department of Cultural Analysis). Working with project teams in Poland and Slovenia, this project supports the three cities of Warsaw, Ljubljana and Klagenfurt, which have embarked on the path to becoming climate-neutral cities under very different initial conditions. The researchers pose the following questions from a cultural anthropological perspective: How do the three cities prioritise climate justice? And does this issue compete with other priorities, such as tight budgets, safety or health? This project will have a key role to play in the City Science Lab.

The City Science Lab (University of Klagenfurt): Climate & Cities Missions in Action, CSL-AAU for short, is funded by the BMBWF 2024 call for EU missions from Horizon Europe (LV 2025-2027) to the tune of more than one million euros.