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European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency
News article28 April 2021

EMPOWERING local authorities to shift towards a low carbon economy

EMPOWERING learning platform

The Horizon 2020 project EMPOWERING supported 85 municipalities in six EU regions to develop Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAP) in the framework of the Covenant of Mayors initiative. 

The project developed a learning platform featuring 10 recorded webinars explaining how to develop a SECAP in an easy-to-understand way. In addition, the learning platform offers useful tools such as a data collection template, Baseline Emission Inventory calculation and a forecasting tool, a Sustainable Energy Planning best practices map and a series of short tests challenging your knowledge on every planning step. The learning platform is available in English and some materials are also available in Croatian, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Romanian and Spanish.

An intensive training programme was implemented by the project for the participating local authorities, consisting of 52 local capacity-building workshops and 7 cross-border peer-learning exchanges and study visits on topics such as integrated energy, sustainable urban mobility, land use planning and innovative financing solutions.

With this targeted capacity-building approach, EMPOWERING successfully managed to push forward municipalities’ commitment to the new Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy with 32 new affiliates. 30 of these municipalities drafted the mitigation part of their SECAPs as a result of the project. In addition, 41 municipalities that were already signatories of the Covenant of Mayors upgraded their existing SECAPs.

Find out more about EMPOWERING’s results and visit the learning platform on their website

Details

Publication date
28 April 2021