Deadline Date: April 16, 2026
The European Union is advancing the transition to circular and sustainable cities and regions through initiatives that implement and upscale circular systemic solutions.
This initiative focuses on increasing circularity and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants across economic sectors, services, and product value chains at local and regional levels, ensuring efficient valorisation of local resources and positive effects on air, water, and biodiversity; promoting widespread deployment, replication, scalability, and visibility of circular systemic solutions to multiply economic, social, and environmental benefits; and enhancing collaboration and knowledge transfer between public authorities, companies, research bodies, and citizens to address environmental challenges such as climate change, resource depletion, and biodiversity loss.
The Circular Cities and Regions Initiative (CCRI) supports place-based innovation to accelerate skills, capacities, and solutions for circular systemic transitions at the city or regional level. Projects focus on moving from demonstration to deployment and upscaling via living labs, which serve as real-life innovation ecosystems engaging citizens, policymakers, academia, industries, start-ups, SMEs, social economy entities, and financial intermediaries. Proposals must adopt a multi-actor approach, establish effective governance, enable collaboration and coordination, and integrate socio-ecological perspectives with contributions from social sciences and humanities disciplines.
Selected cities and regions will serve as demonstrators for validating, testing, and optimizing circular systemic solutions, governance models, and business plans. The approach is sector-agnostic, allowing proposals to choose value chains based on local circular potential. Projects are also expected to support knowledge transfer and replication across Europe, providing actionable recommendations, identifying enabling frameworks, barriers, and enablers for successful scaling.
This destination aligns with EU priorities for quality of life, sustainable prosperity, and competitiveness, supporting the EU Green Deal, the Circular Economy Act, the EU Clean Industrial Deal, and the bioeconomy strategy. It aims to foster markets for secondary materials and sustainable products, enable innovative circular and bio-based solutions, and contribute to climate neutrality and strategic autonomy. Additionally, it supports industrial competitiveness, sustainable forests, water resilience, environmental justice, and social inclusion while excluding legal entities established in China from participation.
The expected impact of projects under this initiative includes improved climate adaptation and mitigation, enhanced industrial competitiveness and strategic autonomy through circular and bio-based value chains, improved living conditions through sustainable products and services, and advanced societal transformation incorporating social sciences, environmental justice, and gender equality. Projects are supported with a total budget of €10,000,000, with maximum EU funding around €5,000,000 per proposal.
For more information, visit EC.
