VIENNA – Vienna's city hall, with its stone towers and gargoyles, often reminds visitors of another neo-gothic building, says city council member Nina Abrahamczik.
"Children who come with the school classes are like, 'Oh, it looks like Hogwarts,'" she says.
But Abrahamczik, who heads the city's climate and environment committee, says this building has something Hogwarts doesn't: solar panels.
When Vienna began requiring all new buildings and building extensions add solar panels two years ago, Abrahamczik says they also felt it was important to add panels to city hall. The panels aren't visible from the ground, so the city can maintain the building's 19th century look, while cutting climate pollution. "That's something where also our job as a role model comes into play," Abrahamczik says. "We have to show how it's possible."
Vienna takes its job as a climate role model seriously. In addition to mandating solar panels and energy-efficient buildings, Vienna is now heating thousands of homes with geothermal energy instead of planet-heating natural gas. It's building massive heat pumps. It's investing in new infrastructure to help adapt to heat waves and floods. And this spring Vienna passed a historic climate law, outlining a plan to get its climate pollution down to zero by 2040.
Vienna is home to one in five Austrians, and its climate action is increasingly important for the country's climate leadership, says Gernot Wagner, Columbia University climate economist and an advisor for Vienna's Mayoral Advisory council. Austria's newly elected federal government is deprioritizing climate action, Wagner says. In the new coalition government, the ecological Green Party is out, and conservatives, who are less interested in climate action, have gained power. "At the federal level things are taking a step back, climate is taking a back seat," he says.
Meanwhile Vienna is forging ahead, and its experience as a climate leader holds lessons and inspiration for cities around the world.
Cities — including those in the U.S. — can make a big dent in cutting climate pollution based on their policy actions, says Nathan Hultman, director of the Center for Global Sustainability at the University of Maryland. That's because 70 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions come from cities.
Hultman's group found city and state climate policies could drive down U.S. emissions 54 to 62% below 2005 levels by 2035, even with federal inaction or reversals of climate action. "From a pure numbers standpoint," Hultman says, "actions that are taken in cities can in fact have a real impact."
Cities play a big role in cutting fossil fuels
At the edge of an old airfield in eastern Vienna there's a 15-story tall drilling rig where men in hardhats move seven-inch metal pipes. The clangs of the pipes echo as they fall to the ground.
Bernhard Novotny, project director for the site, says the pipes are for geothermal wells. The wells stretch miles underground to extract boiling water that lies under the earth's subsurface. That hot water will heat 20,000 Viennese homes by 2028, Novotny says.
Vienna has a goal of getting its buildings completely off gas by 2040. The city got off Russian gas in January, Wien Energie spokesman Alexander Hoor, says. Getting off gas ties into the city's climate goals because gas infrastructure leaks methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and gas also releases carbon dioxide when burned. To get off gas, Vienna plans to heat buildings using heat pumps, capturing gases from waste, burning waste, and geothermal wells.
These geothermal wells are a joint-venture between Vienna-based energy company, OMV, and Vienna's municipal heating and electrical utility, Wien Energie. Being a municipal utility means the company has a stable climate strategy linked to Vienna's, says Rusbeh Rezania, Wien Energie's head of decarbonized heating. That consistency has given Wien Energie flexibility to experiment with new combinations of energy sources, Resania says. "We are not like a private company in which the strategy is changing every year or every two years," Rezania says. " We have time to learn, and we can have time to use the right technology."
In addition to innovating ways to cut climate pollution, Vienna is finding new ways to hold itself accountable for its climate goals, says Jürgen Czernohorszky, executive city councilor responsible for climate and environment.
Vienna's new climate law now requires projects of the city and municipal companies to detail both the financial costs of the project and the planet-heating emissions costs. "There's now a city climate budget which allows us to plan not only in Euro, but also in CO2," Czernohorszky says.
And if individuals or organizations find that Vienna isn't living up to its climate goals, the law has a remedy for that, too, says Katharina Rogenhofer, head of the Austrian climate think tank Kontext Institute for Climate Matters. If Vienna isn't taking promised climate actions, the public "can actually go to court and then trigger those processes."
Vienna leads as Austria slows down
Vienna is leading on climate action at a time when the new Austrian federal government is losing momentum, Wagner says. In the previous Austrian government, the Green party was in charge of a large ministry with climate, energy, and transport grouped together so it could be more effective. "This Austrian climate super-ministry, if you will," Wagner says.
In Austria's new coalition government, which came into office in March, the Green party is out of power. Climate, energy and transport are now split apart, and climate and energy are relegated to conservative-led ministries where many climate researchers fear they won't get enough attention.
Things are not as bad for climate as they could have been, Czernohorszky, a member of the Social Democrats party which is part of the coalition, says. The country narrowly avoided a far-right government that promised to cut billions of dollars worth of climate measures. "We looked into an abyss of abandoning every climate policy Austria has come up with in the last decade," Czernohorszky says. " The alternative would've been rather bad for everybody."
Stefan Gara of the liberal NEOS party, part of the coalition government, writes in an email he wants to make "clear how important the issue of climate is to us at NEOS."
The conservative ÖVP party, also in the coalition, didn't respond to NPR's request for comment.
Austria still has a goal of reaching "climate neutrality" by 2040, like Vienna. For Austria, that means both cutting fossil fuel use and trying to store carbon dioxide underground. It's unclear if the Austrian federal government will reach the goal, Wagner says. But Vienna is a different story, says Karl Steininger, professor of climate economics at the University of Graz.
"Vienna said, if [federal politicians] don't go ahead," Steininger says, "We'll go ahead. And set an example that others can follow."
Vienna offers a pollution-cutting model — to a point
Vienna offers a climate action model for cities around the world, says Andy Deacon, co-managing director of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy. Deacon says city governments can play a key role in cutting emissions through policies in areas like public transit, food waste, building codes and energy.
Not all of Vienna's climate actions are replicable in cities like the U.S. For example, while Vienna is able to achieve pollution reductions through its municipal electric utility, around 70 percent of Americans get their electricity from private investor-owned utilities. It can often be hard to compel private utilities to move away from fossil fuels, says David Pomerantz, the executive director of the Energy and Policy institute, a utility watchdog group.
"Who can make an investor-owned utility do something they don't want to do? It ultimately runs through public utility commissions. A lot of them are openly hostile to anything that smacks of climate stuff," Pomerantz says.
Still Justin Bibb, the mayor of Cleveland, says his city is forging ahead on reaching the city's goal of climate neutrality by 2050. He's focusing on areas his city does control, like energy-efficient building standards and electric vehicle infrastructure.
"The tools and levers I have, I'm gonna keep using them. And while we don't have a good partner in DC," Bibb says, "as the mayor, I still gotta deliver. I still gotta lead. I still gotta get stuff done."
Ready for when pendulum swings again
Researchers say city governments hold key tools to help their communities adapt to climate change's growing risks.
Vienna is seeing increased flooding because of climate change, including a 1,000 year flood event in September. Abrahamczik says increased flood risk is why the city is building "sponge cities". That's when cities incorporate things like sand, ponds and green spaces in urban design to soak up excess water and better manage flooding. Because Vienna is seeing more deadly heatwaves, it's planting trees for shade, and expanding district cooling, a climate-friendly alternative to air conditioning.
Wagner says while Austria's federal government right now isn't as active on climate change, he hopes "the pendulum will swing back".
In the meantime, Abrahamczik says Vienna isn't waiting around. " Waiting for others is something we cannot afford in the time of climate crisis," she says. "We are done waiting."
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