The Climate Transition Strategy of the city of Brescia (Italy)

Abstract

<abstract> <p>To build climate-neutral, and at the same time sustainable and highly resilient cities, it is necessary to act on their infrastructures and activities that take place in them, which constitutes an operation that requires activating a long and pervasive planning process based on a highly integrated use of the intervention tools available to a municipality. Furthermore, it is necessary to have a specific tool which, in addition to structuring actions to counteract climate change, stimulates and coordinates this integration. A voluntary tool that has established itself in European cities committed to combating climate change is the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP), which, subsequently and as a complement to the Sustainable Energy Action Plan, was promoted by the European Union to contribute from below to policies to counter climate change. Currently, one or both instruments have been adopted by around 8,000 municipalities or groups of municipalities. Furthermore, in recent years another tool has been emerging, which is often developed to replace or complement the SECAP to increase the effectiveness of the Municipalities' actions to combat climate change. This new tool, which has taken on different names, is referred to here as Climate Transition Strategy. The experience of the elaboration and the initial implementation of the Climate Transition Strategy of Brescia (Italian municipality of 200,000 inhabitants) is critically described, which was activated together with SECAP to achieve higher levels of mitigation and adaptation to climate change. In particular, the theoretical-methodological characteristics and the initial implementation of this strategy are described, comparing them with the performances required for the adoption of the SECAP and with the experiences that have been had with the latter tools. In this way, the performance of this new tool was compared with that of a consolidated and constantly evolving tool.</p> </abstract>