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Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa has announced that his country has an upgraded sustainability transition goal, being carbon-neutral five years earlier than the Green Deal deadline of 2050. His..
The Lisbon Municipal Assembly approved the proposal to make public transport free to use for young up to the age of 18, higher-education students up to the age of 23 and for elderly residents above the age of 65.
The measure, which is seen as a tool “to combat climate change”, as indicated by the mayor of Lisbon, Carlos Moedas, will have a total annual cost of around 14.9 million euros, and should come into force in the coming months. The City will conclude an agreement with the public transit operator TML, which will extend the provision of free rides for the above-mentioned groups until 31 December 2025.
Social justice and decarbonization
The mayor of Lisbon is a firm advocate of the measure, which he sees as historic and as a way to make the Portuguese capital a model city in the fight against climate change.
"This step is social justice, it is justice for those who want to change the world and who really want to make the world better so that we have a planet we can live on. This measure is also justice in the decarbonization of the planet that we need so much, and this measure is to improve people's lives," he declared, as quoted by Jornal de Negocios.
We asked our followers where they wanted to see be pedestrianised. Is your hometown on the list?
La centrale au charbon de Sines au Portugal a été mise hors service hier soir (14 janvier) à minuit, laissant le Portugal avec une seule centrale au charbon en activité, dont la fermeture est prévue pour novembre.
Energy consumption at Lisbon’s historic City Hall has reduced by 36 percent through what has been hailed as the first deep energy-efficiency retrofit for a heritage building in Portugal. The achievement could pave the way for replication in other cities.
Interventions to reduce energy usage included replacing the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system, switching to LED lighting, installing solar panels and deploying advanced energy management tools.
Lisbon’s City Hall, which was completed in 1880 and is home to the Municipal Chamber of Lisbon, the Mayor and over 100 staff, was among the five most energy-consuming buildings owned by the municipality.
A city that changes
Now the time has finally arrived for local authorities to demonstrate that Lisbon has more than earned the award. According to member of the City Council for the environment José Sá Fernandes, the city was not chosen because it was the most environmentally friendly – rather because it had proven its ability to evolve and adapt.
Eddy Adams, URBACT Programme Expert investigates Cascais (PT) home to one of Europe’s most effective Participatory Budget (PB) models, awarded the URBACT Good Practice label for Bridging the Gap. The city is building on this through a range of further tools to support and encourage citizen participation.
Based on the experience developed over the past ten years in Lisbon, the Bip/Zip program is currently at the basis of the URBACT Transfer Network Com.Unity.Lab which aims at sharing the knowledge with other cities across Europe. In this article the different tools of the strategy are outlined.
With the neighbouring cities of Porto (PT) and Vila Nova de Gaia (PT), the city of Matosinhos (PT) is part of the Atlantic Front of Porto. The three municipalities have signed a “Letter of Commitment” as an inter-municipal tool for the implementation of the territorial policies’ strategy in key areas, based on an integrated approach.
In recent years cycling has entered the urban mobility agenda in many regions worldwide, demonstrating a growing policy and academic interest, pushed by a global commitment towards the transition to post-carbon societies.
Renewable energy sources made up 103.6 per cent of mainland Portugal’s electricity supplies last month, according to the energy sector.
During the same period last year, renewable energy was only able to meet 62 per cent of Portugal’s electricity needs.
Portugal has been a renewable leader since before 2016, when it broke records for running on renewable sources for 107 consecutive hours.
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The EU as a whole is aiming for 82 per cent clean power by the end of the decade but some member states are looking to go one step further.
Last week, the University of Minho (Portugal) organized a seminar called “Adaptation strategies for urban tourism in the face of climate change within a framework of post-pandemic opportunities”. What drew attention there was a study on climate change in the Porto Metropolitan Area done by geographer Hélder Lopes, who claimed that the city needs to create ‘climate shelters’ in order to withstand the impact of weather fluctuations.
Portugal’s new National Circular Cities Initiative, known as InC2(link is external), is designed to “support and empower municipalities and their communities in the transition to a circular economy”. To do so, it will bring URBACT’s participative methodology and capacity building to a wide range of municipalities throughout the country. The programme is financed by a EUR 1.5 million National Environment Fund over three years.
