LG Action panel discusses local initiatives during alternative energy conference in Sofia
By Nathan Johnson
At the South-East European Forum on Energy Efficiency, Renewable and Waste Management, held in Sofia, Bulgaria on April 13-15, LG Action organised a panel discussion and workshop for local and regional authorities titled 'Low-Carbon Communities: Mayors Meet Opportunities'. Seven panellists from Belgium, Bulgaria (two speakers), Hungary, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia each brought unique perspectives to show the many ways that local governments, whether at municipal or regional level, are vital components for generating macro-level shifts towards energy-efficiency, smarter waste-disposal mechanisms (such as waste-to-energy), recycling and reduced consumption. Successful shifts in some or all of these areas of concern will not only contribute to environmental sustainability, but are also important factors in creating a better quality of life for millions of European citizens.
LG Action advocates taking proactive measures, urging local governments to "take key steps and take on more responsibility in climate protection and local energy security, [to] increase their support from national governments to contribute to a coherent framework across the EU and feed into the national, European and international climate and energy debate." As a small part of what was a very large three-day event in Sofia, featuring some 96 high-level speakers from 28 countries discussing a broad range of topics, the LG Action panel helped to provide concrete examples of practice from across Europe. These examples show not only how much can be accomplished, but also how much remains to be done.
'Eco + Logical = Ecological'
Providing an example of a small-scale project that has proved an unqualified success, Slovenian architect Slavko Gabrovsek spoke about his heading of a project to design Slovenia's first low-energy elementary school largely from materials of a pre-existing structure. Working with a privately funded budget of EUR 5.6 million, Gabrovsek's team partly demolished a 4,000-sqm school building in the community of Brezovica, just outside Ljubljana.
Following demolition, materials were sorted for re-use to, in Gabrovsek's words, "ensure the presence of the old in the new." To make the new building more energy efficient, jutting angles and isolated or exposed sections of the old structure were eliminated. Walls and ceilings were made air-tight with insulation and thermal wrapping, and solar panels were installed for heating water. Because of heat recuperation and other factors, water consumption in the reconstructed school has fallen from 200 cubic metres per month to around 80.
Gabrovsek's elementary school project, with its emphasis on re-use of materials and energy reduction, is not only an example best practice within the 'waste hierarchy' model, but is an educational facility in more than one sense: visitors to the school, whether public authorities, builders or students, can study it as a model for future retro-fit or construction projects in their communities. And, incidentally, the school project coasted home well under budget, spending only EUR 4.4 million of the allocated total amount, proving that such projects are often more economically viable than one might think.
City limits
While it's no small accomplishment to procure private funding to radically transform a piece of existing infrastructure and provide a model for future development, it's quite another matter to locate funding and marshal support to steer an entire municipality or city in a new, more sustainable direction. Two of the LG Action panellists spoke about their efforts to effect citywide change.
Burgas, Bulgaria
Burgas is Bulgaria's fourth-largest city by population, and home to the largest oil refinery in South-Eastern Europe. Stilyana Mihaylova spoke about current efforts to tackle challenges that her city faces. In 2009, Burgas joined the Covenant of Mayors, which is a "mainstream European movement involving local and regional authorities, voluntarily committing to increase energy efficiency and use of renewable energy sources on their territories ... Covenant signatories aim to meet and exceed the European Union 20% CO2 reduction objective by 2020."[1]
The main environmental issue in Burgas is air pollution. Even with the refinery continuing its day-to-day operations, significant reductions in energy consumption and related pollution can be achieved in the public- and residential building sector, and by working towards new public transport solutions. The former provides significant challenges: a database needs to be developed to identify those residential buildings can benefit most from retrofitting to reduce energy use and loss. Also, normalised standards need to be established so that existing and future building can be 'retooled' to fit household consumption levels. To make transport in Burgas more sustainable, the city plans to introduce natural-gas buses and encourage carpooling in order to reduce the use of personal cars. Finally, monitoring of air-quality is to be carried out in problem areas throughout the city.
City officials are working on a plan to carry out these activities, but they will require the involvement of citizens and businesses alike, and this can only occur through extensive awareness-raising. A citywide Energy Awareness Week is part of this strategy. Financing for these efforts comes from a variety of sources: international organisations such as the EEF and UNDP, national campaigns such as Beautiful Bulgaria, and the state budget.
