Copenhagen promised to be carbon neutral by 2025. What happened, and what does it tell the cities aiming at 2030?

Two chimneys carry much of Copenhagen’s climate arithmetic. One rises from Amager Bakke, the waste-to-energy plant run by ARC. The other belongs to Amagerværket, the combined heat and power station of the city’s utility, HOFOR, which supplies about a quarter of the municipality’s district heating. Its Block 4, opened in 2020, burns wood, and it is Denmark’s largest single source of biogenic CO₂.

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Capture that CO₂ and store it, and a plant burning wood would pull carbon out of the air: many hundreds of thousands of tonnes a year, by HOFOR’s estimate. The last stretch of the climate plan leaned on capture, and delays in carbon capture and storage are named as a main reason the 2025 goal proved so hard. Even on the original timetable, capture at Amager Bakke was due only “before 2030”, after the deadline had passed.

Then the bet came apart, in notes to the city’s committees. E.ON, the energy company that was to build capture at Amager Bakke with ARC, was prequalified in May 2025, with nine other companies, for the Danish state’s fund for carbon capture and storage. On 12 June the technical and environmental committee was told, in confidence, that the partnership had formally ended: E.ON had found that the business case did not add up. The bid deadline, 26 August, passed without a preliminary bid.

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That left Amagerværket, and the city’s note of 1 September said capture on Block 4 was expected, on its own, to be enough for the next goal: a climate-positive city by 2035. On 4 December HOFOR’s board decided not to hand in its best and final offer to the Danish Energy Agency. Its reasons, in its own statement, were uncertainty about where the CO₂ would finally be stored, a tight timetable and large guarantees. The timeline puts the dates side by side; read the last two together.

A plant that had to run by 2030 could not wait for a store that would decide at the end of 2027 at the earliest.

Meanwhile the city had moved its goalposts. Klimastrategi 2035, adopted on 18 September 2025, sets three new goals: a climate-positive city, half the global footprint of its citizens, and half the footprint of the council’s own purchasing. Climate positive means taking more carbon out than the city emits, which is exactly what capture was for. The first status report, in June 2026, expects territorial emissions roughly two-thirds below 2019 by 2035 with the measures already funded, and says positivity can be reached only if CO₂ capture is set up in Copenhagen before 2035. What else could deliver the negative emissions, the January note admits, is so far unclear.

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Copenhagen is not alone. Stockholm’s plan needs negative emissions to exceed the city’s remaining emissions by 2030, and counts on capture at its Värtaverket plant to remove 800,000 tonnes a year. Amsterdam’s forecast assumes capture at the city’s waste incinerator zeroes one heat network’s emissions after 2028. And the UK government’s pathway, says the Climate Change Committee, relies on a steep scale-up of engineered removals. Every plan has a bet like this. Can you find the one in yours?

Copenhagen’s account has two bottom lines, and the gap between them is a decision. The city subtracts the renewable power, heat and gas made by plants inside its borders or part-owned by it: wind turbines, including 39 that HOFOR built in Jutland and on Lolland with a municipal loan guarantee, solar panels, and its 20.6% share of the Vestforbrænding incinerator. In 2024 the credit removed about two-thirds of the emissions from electricity use and 73% of those from district heating.

The chart shows what the credit does, source by source.

Without the credit, heat and power are the biggest emitters after road traffic; with it, they shrink to a fraction of what the roads emit. Nothing is hidden: the account prints both totals and its method. But other cities choose differently. CE Delft, which forecasts Amsterdam’s emissions, does not count the city’s own solar panels and turbines as a cut at all, because power flows across one national grid. Even inside one account, choices move numbers: Copenhagen splits the emissions of its combined heat and power plants between electricity and heat by the “200% method”, and its account calls the choice between that and the alternative “125% method” “primarily a political choice”.

Then there is what a city counts at all. Boston’s inventory leaves out goods and food made elsewhere and consumed by Bostonians, and about half of its cut since 2005 came from a cleaner regional grid. Philadelphia’s puts the city at 12.9 million tonnes for 2022, then shows its full total rising from 16.7 million to 20.6 million when greenhouse gases are weighed over 20 years rather than 100.

Most of all, a territorial account leaves out what people buy. Danish municipal targets cover only territorial emissions, notes CONCITO, the think tank building a common monitoring system for the municipalities: 96 of 98 had adopted climate action plans by the end of 2024. The average Dane’s consumption causes about 13 tonnes of CO₂e a year, roughly double the world average. That is why Copenhagen’s new strategy targets its citizens’ global footprint as well.

