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Berlin is getting ready for a referendum on climate neutrality and moving the deadline from 2045 to 2030. Local officials believe that to be nigh impossible without incurring debt in the billions of e..
On October 27, Glasgow City Council unanimously backed a motion stating that women should be at the heart of all aspect of city planning, becoming the first city in the UK to embrace 'feminist urbanism'.
The main message I brought was that cities should be included in global policymaking on climate and the upcoming climate summits. Without cities, it will be impossible to tackle global warming. Moreover, cities want to lead the way. They facilitate innovation and have the capacity to invest on a large scale in clean mobility, green construction and creating a sustainable energy supply.
The starting point for Transition is that the future with less oil, and producing less carbon emissions, could be preferable to today.
As the effects of climate change become more apparent, the importance of action at the local level has never been clearer. So how can mayors who want to make their cities healthier, cleaner places overcome barriers to change? At a meeting of 16 global mayors convened in London by the climate-focused leadership group C40 Cities this week, Dr. Maria Neira, the World Health Organization’s director for public and environmental health, outlined six “prescriptions” for mayors aiming to deliver meaningful climate action to their citizens.
This policy paper by the Jacques Delors Institute, aims at drawing lessons from the French movement of the Yellow Vests for EU climate policy. It argues that Yellow Vests were not against the carbon price or climate action per se, they were against socially-unfair climate policy. The overall legitimacy and efficiency of the EU Green Deal would be strengthened if the polluter-pays principle is applied consistently, and if climate policies take into account people’s differentiated capabilities and responsibilities in the face of the climate crisis. The just transition is a narrow path that jointly addresses the climate and social emergencies and calls for renewed governance to better take into account daily realities of all citizens. If an EU carbon price on heating and road transport is eventually charged on EU citizens, mitigating risks of social backlash would require the adoption of : socially-fair price signals (e.g. remove exemptions for businesses, industry or aviation), more ambitious regulations (high Minimum Energy Performance Standards for existing buildings and CO2 standards for cars), adequate financing and technical assistance (sufficiently funded and frontloaded Social Climate Fund), and a more inclusive governance (mandate and support involvement of all stakeholders in the energy transition decision-making, include strong multi-level governance in the Social Climate Fund). These recommendations hold with or without ETS2 but become all the more important if ETS2 is adopted. Beyond the need to avoid social unrest, the “Fit for 55” climate package is above all a unique opportunity to implement a socially-just transition that would alleviate existing carbon inequalities, hence strengthening the EU social cohesion and future resilience.
Interview de Sylvain Godinot, 2eme adjoint au Maire de Lyon délégué à la transition écologique et au patrimoine.
The European Commission plans to unveil a €195 billion plan to stop importing Russian fossil fuels by 2027, combining a faster rollout of renewable energy and energy savings with a switch to alternative gas supplies, draft documents show. The draft measures, which could change before they are due to be published next week, are a follow-up to Commission plans outlined on 8 March after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Called REPowerEU, the March plan aimed to “eliminate” Europe’s dependence on Russian gas “well before 2030” and reduce the EU’s dependence on Russian gas by two thirds before the end of this year. The follow-up measures to be presented next week include a mix of EU laws, non-binding schemes, and recommendations national governments could take up, including by revising their plans to spend the EU’s huge COVID-19 recovery fund to free up more funding for the energy transition. The European Commission plans to unveil a €195 billion plan to stop importing Russian fossil fuels by 2027, combining a faster rollout of renewable energy and energy savings with a switch to alternative gas supplies, draft documents show.
Six cities (Barcelona, Istanbul, Velenje, Nuremberg, Vila Nova de Gaia, Eilat) offer suppliers €7.68 million to design, develop, and test an innovative Renovation Approach capable of generating Renovation Packages delivering 100% renewable energy supply (RES) to any existing non-residential building with adequate envelope quality. The Renovation Approach is to be tested through generating and implementing Renovation Packages for specific buildings in Buyers Group portfolios, the Demonstration Sites.
