Communities of Practice to Boost Circularity on a City Level

As demographic and economic centres, cities are important players in the transition to a Circular Economy. The European Commission is increasingly putting focus on propelling the efforts of cities and regions to become more circular, reduce pollution, and curb waste. The Circular Cities and Regions Initiative (CCRI) and the CSCP have launched the CCRI Communities of Practice in an effort to better coordinate the work of numerous projects and initiatives currently working on the topic of the Circular Economy on a city level.

For years, the CSCP has been engaged in supporting cities in various initiatives, including the urban circular bioeconomy, circular households and lifestyles, zero waste cities, improved waste management or innovative fab labs. Across Europe, numerous cities are embarking on their own circular transitions, with a diverse array of projects, initiatives, and approaches emerging from different angles.

The Circular Cities and Regions Initiative (CCRI) has been launched by the European Commission with the purpose of coordinating these efforts and aligning funded projects and supporting schemes. The new CCRI Communities of Practice project adds to that structure with a practical approach focused on real-life implementation.

The CSCP role is to support knowledge exchange and ensure that cities can learn from endeavours of each-other. To this end, several Communities of Practice (CoPs) on relevant topics for the urban circular transition will be established and coordinated as part of the project.

Each CoP is centred around specific transformation topics and includes a variety of opportunities for direct exchange between cities and regions at different levels of experience.

The CCRI Communities of Practice enables peers to learn directly from each-other with the added benefit that all participants receive additional expert knowledge from the project consortium. The concrete topics the project will work on will be based on the needs of the cities and regions involved in the transition.

The CCRI Communities of Practice is funded by the Horizon Europe and will run until 2027 with contributions from 11 partners.

For further questions, please contact Felix Schumacher.