The European Covenant of Mayors turns 15

On 10 February 2009, 370 mayors gathered at the European Parliament to officially launch the Covenant of Mayors. They came together to commit to tackling CO2 emissions beyond the EU’s objectives for 2020, reducing them by at least 20% in their respective territories. Over these years, CINEA has strongly supported the Covenant of Mayors initiative providing EU funds for developing projects working on the development of local energy and climate action plans, and aiming to translate the EU Green Deal into local action.

The initiative was particularly supported under Horizon 2020, providing funding to projects such as:

• CEESEU, which has brought together 11 partners from 10 Central and Eastern European countries to build the capacity of public officers to develop Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAPs) and empower local governments to meet their energy and climate commitments.
• CoME EASY, that has linked and synthesised the many available instruments and tools supporting local authorities, in particular the Covenant of Mayors and the European Energy Award, with the aim of better assisting them to accelerate the energy transition at local level.

These two projects and many more are featured in a comprehensive CORDIS results pack “Local authorities leading the way towards decarbonising Europe”, focused on how regions cities and municipalities across Europe develop and realise their clean energy transition goals.

Nowadays, the LIFE Clean Energy Transition programme continues to support cities and regions’ endeavours and the Covenant of Mayors initiative. For instance, the recently started AT LAST project aims to structurally speed up and scale up the implementation of SECAPs across Europe, by focusing on small and medium-sized cities in in Belgium, Italy, Sweden and Netherlands.