Copenhagen

Copenhagen Solutions Lab is the city’s own test bed for urban technology, inside the Climate, Environment and Technical Administration. Its current work covers air quality, AI for energy use in buildings, data on how people move and the circular economy. The lab can lead projects, but it does not normally decide their priority, funding or roll-out, the city told a Social Liberal councillor, Emil Moselund Østergaard, in June 2026. Copenhagen has had no central innovation unit since it closed its Innovation House in 2019, so projects depend on the backing of the separate administrations that hold the budgets.

Organisation in focus

Copenhagen Solutions Lab

The city’s own urban-technology test bed, inside the climate and technical administration.

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Much of the climate work belongs to companies. HOFOR, the utility that Copenhagen owns with neighbouring municipalities, runs the Amagerværket combined heat and power station, which supplies about a quarter of the city’s district heat. ARC burns waste for its owner municipalities at Amager Bakke. Metroselskabet, which builds and runs the metro, is 50% owned by the city, 41.7% by the state and 8.3% by Frederiksberg.

EnergyLab Nordhavn tested from 2015 to 2019 how a new harbour district could share heat and power. DTU, the city, the port developer By & Havn, HOFOR, ABB and Danfoss took part, and it closed in 2021. BLOXHUB, a members’ hub for urban innovation in the BLOX building on the harbour, counts about 350 companies, research institutions, organisations and public bodies. Gate 21 works on similar projects across the wider region.

Organisation in focus

BLOXHUB

Facilitates collaborative sustainable urban solutions via networking, events, and co‑working spaces across.

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Organisation in focus

Gate 21

Connects municipalities, businesses, and academia to implement sustainable climate‑focused urban projects.

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Some of the shared work runs between municipalities. The Health and Care Administration has its own Welfare Innovation Unit and runs a collaboration of six Danish cities on welfare technology, with joint projects and one entry point for suppliers. A joint secretariat plans the super cycle highways for 27 municipalities. Innovation District Copenhagen gathers the city, the state, universities, hospitals, foundations and firms around life science and quantum technology. The city’s planning director sits on its board.

Published tallies of start-up money are national, not for the city. By one commercial count, 74 Danish start-ups raised €886m in 2025. EIFO, Denmark’s state export and investment fund, reported venture activity down 44% in the first half of that year.

Copenhagen is governed by its council, the Borgerrepræsentationen, with 55 seats, and by seven mayors who each lead an administration. After the election of November 2025, Sisse Marie Welling of SF (Green Left) became Lord Mayor on 1 January 2026. By the political news site Altinget’s account she is the first from outside the Social Democrats in over 100 years. Enhedslisten (the Red–Green Alliance) won the most seats, 13. Eight parties holding 46 seats signed the agreement that made Welling Lord Mayor. The Social Democrats stayed outside it, but still took one of the seven mayoralties, for employment, integration and business.

There is no chief digital officer. The Lord Mayor chairs the Finance Committee, which holds digitalisation, and the Finance Administration wrote the digital strategy for 2026–2027. The council adopted it on 21 May 2026, with DKK 150m for joint digital development to 2029, after four parties added commitments on universal design and residents’ differing digital skills. It sets no quantified targets. Professional judgements, decisions on residents’ cases and the relationship with residents are not to be automated. The city also wants to use more European suppliers. That builds on an analysis the council ordered unopposed in March 2025, of how it could avoid depending on the tech giants.

The Parliamentary Ombudsman, who oversees public authorities for the national parliament, is looking at how such lines work in practice. In August 2026 the office opened general investigations into selected municipal AI projects. One is a Copenhagen system that uses software robots and machine learning to fetch and read the child-protection and criminal-record certificates needed for hiring. The office asks how the model decides which cases a person must handle.

Klimastrategi 2035, the city’s climate strategy adopted on 18 September 2025, has three goals for 2035: a climate-positive territory, and halving both residents’ consumption footprint and that of the city’s own purchasing. The first status report, in June 2026, expects territorial emissions to fall by about 68% from 2019 with the measures already funded. It states that climate positivity can only be reached if carbon capture is built in Copenhagen before 2035. Purchasing is on course for only about 30% of its target.

