Thomas Osdoba’s (M.A. ’88) rural roots trace back to a farm outside tiny Minnesota Lake (current population 658), roughly 20 miles south of Mankato.

Today however, this former Minnesota farm kid calls Angers, France, home. It where he’s directing an ambitious European Commission program to fight global warming called NetZeroCities. The effort’s daunting goal is to achieve climate neutrality—which means net zero carbon emissions— for more than 100 European cities by 2030.

To track Osdoba’s career path, a good place to start might be the U of M’s Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Osdoba earned his bachelor’s degree in economics in 1986 from St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, knowing he was interested in public service, but not exactly what kind. He then enrolled at Humphrey, where he earned an M.A. in public affairs in 1988, to help find answers.

“When I started at Humphrey, I didn’t know that I had a particularly strong interest in sustainability or even environmental policy,” Osdoba says. “I would say growing up on a farm where biodiversity was still a thing, and having lots of access to nature, were [areas] that I had a passion for when I was a kid, but it wasn’t driving me to that field of study.” But then two things happened.

First, Osdoba was selected as one of four students for an internship with the City of Minneapolis to help develop plans for the city’s recycling program. “That created a bit of a trajectory where I got increasingly exposed to environmental policy conversations,” he says. “I took some environmental policy courses. And then, just as I was finishing in 1988, the Brundtland Commission Report on Sustainable Development came out.”

The Brundtland Report, named after the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development chair Gro Brundtland, laid out a strategy for uniting development with the environment. Osdoba read the report, concluded that its concept of “sustainable development” made perfect sense, and has committed his professional life to it ever since.

After graduating, Osdoba spent nine years with the state of Minnesota on an initiative to clean up Superfund sites. Then, when former wrestler Jesse Ventura “shocked the world” by winning Minnesota’s gubernatorial election in 1998, Osdoba was unsure about his future. He decided to head to Oregon without a job.

Though perhaps risky, it turned out to be a great decision. Osdoba built a network there and started consulting. Some of the people in his new circle were from Vancouver, Canada, which was planning to launch a new municipal office and sustainability initiative and needed a manager. Osdoba got the job and led that effort for nearly three years.

He then headed back to the U.S. For the next decade, he headed a variety of offices and programs focused on sustainable development. At the end of 2017, Osdoba was in Washington, D.C., working as director of green initiatives for an organization called Enterprise Community Partners. ECP works to advance equity through affordable housing, and Osdoba’s job was to integrate sustainability into affordable housing development.

At a conference, a friend introduced him to a visitor from London-based Climate-KIC, the European Union’s largest public-private partnership addressing climate change through innovation. Climate-KIC was looking for a senior adviser to work with cities on climate and Osdoba got the job. He began working at Climate-KIC in London in February 2018 as the European Commission was talking about ambitious “moonshot” ideas to address climate change.

“When I got there, I had a conversation with our CEO who said, ‘What if they had a mission like [the space initiative] for cities on climate change?’ It was really in response to that question that I designed a program to help cities in a much more expansive way, being more aggressive around policy, around citizen engagement, around finance, so they can radically increase the pace of work they’re doing to reduce greenhouse gases.”

In 2020, the EC launched its ambitious “European Green Deal” program, which set out policy initiatives aimed at achieving climate neutrality for the entire bloc by 2050. The EC created an advisory board to identify specific ways to achieve that goal, and turned to Osdoba and his colleagues. “We’d been experimenting with about 10 cities on how to do this, and [the EC] launched this big mission in 2021 to pick a hundred cities in Europe that would try to work in this way. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since,” Osdoba says.

Osdoba now heads NetZeroCities, an EU-funded collaborative platform of 33 European organizations supporting the European Mission for 100 “Climate Neutral and Smart Cities” by 2030. Today 112 cities, from Amsterdam to Zagreb, have adopted the aggressive goal of achieving climate neutrality by the end of this decade.

NetZeroCities says it works as a “one-stop shop” for participating cities, helping them find ways to foster systemic change, social innovation, and heightened citizen engagement.

Can they reach their goal? Even Osdoba has his doubts—though he believes a few of the cities will. One impediment, he says, is cultural. As an American, Osdoba is accustomed to cities being drivers of innovation. In Europe, however, he believes that local government generally feels dependent on its respective federal government. That means one big challenge is to “get national governments to really empower cities to do more and give them the authority to take action.” The problem is that “a lot of national governments are not necessarily as aligned with this ambition as they were two years ago,” he says.

Even if NetZeroCities doesn’t reach its goal, Osdoba believes the program is valuable. First, he says, it is making progress in a variety of ways, including lowering the costs of renewable energy. It’s also demonstrating that much more ambitious programs are needed.

“Climate action that seeks to preserve any chance of avoiding the worst scenarios depends on our ability to move away from a fossil-fuel-based economy faster,” he says. “A hundred European cities driving this only makes sense if we understand this can help the rest of the world move faster as well.”

Dick Dahl is a freelance writer based in the Twin Cities.

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