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So handle comparisons with care. Amsterdam measures against 1990, Boston 2005, Philadelphia 2006, Tallinn 2007, Prague 2010; scopes, credits and warming horizons differ too. Compare a city with its own past first, and read the method before setting it beside anyone else.

In April 2022 the European Commission chose 112 cities from 377 applicants for its mission for 100 climate-neutral and smart cities by 2030, two decades ahead of the EU’s own 2050 goal. By October 2025, 103 had been awarded the mission label.

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At the core is the climate city contract: commitments by the mayor, the council and local partners, an action plan and an investment plan, co-signed by national and regional authorities. NetZeroCities, a consortium of 33 partners, helps the cities write them. A contract is a plan, not a result, and the bill is large: the mission puts the investment needed across its cities in the hundreds of billions of euros.

Read closely, the dates mean different things. Warsaw’s contract aims for an 80% cut by 2030 in two pilot districts, Praga-Południe and Ursynów; city-wide its target is 40%, with neutrality in 2050, and heat from the EU’s largest district heating network still comes mainly from coal and gas. Stockholm aims to cut emissions from energy and transport by 80% against 1990 and to be climate positive by 2030. Tallinn commits to 40% below 2007 by 2030, Prague to 45% below 2010. Vienna has written neutrality by 2040 into law.

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Amsterdam has had an outside forecaster check every year since 2020 whether it will arrive. CE Delft recalculates the city’s path to its goal of 60% below 1990 by 2030. The chart shows what each annual forecast expected.

The forecast has never come close. The 2025 update expects 46% and says the city would have to save another 540 kilotonnes to make it. Most of the cut it does expect is national: the emission factor of Dutch grid electricity falls by 78% between 2022 and 2030. The city’s own measures lag, above all the move of homes and offices off gas, whose pace has been revised down year after year.

Amsterdam’s new coalition for 2026–2030 keeps the goal and writes, in its agreement, that it needs “big steps from the cabinet”. The plans are written. Who pays for them?

When Dublin City Council costed its priority projects to cut carbon in its two decarbonising zones, Ballymun and Ringsend–Poolbeg, the bill came to around €439 million. In July 2026 councillors heard that the Department of Climate had allocated €70,500, to be spent within the year, at least €8,000 of it on community engagement.

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Irish law asks every council to choose one or two such zones and to target a 51% cut by 2030. Many of the measures in the plans, from active travel to bus electrification, fall to national bodies with budgets of their own.

Money is half of it; people are the other half. In Denmark, CONCITO found that half of municipalities had set aside money for their climate plans, and staffing varies enormously.

A plan written for every Danish municipality is carried out, in the typical one, by two people. And many levers sit above the city. CE Delft’s split for Amsterdam makes the city primarily responsible for gas heating in homes, shares non-residential buildings with the national government, and leaves motorways to the state, rural roads to the province and industrial process emissions to The Hague and Brussels. Its warning: heat networks are stuck until national legislation is settled, and the transition needs structural money from the state.

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The national frames are slipping too. Germany’s Expertenrat für Klimafragen found in May 2026 that emissions fell by only 0.1% in 2025, as buildings and transport rose, and expects the budget to 2030 to be overshot by 60 to 100 million tonnes. In Britain, the Climate Change Committee finds emissions 50% below 1990 but a gap between the government’s plan, which reaches 65% by 2030, and the 68% the UK has pledged.

What do cities ask for? Rarely a new target. Dublin’s councillors asked to see “funding on the table” for projects they know will cut carbon; CONCITO asks for more resources and guidance; Amsterdam’s forecasters say the city needs laws and structural money from The Hague. Each wants the means to do what it has already promised.

Copenhagen cut deep, counted in the open and reported its setbacks to its committees as they came. Before your own deadline, ask your plan four questions.

1. What does the headline count? Find the total your target is measured against and every credit inside it. Copenhagen’s account prints both; yours should too.
2. What is the bet? Name the project the last stretch depends on, the date it must work and the date the things it needs are decided. The HOFOR note shows what happens when those dates cross.
3. Who holds the money and the levers? Split what is left into what the city controls, what it shares and what sits with the state, as CE Delft did for Amsterdam, and cost each part.
4. Who checks you? An outside forecast every year, like Amsterdam’s, tells you early enough to change course.

Then look sideways. Compare cities and countries sets places side by side, and the city profiles of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Warsaw gather their plans and sources. If your city is working to a deadline, join the Hub’s community on the participate page and say which one: the most useful peer is often a city that has already hit the same wall.