Sustainable Energy and Covenant of Mayors in our Cities

• Workshop Programme and Presentations [EN / HU]

46 participants - including representatives from 27 municipalities - attended the fruitful one day workshop. The workshop was conducted in both Hungarian and English, with simultaneous translations. 

The key objectives of the workshop were to: 

• Show local authorities interested in local sustainable energy use the clear opportunities and benefits the Covenant of Mayors initiative represents for them. Furthermore, it set out to prove that it is advantageous to implement this initiative within the national conditions.
• Build the capacities of participating cities to allocate sufficient human resources, to develop and implement local Sustainable Energy Action Plans, to involve local stakeholders and citizens and make use of the experiences of Covenant signatories.
• Find solutions for the smooth implementation of the Covenant initiative within the national and regional context in Hungary – inform potential “supporters” about the initiative and encourage them to become “Covenant Supporting Structures”.  Establish a foundation for permanent networking among cities and their partners.

Representatives of local authorities (e.g. Budapest, Veszprem, Tata – 3 out of the 4 current signatories of the Covenant were present as well as many others), energy agencies (ENEREA - a regional energy agency), ministries (Ministry of Development), as well as consultancy and private companies participated in the workshop. ENEREA and its regional authority (North-East Hungary) are potential future Covenant Supporting Structures in Hungary and expressed their interest in cooperating with the initiative.

Participants were given a series of concrete examples on the different steps required to effectively meet the Covenant commitments and particularly appreciated the logical structure of the whole process. The adaptation phase for example, with the creation of adequate administrative structures and the allocation of human resources – such as the so-called “Covenant Coordinators” – paves the way for an accurate development of Baseline Emissions Inventories (BEI) and Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SEAP), in cooperation with local actors and citizens.

The experience of local municipalities (Tata) and the regional energy agency (ENEREA) encouraged other local authorities to deal strategically with energy issues in their municipalities and, as a next step, join the Covenant.