Mayors: Climate change, housing are cities’ top challenges ahead of European election

By Aitor Hernández-Morales, Giovanna Coi | 05/24/2024 06:41 AM EDT

Local leaders want the EU to fund affordable housing, sustainable mobility and adaptation to climate change.

This article is part of POLITICO’s Global Policy Lab: Living Cities, a collaborative journalism project exploring the future of cities. Sign up here.

As Europe heads to the polls, the continent’s local leaders say that climate change and housing are the most important issues facing their constituencies.

The latest Eurocities Pulse Mayors Survey — conducted in the months leading up to June’s European Parliament election and shared exclusively with POLITICO’s Living Cities— polled 92 mayors in 28 European countries.

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For the second year in a row, climate change topped the list of most important issues for Europea’s urban areas. More than a quarter of the bloc’s municipal leaders said that global warming was the biggest threat facing their city; over two-thirds said they felt the majority of their citizens demanded action on decarbonization policies.

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