Governance gap: How cities plan for climate neutrality without planning the end of fossil gas

Peer-reviewed paper 5-090-26

Many cities around the world have adopted a climate neutrality target. In the EU’s mission ‘Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities’, 100 cities are pursuing the target of achieving climate neutrality by 2030. To achieve this, there needs to be a phase-out of fossil gas. However, municipal strategies for coping with declining gas demand and for the future of gas distribution networks are often lacking. This paper compares six European mission-cities – Barcelona, Budapest, Copenhagen, Ljubljana, Mannheim, and Warsaw – to investigate how local governments address fossil gas dependency, govern heat system transformation and address the infrastructural and economic challenges associated with decommissioning gas networks. The study reveals a discrepancy between climate-neutrality commitments and tangible measures to phase out gas.

While cities such as Copenhagen and Mannheim demonstrate integrated planning and substantial shifts towards low-carbon district heating (DH), others maintain gas grids as a long-term component of their heating supply and lack binding timelines or regulatory instruments for transformation or decommissioning. The comparison reveals that, although gas grid decommissioning is essential for managing declining throughput and ensuring affordability, it is rarely addressed explicitly within the EU. Overall, the findings point to structural barriers in planning, communication, and multilevel governance that limit credible transition pathways. The paper concludes that, without integrated infrastructure planning and coherent financing, many cities risk becoming dependent on fossil gas for much longer than their stated climate neutrality targets would allow.