Bydgoszcz, Poland
Katarzyna Napierala participated in the LG Action panel to discuss her home city of Bydgoszcz, Poland, which lies between Gdansk and Warsaw. Like other cities that have joined the Covenant of Mayors, Bydgoszcz committed itself to a CHC-emission reduction target of 20% by 2020. This is an ambitious goal for a city that grew its emissions and carbon footprint from 2005-2009, and it is indeed unlikely that the 20% target will be reached by 2020: but Budgoszcz will likely come very close, and this is no small achievement. With projected emission cuts of 2.8% in the government sector and 16% in the community sector, the city will likely fall short by just 1.2%. If there is a lesson to be learned here and applied in a wider context, it's that setting ambitious goals can lead both to impressive results and the desire to do even more.
With co-funding from LIFE+ and Italian Local Agenda 21, the city of Bydgoszcz is working towards achieving several goals, including a GHG inventory, economic impact report, mitigation and action plan, and integration plan. The city is developing fuel, energy and waste-management inventory.
Napierala highlighted some of the many lessons learned in the process of carrying out these efforts, among which are cooperation with local and state authorities, capacity building (both at administrative and NGO levels), consultation, expert assistance and achieving compliance with EU standards and laws.
Coast-effective
Communities and cities are, of course, merely components of national, regional and continental - even global - infrastructures. Other types of programmes and strategies are needed to implement sustainable development practices over broad geographic and demographic swathes in as short a time as possible, given the nature and gravity of today's climatic and environmental threats.
One organisation taking a regional approach to address these problems is the Black Sea Regional Authority, established in 1992. This organisation comprises 21 Bulgarian municipalities on the Black Sea Coast. According to Milena Nalbancheva, the Authority is committed to carrying out a number of important and difficult tasks, including: developing a legal infrastructure for local authorities to address environmental concerns; providing high-quality services to members; supporting economic development for municipalities through grants and projects; establishing links with partner municipalities; building a network with other countries, institutes and foreign NGOs; and achieving sustainability as an organisation.
Nothing wasted
Hara Xirou from the Brussels-bases Association of Cities and Regions for Recycling Sustainable Resource Management (ACR+), used the 'waste hierarchy' model to help illustrate and measure the progress of recent European efforts to recycle more while, at the same time, generate less waste.
The 'waste hierarchy' is a schema for illustrating various approaches to waste management: i.e. strict avoidance of waste generation (best), reduction at source, re-use, preparation for re-use, recycling, other recovery (e.g. energy), and disposal or landfilling (worst). It should be noted that today's richer and more technologically advanced countries have the capacity to deal more effectively with waste (through either recycling or waste-to-energy schemes, etc.), but these societies also generate more waste; conversely poorer, less advanced countries produce far less waste, but can be severely affected nonetheless because of lack of capacity to deal with the waste that is generated. In other words, waste generation and disposal is everyone's concern.
Xirou mentioned that municipal waste is responsible for 5% of total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The EU has set a strict recycling target of 50% for Member States by 2020, and this poses a great challenge to local authorities, especially as there are two controversial issues that need to be addressed. The first involves the efficacy of long-distance shipping of recycling waste, while the second concerns achieving a balance between recycling versus potential energy recovery from combustible waste. In any case, all municipal attempts at waste management should aspire to follow the 'waste hierarchy' approach insofar as possible, and recycling and composting are particularly high on urban agendas, Xirou said.
Strength in numbers
Judit Balint, from the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Easter Europe (REC), detailed LG Action objectives during a panel discussion two days earlier that focused on waste management. Balint stressed the need for commitment from local governments and the importance of keeping money flowing through local economies.
As new Member States will produce more waste than before, LG Action is focusing on energy and renewables as key points of EU-wide awareness-raising. Local government bodies will have to take on some great responsibilities in responding to present and future challenges. Among new Member States, this includes moving away from landfill-type solutions towards cleaner alternatives, as well as confronting the problem of border dumping - a practice that allows richer countries to unload their waste in neighbouring, poorer countries, and one which also skews official statistics.
LG Action is doing its part to mobilise local governments, having gathered 2,418 signatories to the Covenant of Mayors. LG's Climate Catalogue provides data for 3,200 cities and there are now 387 separate action plans completed or underway. Further data, several articles and detailed looks into 30 separate case studies are available on the LG Action website.
[1] http://www.eumayors.eu/index_en.html
