Cities are key to how our urban economies respond to the challenges of climate change. As places where we live, work, and visit they are the central hubs for much human activity.  Urban environments face a number of challenges over the next few years: the need to upgrade 20^th century infrastructure; improving the energy efficiency of homes and public buildings;  managing the collection and dispersal of waste; reducing the reliance on carbon for individuals and businesses.

Since the 1970s Sweden has developed experience and expertise in Energy Planning. Over the last two years, experts from the city of Malmo and the Swedish Energy Authority have provided workshops, study visits,  case studies and mentoring for municipalities in the UK, Italy, Greece, Poland and Spain as part of the PEPESEC project.  Each of the cities involved has used this experience in planning Sustainable Energy Communities to develop their own energy plans.

This event provides an opportunity for anyone involved in energy planning in their municipality, and interested in how energy planning can contribute to the smart cities fo the future, to find out more.

This FREE event takes place on Wednesday 2^nd June 2010 at the Eurocities office in Brussels and is the final dissemination event of the PEPESEC project. The morning session will be a workshop on Sustainable Energy Communities, and the afternoon will be an opportunity to find out lessons learnt from the other partner cities on the project – and to talk about the next steps for collaboration.

ONLINE REGISTRATION

If you would like to attend or find out more information please register online or contact Adrian Slatcher at MDDA.

“The Energy and Environmental Technologies sector, recently renamed by BIS to the Low Carbon Goods and Services Sector is one of the region’s priority sectors.

The objective of the consultation exercise is to consult the public sector and industry in the region on the proposed sector strategy for the Low Carbon and Environmental Goods and Services sector. The responses from the consultation exercise will influence the content of the final strategy document.

Low Carbon and Environmental Goods and Services Sector Strategy – Consultation Draft

Low Carbon and Environmental Goods and Services Sector Strategy – Appendix Summary Segment Profile

We welcome all responses and please do respond if you support the strategy and have no further comments to make. However, we would particularly welcome comments on the following points:

1. Do you agree with the definition of the sector (Section 2.1)? Are there any technologies or services we should be including which are not covered by the strategy?
2. Do you agree with the key barriers to development (Table 8)? Are there any other market failures we should consider?
3. Do you agree with the Vision, aims, strategic objectives (Section 6)? If not, what would you suggest as alternatives?
4. Do you agree with the Strategic Framework and sub-sector priorities within the framework (Figure 5)? If not do you have evidence to support different priorities?
5. Do you agree with the suggested new actions? Are there any other activities we should consider for inclusion in the action plan and why?

Responses should be made by email to consultations@nwda.co.uk.

Helen Seagrave, Sector Development Manager – Energy and Environmental Technologies is the principal contact for any enquiries about the consultation.”

(Taken from NWDA website)

The platform contains  case studies, to enhance knowledge exchange on current developments and carbon saving potential in a range of solutions for smart buildings, smart grid and smart transport. The website extends  Smart2020 research to clarify where significant barriers to implementation remain and indicate, through analysis of concrete examples, how such barriers can be overcome. View the case studies here .

More case studies are still being sourced and please get in touch if you would like to be included.

For further information or queries please contact:
Molly Webb MWebb@theclimategroup.org or Emma Owen EOwen@theclimategroup.org

It can also be followed on Twitter: #gacc2009

The conference website is www.greenconnected.eu

Crain’s Manchester Business website reports that the new designation ” is expected to save 6 million tones of carbon, create an additional £650m to the economy and support 34,800 jobs.”

Homes and offices will be insulated, and smart meters installed – as well as a low carbon laboratory building on the expertise of the city’s research institutions.

You can read the full article on the Crain’s website here.

Manchester plans to reduce the city’s carbon emissions by 41 per cent by 2020 and has mapped out impressive plans including smart metering, radical changes to energy production, improved public transport and more energy efficient homes.

A new website promoting the vision has been launched to communicate the plan, and the actual document can be easily downloaded from here.

PEPESEC partners Manchester City Council and Manchester Knowledge Capital have been involved closely in the process of developing this plan over the last few months.

“Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June’s UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: “We can go into extra time but we can’t afford a replay.”

At the deal’s heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world’s biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of “exported emissions” so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than “old Europe”, must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature”.

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.”

‘Fourteen days to seal history’s judgment on this generation’ by The Guardian is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at guardian.co.uk.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/02/guardian-environment-team

A public website like this will surely provide a useful focal point for information about an urban centre’s progress.  In 2010 the FutureEverything conference plans to launch an initiative to make Manchester an “OpenData City” – so hopefully pulling together a wide range of information from a diverse range of partners.

“Cities can be seen as laboratories”, writes Drew Hemment, about the FutureEverything initiative and its something that MDDA embraces being  part of the European Network of Living Labs.

As part of MDDA’s work on PEPESEC we’ll be shortly providing more information about how “intelligent systems” can be useful for an urban area’s energy planning – and we’ll be  enhancing the Best Practice toolkit with other tools, information and case studies.

New features on the site include -:

• RSS feeds from COP15 site, the Guardian Environment and other sources (see lefthand column)
• Sign up to our RSS feed (sign up on right hand colum)
• Links to key websites of interest to city’s involved in Energy Planning (see PEPESEC bookmarks to the right)
• Publications section to easily find newsletters, Best Practice Guide and other PEPESEC publications (see top menu.)

Funded by the the EU’s Intelligent Energy program, the PEPESEC project has seen the Swedish model for Energy Planning disseminated to partners in the UK, Greece, Italy, Spain and Poland over the last two years.

A series of study visits took place, where energy planners from Malmo and the Skane Energy Agency provided workshops for local energy planning – and got to see some of the environmental initiatives in each municipality. In addition, local stakeholders were often invited along to engage with programme.

A best practice guide for Energy Planning has been developed and is now available as a finished version for your consideration. Over the next few weeks we will be making available more resources for you to use in your own energy planning programme – particularly tailored to the experiences of each country.

Please have a look at our Publications section to see newsletters, best practice guide, study visit, and useful templates that may be of use to you.

In addition a comprehensive “knowledge base” with over 170 case studies from around Europe is provided.

This website has recently been enhanced to be more outward facing – it now lets you sign up for “updates” via RSS (see the right hand column), which means you’ll get details of new articles added sent to you as an email.

In addition we have tried to bring in feeds from other useful sites such as the Guardian newspaper and the official COP15 site.

Part of PEPESEC’s role is to pilot the use of ICT as an aid in energy planning – and further “demonstrations” of this will be made available shortly. The majority of EU environmental websites don’t currently provide information in a feed that can be easily accessed using RSS – so we’ve added them as bookmarks.

If you’d like to contact us for more information about the project please find our details on the contacts page.

You browse the document using the Issuu reader below (click it go full screen).

If the Issuu reader is not showing below, you can download the Best Practice Guide as a PDF document.