Girona’s municipalities are mainly small so lack the technical or financial capacity to carry out ISE on their own. BEenerGI will support these municipalities from technical, legal and financial points of view. So in the next three years 6.48 MEUR of investments will be mobilized to increase energy efficiency in street lighting in 65 municipalities and 9.40 MEUR will be mobilized in energy efficiency investments in 85 public buildings. BEenerGI specific objectives are: launching sustainable energy investments to strengthen innovative organisational models, establishing and promoting a new funding scheme, capacity building among all key actors involved and final beneficiaries, opening access to energy consumption data and communication of results across Europe. BEenerGI is innovative both for the organisation of project development assistance (PDA) and for its proposed financial engineering. Regarding PDA innovation, the project will join investments in at least 15 packages in order to make them bankable. Regarding the innovation of the proposed financing engineering, BEenerGI will encourage contracts between municipalities and ESCOs or Small and Medium Enterprises-Micro-ESCOs Local energy sector SMEs (local maintainers, local energy suppliers,..). In some cases, Ddgi will give a subsidy of 2 MEUR to municipalities (during the whole period) to make the planned investments in public buildings bankable and to decrease the payback of these investments. BEenerGI foresees using the monitoring system for energetic consumption already installed in Covenant municipalities as a monitoring tool to evaluate the impact and results of the project. BEenerGI will disseminate its results among Covenant Coordinators or other local authorities that want to replicate these innovative organizational models to mobilize bankable bundled IES.

"ON THE WAY TOWARDS A LOW-CARBON SOCIETY - Increasing professionalism in land use and landscape management within climate changeThe European Commission is looking for cost-efficient ways to make the European economy more climate-friendly and less energy-consuming. By 2050, the European Union could cut most of its greenhouse gas emissions. In this framework, the idea of a low-carbon society has been launched as an aim of future societies. According future scenarios and national strategies, a large number of environmental specialists are and will be needed for preventing climate change and achieving the aims of a low-carbon society.Nowadays, the problem is that the higher education sector does not have a direct relationship to working life which would be the best party concerned to mentor and direct educational structures in the field of environmental issues. Close cooperation between working life and education as well as working life based issues as threads of study structures would be a way to train environmental specialists able to respond to challenges of land use and landscape issues and, broadly, to challenges of a low-carbon society. The overall aim of the project is to create and empower higher education structures, which will achieve professionalism in the management of land use and landscape issues targeting the idea of a low-carbon society and, hence, preventing climate change.TowardsLCS is a consortium of nine partners from Finland, Poland and Spain including three academic institutions and six local, regional or national organizations (working life partners):FINLAND1. University of Eastern Finland2. Metsähallitus, the Parks & Wildlife Finland (national public body)3. Regional Council of North Karelia (regional public body)POLAND4. Adam Mickiewicz University5. Miejska Pracownia Urbanistyczna (Municipal Planning Office) (local public body)6. Zakład Zagospodarowania Odpadów (Waste Management Company) (enterprise)SPAIN7. University of Girona8. Landscape Observatory (consortium, advisory body)9. Girona Provincial Council (local public body)The project has highlighted environmental questions, which are real and present in land use and landscape planning and management at the local, regional and national levels. The project has empowered the local, regional and international cooperation between the university and working life partners and it has opened opportunities for further cooperation on the fields of higher education, regional development and research.The most important achievement of the project is the ""Towards Low-Carbon Societies Learning Platform and Study Modules"", see: http://towardslowcarbon.eu/. The platform is an open-access study area for the higher education and anybody who is interested about the idea of low-carbon society. It 1) offers information about low-carbon society 2) helps to design a low-carbon theme course in higher education and 3) in the frames of flipped learning, includes study materials before intensive course activities."

The technical and economic viability of sustainable energy projects is of great interest to public institutions, businesses and individuals due to the associated energy savings and the additional economic and environmental benefits. The EU has articulated numerous mechanisms to encourage the mobilization of investment in terms of sustainable energy, and in Spain there are currently several of them applied to finance such projects. However, there is a set of barriers that hinders a greater development of them, standing out the lacks of: - trust among investors in financial viability; - public and private capabilities in project structuring; and - emblematic successful cases that can be a reference model. ENERINVEST addresses those issues by creating a consulting platform which will provide financial, technical and legal solutions to sustainable energy, facilitating the dialogue among the different stakeholders involved. ENERINVEST aims to become the reference Spanish platform in the field of sustainable energy projects financing, which covers the existing gap between the financial sector and the sustainable energy sector, hence, promoting a higher and more efficient investment in sustainable energy projects. This work is translated in: - gathering and organizing all current information, regulation and existing financial models in Spain; - identifying and promoting successful cases of innovative financial models; - creating an e-platform with an assessment and meeting tool for preliminary market assessments; - establishing working groups with stakeholders to join forces for the promotion of financial mechanisms for the execution of sustainable energy projects; - developing communication activities of the platform to foster its visibility and disseminating the results The main interested parties in ENERINVEST’s activities and results are the following target groups: projects promoters; financial entities, investors and policy makers and other stakeholders in energy and financing.

