Towards Climate Neutrality: Progressing Key Actions for Positive Energy Districts Implementation

Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) represent an emerging urban transition paradigm, an advanced framework to effectively attain decarbonization targets, as well as a holistic approach to foster more resilient and livable cities. However, imple-menting PEDs is challenging, demanding substantial planning, design, and opera-tions changes. Mainstreaming PEDs calls for innovative legal, institutional, business, and organizational frameworks, as well as an active involvement of the main actors (i.e., cities, municipalities, communities, investors, industry players, and service providers), to co-design and jointly progress ambitious agendas, multiscale plans, flexible instruments, and adaptive structures. Benefitting from the authors’ coopera-tion within the Horizon 2020 project, Cooperation in Science and Technology COST Action ‘Positive Energy Districts European Network’ (PED-EU-NET in PED-EU-NET | COST ACTION CA19126, 2020), the proposed contribution addresses relevant issues and opportunities characterizing the development of PEDs in Europe, relating attention to effective implementation, context-specificity, replicability, and upscaling.