According to data collected by Eurostat, nearly one-fifth of Portugal's 10 million citizens admit to being unable to keep their homes adequately warmed, far more than the average 6.9 percent of the EU population that suffers from the same dilemma.
"Portugal is one of the EU countries with the greatest number of people who suffer from energy poverty," said João Pedro Gouveia, lead researcher at Nova University Lisbon's Center for Environmental and Sustainability Research. "People either spend huge portions of their money paying for heat, or adapt to the situation by going without it and wearing coats, hats and gloves indoors, living in conditions that people in the rest of Europe wouldn't tolerate in this day and age."
The Sines coal plant in Portugal went offline at midnight yesterday evening (14 January), leaving the country with just one remaining coal power station in operation, which is scheduled for closure in November. Portuguese energy utility EDP announced its decision to shut down the 1,296 MW Sines coal plant in July last year, bringing the closure forward by two years – from 2023 to 2021. EDP’s initial plans were to close Sines in 2030. The decision is “part of EDP group’s decarbonisation strategy” and was taken in a context where energy production increasingly depends on renewable sources, the company said back in July. The Sines coal plant in Portugal went offline at midnight yesterday evening (14 January), leaving the country with just one remaining coal power station in operation, which is scheduled for closure in November.
Lisbon’s municipal transport company, Carris, is working to increase the number of electric vehicles in the public transport system. A €252 million investment is foreseen to increase the fleet with 420 electric buses and 25 trams by 2023, to contribute to shifting 150,000 motorists to more sustainable modes of travel by the end of the decade.
In parallel, Lisbon has embraced micromobility as a last-mile solution, with 9 companies operating over 12,000 e-scooters in the Portuguese capital.
Carris, the company responsible for Lisbon’s public transport network, has launched its newest eco-friendly initiative – namely six buses, travelling along already established transport routes, running on biofuel, made out of recycled cooking oil.
The new vehicles were inaugurated just last week and through their new innovative power supply, they will be emitting 83% fewer carbon emissions.
The Action Plan for Sustainable Mobility in the Autonomous Region of Madeira (PAMUS RAM) was approved at the end of June. The Portuguese region is one of the locations in the CIVITAS DESTINATIONS project.
By Lise Desvallées The main result of the thesis is that situations of energy vulnerability are politicized by both new actors and traditional players in energy governance. I show how civil society activism gives rise to a right to energy, which is not enshrined in national legislation and which, under the pressure of new social movements, becomes an imperative for local communities. I then analyze the diffusion of programs targeting vulnerable households, based on a model that aims at reducing consumption and therefore limiting the number of unpaid energy bills. This experimental and inexpensive model meets the interests of organizations from civil society, local communities, energy suppliers and the households themselves who were already reducing their expenses.
The Portuguese government plans to invest 300 million euro by 2030 in the construction of new bike lanes, linking already existing ones, in order to encourage the use of bicycles at the expense of cars, as announced by the Minister of the Environment, Mr John Matos Fernandes. This is part of the so-called “Portugal Ciclável 2030”, an ambitious programme whose main objective is to identify potential connections to improve intra-urban cycling networks and build up/enlarge cycling facilities with particular reference to most isolated sections located at the outskirts of biggest agglomerations.
Under the Portuguese plan, about 60 percent of the funding will go to transport projects, with a focus on the railway network where the lack of investment has led to frequent strikes and widespread complaints from passengers. The plan is expected to include an upgrade of the main Lisbon to Porto route, plus improvements to suburban and regional lines.
About 15 percent of the funding for the investment program is expected to come from the state budget, according to Portuguese media reports, with most of the rest from private investment and EU funding.
Portugal's renewable electricity production exceeded monthly consumption for what is likely the first time, in March, according to the nation’s transmission system operator, REN.The average renewable generation for the month exceeded 103% of consumption, beating out the last record (99.2%), set in 2014. It almost certainly won't be the last time. The country i
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