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So it’s possible to imagine that the city that Glaeser described in his book was not the city of the future, but a city that was already sliding into the past. If this is true, it has significant implications for the future of work.
Britain’s cities need urgent transformation in the next decade and beyond if the country is to meet its 2050 net zero targets and create cleaner, safer spaces for citizens, according to a major study from E.ON and the UK Green Building Council.
Brussels Capital Region will integrate a Citizens Assembly for Climate to help with green and sustainable policy. The assembly will have the power to control government decisions, ask for follow-ups a..
Les épisodes de fortes chaleurs et de canicules poussent les municipalités à revoir leurs aménagements urbains. Pour lutter contre le phénomène des îlots de chaleur, de plus en plus de villes décident de faire sauter le bitume, pour le remplacer par des espaces naturels, des parcs ou des forêts urbaines. Alors que le béton et le bitume emmagasinent la chaleur et la restituent la nuit, les sols naturels restent plus frais et conservent l’humidité. Novethic a sélectionné cinq exemples de villes qui restaurent la nature.
Buildings are in the spotlight as the EU contemplates a long, hard winter on the back of an energy price crisis intensified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Already the EU’s ‘Fit for 55’ climate package aimed to double renovation rates by 2030 and pioneer minimum energy performance standards for buildings. The REPowerEU proposals – issued in response to the Russian invasion – complement this with a solar rooftop plan and raise the EU’s overall energy efficiency goal for 2030 from 9% to 13%.
Citizen participation? Hell no! is a game created originally by Christophe Gouache for the Active Citizens’ URBACT action planning network. The game was created based on the long experience of Strategic Design Scenarios on citizen participation, forms of participatory approaches, social innovation and design for policy projects, initiatives, action-research processes, etc. SDS has worked for more than 10 years together with elected officials and civil servants, hearing a lot of comments, arguments, explanations from some people which justify their non-engagement towards more participatory processes…
According to a report by Le Soir, yesterday, the mayor of Etterbeek, a district in the Brussels Capital Region, stated that local authorities needed to find more funds for green projects. Mayor Vincent De Wolf explained that the COVID-19 pandemic has left many municipal coffers empty and ill-equipped to finance important climate change policies.
This is why he proposed a loan scheme, where private citizens will be able to invest in their local governments, specifically for sustainability projects. The scheme he outlined showed that the money would be invested into the city for a period of 5 to 8 years and promised a 1.5% to 2% dividend rate.
The idea of tapping into citizen wealth, specifically for green projects is fairly unexplored, however, there are a few prominent examples from the European Union. One of the most successful case studies involves the city of Vienna and their scheme to sell shares from photovoltaic plants.
The basic idea behind that plan is to let citizens share the climate transition period and become an active part of it. On the one hand, it’s a way for the city to source quick funds and on the other, citizens who cannot make their own PV systems can take part in the green transition.
In order to be climate neutral by 2050 and to fulfil its 2030 climate targets, Europe needs more green investment. Although total European climate investment is on the rise, thanks in part to the EU’s recovery fund, businesses, households and governments must spend more on green energy, infrastructure and energy efficiency. But Europe’s fiscal rulebook risks holding such investment back, and some highly indebted countries cannot increase debt much further. In this new Centre for European Reform policy brief, ‘How to make EU fiscal rules compatible with net zero’, Claudio Baccianti of Agora Energiewende, and Christian Odendahl European economics editor at The Economist and former chief economist of the CER calculate the spending needed for the EU to meet its climate goals and propose a reform to its fiscal rules that would allow for this.
Helsingborg has set a target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2035 and its authorities are so serious about it that they have issued sustainability-linked bonds. The performance indicator for that financial instrument will be the trajectory of the municipal emission reduction rate in the following years. The goal of the bonds is to attract capital for the carrying out of bolder and more expansive green initiatives so that increased quality of life and a healthier environment will be brought about. The action makes Helsingborg the first municipality to try this approach.
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