Until now, most of the municipalities prepared their Sustainable Energy Action Plan (SEAP) and Sustainable Energy Climate Action Plan (SECAP) with external assistance and are not directly involved in the preparation process, and, in the end, they do not feel like “owners” of the plan. This highly influences the implementation of the SECAP afterwards. In the meantime, there are leading and experienced municipalities in energy and climate planning, however, their number is yet too small and higher effort needs to be put to bring the other municipalities up to their level, especially small and medium municipalities. Moreover, one of the most crucial barriers identified by all municipalities is the lack of an energy manager.
To address these issues, Own Your SECAP is building on resources developed in previous projects such as 50000&1 SEAPs working on the topics of energy management and action plan standards and the Compete4SECAP project that organised municipal energy-saving competitions.
To address the barriers identified by the municipalities and all previous works on the subjet, the Own Your SECAP project aims at:
To directly engage 44 municipalities to develop or upgrade their Sustainable Energy Climate Action Plan (SECAP) with ambitious targets of climate neutrality in 2050 and highlighting measures that have double (mitigation and adaptation) and triple effects (mitigation, adaptation, and energy poverty),
To directly empower at least 44 municipalities to implement their SECAPs by:
institutionalising integrated energy planning in their municipalities,
fully employing and certifying energy management systems (EnMS) and expanding EnMS with procedures on climate adaptation,
digitalising energy and climate monitoring through the use of a user-friendly ICT Energy Monitoring Platform for reliable data collection,
creating clear governance structures to implement the plans,
organising different capacity building and peer-to-peer (P2P) activities, including tailored-made assistance, discussion platforms for policy makers and public officers, replication and best practices,
investing into sustainable energy and climate actions.
To gain support and resources for the implementation of 528 SECAP measures to ensure further systematic approach in the implementation of the SECAP measures,
To empower at least 66 replication municipalities through dedicated peer-to-peer activities to replicate part or all the OwnYourSECAP activities, including SECAP and/or EnMS development and/ or implementation, etc.,
To ensure specific territorial focus on innovative processes addressing climate-mainstreaming in municipal budgets of 88 municipalities, i.e., applying carbon budgets and earmarking and tracking resources for climate actions in the municipal budgets,
To ensure that at least 400 stakeholders across Europe with an intrinsic interest or mandate to capacitate local authorities are directly and qualitatively informed on the OwnYourSECAP guidance,
To disseminate to at least 500,000 persons out of the target groups the experiences on implementing SECAP measures, EnMS, capacity and guidance materials developed to enable European-wide replication,
To demonstrate that quality management and certification schemes for better energy performance (energy efficiency and renewable energy) as well as integrated energy and climate planning and management can capitalise on synergies and scale in the public sector to the benefit of local authorities and its stakeholders, particular, Signatories, Supporters and Coordinators of the CoM,
To reduce energy waste and related CO2 emissions, increase the share of renewable in the generation of energy for final consumption, realise cost savings as well as socio-economic and environmental benefits, including climate adaptation, thereby moving towards a coherent transformation of municipal energy systems.
EnMS are based on the voluntary international standard « ISO 50001 » to address energy use and consumption, measurement, documentation and reporting of energy use and consumption, design and procurement practices for energy-using equipment, systems and processes, and finally development of an energy management plan and other factors affecting energy performance that can be monitored and influenced by the organisation.
« Design thinking is a mindset, a process and a mechanism for addressing “wicked social problems” (the complex and multifaceted sociocultural and economic challenges that are difficult to solve – e.g., poverty, income disparity, sustainability, and financial crisis) and exploring possible futures. »
Design thinking will ensure that all the involved parties, including politicians, will fully understand the problems that the municipality faces, will explore a wide range of workable solutions, test and implement them not only in the target municipality but also in other municipalities.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Life funding instrument for the environment and climate action under grant agreement no 101077109. The sole responsibility for the content of this website lies with the OwnYourSECAP project and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Union.
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