From our library

Status på Klimastrategi 2035, klimabudget og styringsmodel for klima (Økonomiforvaltningen, 3 Jun 2026)

The first status on Klimastrategi 2035, which says climate positivity needs carbon capture.

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Neither of the city’s capture projects won state support. E.ON, ARC’s partner at Amager Bakke, submitted no bid in August 2025 after the partnership ended. In December 2025 HOFOR and Elimini, a carbon-capture firm owned by Britain’s Drax, decided not to make a final bid for a plant planned at Amagerværket. They cited uncertainty over where the carbon would be stored and the large guarantees required. In May 2026 the state’s DKK 28.7bn tender went to a single winner, the cement maker Aalborg Portland. The city’s environment mayor has said national rules make a congestion charge impossible for the city to introduce.

The argument over capture is older. When ARC did not apply to the state fund in 2022, Line Barfod of Enhedslisten, then the city’s mayor for technical and environmental affairs, blamed the government’s criteria.

The state’s answer has not changed. In April 2023 the climate minister, Lars Aagaard of the Moderates, defended the financial conditions in a written statement. Barfod holds the renamed climate, environment and technical post in the new council.

The Supercykelstier (super cycle highways) are commuter routes planned jointly by the municipalities of the capital region. Since 2012 they have built 16 routes covering 244 km, for DKK 387m in today’s prices. An ex-post analysis by Impact Economics in April 2026 put the net benefit to society at DKK 6.0bn, an internal return of 17%, with health gains worth DKK 3.9bn. The municipalities paid 53% of construction and 98% of upkeep, and end up DKK 0.3bn worse off, while the state gains DKK 2.6bn through taxes and health savings.

From our library

Ex post samfundsøkonomisk analyse af supercykelstierne (Impact Economics, 30 Apr 2026)

The 2026 ex-post analysis of the region’s super cycle highways: costs, benefits and who pays.

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The cloudburst plan (skybrudsplan in Danish) was drawn up in 2012 and given a 20-year investment plan in 2015, with about 300 surface projects to protect the city from a 100-year rainstorm. National rules in force since 2021 cap what wastewater tariffs may fund, and in December 2024 the council cancelled most of the projects that could not start before 1 January 2027. About 58 will still be built to the old standard, and 23 are in use; new projects will be designed to the lower standard the rules allow. So far the work has cut flood risk by about 9–10%, protecting about 4,400 households and 750 business addresses. Tunnels by HOFOR are still to come.

The council decided in its 2019 budget to convert every bus line to electricity, and by 2025, 80% of bus operation was electric. By spring 2026 the city’s buses ran on electricity. After a winter of charging failures on line 2A, the council ordered eight gas buses to stand by there until 2029. During the charging plan for 2022 to 2025, the number of charge points on public streets rose from 1,141 to 4,126, not counting those in car parks or at shops. The plan narrowly missed one target, with 10.9 electric and plug-in hybrid cars per point against a ceiling of 10. It missed the other: no block of flats was to be more than 250 m from a point, but the average was 326 m and the farthest 705 m.

The City Data Exchange tested whether city data would sell. The city, the Capital Region and Hitachi opened the marketplace in 2016. Of its datasets, 25 were priced and 134 free, and Hitachi itself published 131. It closed in 2018, when the contract with Hitachi ended, for lack of demand. An evaluation report published that year set out what its users had learned.

K-AI, an assistant in the city’s own AI system, was tested in the Social Services Administration to draft letters to parents after a child-welfare report. Tested on fictitious cases, it sometimes added information or concerns that were not in the original report. The administration is now working out how it could run in daily use. A data-based maintenance model built with Sweco, an engineering consultancy, is in daily use for about 80 sports facilities, 30 culture buildings and over 45 artificial pitches. It steers DKK 500m of upkeep to 2034 and went into use in September 2026, too recently for results.

Copenhagen is now counting on a plant it cannot order. On the levers it holds, it keeps an honest score. Street chargers multiplied, though both charging targets were missed, and a smaller share of commuters cycled in 2025 than in 2024. The 2035 goal sits with others. The state’s DKK 28.7bn capture tender went to a cement works in Aalborg, and HOFOR and Elimini are looking for another way to build at Amagerværket. The city’s own status note says climate positivity needs a plant like that.