Sustainable Energy Transition: Local Governments as Key Actors

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of the motivation for local climate and energy action, exploring the role of local governments in dealing with climate change and energy, and relevant developments impacting on them. Local climate and energy action is essential to achieving sustainable development, mapping the sustainable energy transition, and improving resilience in a changing world. Municipalities around the globe are engaging in this area, following a similar basic approach, which ICLEI has captured in its GreenClimateCities process methodology. They are exploring how to shape their communities’ future, map the transition pathway, and find innovative ways to make their cities and towns liveable and resilient. Access to affordable, clean energy is essential to achieve good quality of life—not only for citizens with their daily needs, but also to provide services and goods, and to make businesses and industries viable and successful. Sustainable energy is also important when exploring sustainable development, ensuring energy for electricity, as well as heating or cooling is reliably provided, and affordable for all. The multiple additional benefits, such as improved air quality and health, reduced or avoided greenhouse gas emissions, and creation of new employment opportunities, are what makes this transition so interesting. Many local governments address these aspects in their communities and in their own governmental operations. Yet they do not work in isolation. A key action partner, they also (need to) work in synergy with their national governments and other governmental levels (state, region, province), each with its specific mandate and role when addressing climate and energy. There is a need for communication, interconnecting, and acting in cooperation between all government levels. This is a new area of exploring intra-governmental coordination in many countries, where traditionally a top-down approach is followed that does not necessarily ensure an optimal approach. Developments in the area of climate that have impacted on local governments are presented in this chapter, including the recently successfully concluded Local Government Climate Roadmap—a major global advocacy process that also explored multilevel governance as a cooperation model while mobilising local governments to engage in local action. These issues are addressed in the conference session “Sustainable energy communities—local action, local impact”.