Context
Barcelona has consistently positioned itself at the forefront of urban sustainability and climate action in Europe. Since 2002, the city has implemented successive ten-year Sustainability Action Programmes and promoted the Citizens’ Commitment to Sustainability, mobilising public authorities, civil society, businesses, and educational actors around shared climate goals. This long-term trajectory was further reinforced in 2024, when Barcelona’s participation in the European Mission 100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030 was formally endorsed through the approval of its Climate City Contract by the European Commission.
Achieving climate neutrality, however, is not only a matter of infrastructure or regulation; it requires profound social and cultural change. Barcelona City Council therefore places strong emphasis on empowering citizens as agents of change and fostering a shared culture of sustainability. This vision is embodied in the Let’s Change for Climate Plan, which aligns municipal programmes, services, and resources with the city’s climate objectives.
As the scope and diversity of sustainability initiatives expanded, a critical challenge emerged: the absence of a unified framework to monitor, evaluate, and demonstrate their real impact. This project was conceived to address that gap and to provide the robust, harmonised evidence base required for transformative climate governance.
Objectives
The project has a clear strategic ambition: to ensure that Barcelona’s efforts to promote sustainability culture translate into measurable, meaningful, and lasting social change. Its first objective is to define a shared Theory of Change for all municipal services aimed at fostering sustainability awareness, knowledge, and action, explicitly linking day-to-day activities to long-term climate outcomes.
Second, the project establishes a harmonised indicator and monitoring system capable of delivering real-time, reliable evidence on performance, reach, and impact. This system enables the City Council to assess whether the conditions for behavioural change are being created and whether citizens are effectively adopting more sustainable habits.
Third, the project strengthens institutional capacity by embedding a strong data culture within municipal technical teams. Through training, coordination, and shared tools, teams are empowered to generate, manage, and interpret data consistently.
Finally, the project supports evidence-based decision-making, enabling continuous improvement of programmes and a more efficient and strategic allocation of public resources. In doing so, it transforms monitoring from a purely administrative exercise into a central lever for climate action and public value creation.
Implementation
The project has delivered a fully harmonised, city-wide data reporting and analysis system for sustainability culture services, progressively implemented through a phased and adaptive approach. Municipal teams report their activities on a monthly basis using a standardised Excel template that captures key variables such as thematic focus, type of activity, target audiences, participation figures, satisfaction levels, and operational characteristics. This approach ensures consistency while accommodating the diversity of services and programmes involved.
All reported data are consolidated into a single dataset and visualised through Power BI within the City Council’s knowledge management intranet. This enables dynamic analysis and comparison across programmes, departments, districts and time periods, providing strategic and operational insights. The system supports continuous quality improvement by allowing teams to refine data entry practices and progressively expand the range of indicators collected.
By 2025, the system covered 706 different types of activities and registered 560 927 impacts, representing a 20% increase compared to the previous year. For the first time, Barcelona has a comprehensive and comparable overview of how sustainability culture services reach citizens across the city. These results directly inform internal decision-making and annual Climate Plan reporting, while embedding learning, accountability, and adaptation into everyday municipal practice.