Innovative financing is an option for urban climate and sustainable development projects, but cities, municipalities and regions need to know how to activate and use it. The Recommendation-Decision Matrix tool is working to that effect!

The Recommendation-Decision Matrix tool is designed to support local governments on their first decision-making steps against a wide array of innovative schemes for financing their climate and sustainability actions. A practical and easy-to-use tool, free and accessible to all local and regional authorities and their implementing agencies, who are looking at ways to increase or diversify their funding base in order to bridge their municipal infrastructure needs across 5 different sectors:

  • Public Buildings
  • Private Buildings
  • Public Lightning
  • Transportation
  • Cross-Sectoral

For each sector of recommendation, there are specific innovative financing schemes that could be best employed.

For each specific scheme an easy-to-grasp checklist of selected decision criteria identifies an ease of implementation rate (%), based on the project-specific characteristics and the general framework conditions.

Analysis is meant to be repeated over time alongside the early stages of city planning or projects’ preparation process and can also serve as a stand-alone capacity building resource enabling a concise overview of new and innovative financing instruments and an interpretation of their mechanisms and areas of application.

The Recommendation-Decision Matrix tool has been developed in PROSPECT+, a capacity-building HORIZON 2020 project aiming at bringing together EU municipalities and empowering them to make more informed decisions on implementing their local energy and climate plans (e.g. SEAPs, SECAPs, etc.) by using the appropriate innovative financing schemes.