Even popularly thought, landscapes are much more than visual sceneries. Instead, they are environments for dialog between nature and culture. The 2004 European Landscape Convention (ELC) is the first international treaty to be exclusively concerned with the protection, management and planning of all dimensions of landscape, and not restricted to exceptional landscapes but also considering everyday landscapes.The Landscape Approach (LA) is a bottom-up, collaborative and community-based approach to landscape planning and management, with the aim of balancing competing demands in a way that is best for human well-being and the environment. It means creating solutions that consider food and livelihoods, finance, rights, restoration and progress towards climate and development goals. LA opens opportunities to discuss and negotiate from the more concrete shared reality, with the outline of values, expectations and acceptable trade-offs for each type of user and stakeholder, in order to envision future landscapes upon the principle of non-regressive policies of the ELC.Living and thriving landscapes are increasingly related to wellbeing and quality of life, and the public administration cannot manage them with traditional sectoral thinking. Hence, many private corporations, NGOs, landowners and citizens, are developing or getting involved in experiences to regenerate or manage landscapes in environmentally friendly ways. It is a novel trend by which communities and stakeholders are gaining ownership over the spaces that conform the green and blue infrastructures of ordinary surroundings, but also a solution for endangered or highly valuable and very sensitive natural areas at international scale.Even if the ELC has affected the national landscape legislation, the basic ideas of the LA are seldom implemented in landscape practices. As a consequence, landscape remains prone to social conflicts, as landscapes’ multifaceted nature and multistakeholder legitimacy are insufficiently considered.The partners of the consortium are willing to tackle the question, how actors and stakeholders can collaborate into the governance of a landscape. Thus, the main aim of the project is to enhance landscape awareness and collaborative governance of cultural and natural landscapes through innovative learning interventions in higher education. The specific objectives of the project are:- To promote integrated landscape approach in land use and environmental management.- To enhance civic engagement to bring-on pro-environmental behavior towards every day landscapes and threatened landscapes.- To innovate in citizen science and participatory methods as tools for landscape planning and management.- To design innovative learning environments and interventions for landscape education in order to ensure collaboration and knowledge creation.The project activities will culminate in Learning Labs organized in the partner countries. In the Labs, HE students will be offered a close-up experience about community-based landscape planning, management, and conservation initiatives with stakeholders, like local authorities, environmentalist NGOs as well as local citizens. While working on concrete situations of action students are guided to collaborative knowledge creation together with stakeholders and generating new knowledge, skills and innovations.In addition to the main target group of HE students and teachers, the project recognizes other target groups, like policy-makers, local and regional authorities, environmental planners and managers, environmental NGOs and citizens.Expected results of the project have been foreseen into societal, scientific and educational results:Societal results:- Exploitation of integrated LA through interactive applications and participatory methods ease off the deployment of collaborative landscape governance- Awareness of landscape values increases and citizens are more engaged to act for their local landscapes- New knowledge and improved flow of communication between policy-makers, authorities and citizens- Citizen science application is an open-access tool for every interested userScientific results:- Contribution to the theoretical discussion of the holistic nature of landscape- The rise of the methodological awareness when studying landscape - Elaboration of the connection between the LA and the citizen science- Emphasis towards the idea of open scienceEducational results:- New transferable HE landscape education methodologies, applications and materials - Enhanced skills and competences of the students and teachers involved in the project activities- New pedagogical innovations based to the socio-constructivist learning theory- Increased ability of involved students to comprehend and act on the multifaceted processes of landscape governance- Innovative learning environments and interventions play significant role in landscape education

One of the principal challenges to reaching targets of the Energy Transition (ET) is to improve the coordination between local authorities and regional governments with the aim to enhance decision-making process, coherence and consistency of the implementation of energy transition measures (ETM). ePLANET will meet this challenge by encouraging the digitalization of measures and plans enabling an interoperable ecosystem of data and tools supporting energy transition decision making, putting it into practice by the public sector. ePLANET builds on an existing infrastructure enabling massive data gathering, making the data and measures comparable and interoperable with existing local initiatives (CoM, Clean Energy for EU Islands Initiative) and regional/national plans, analysing this data and offering relevant results to key stakeholders. This will enhance decision-making -more informed, more transparent and faster decisions-, contributing to improved monitoring and verification schemes. Enabling harmonisation of plans and interoperability across the local and regional authorities to joint application of ETM favouring more efficient use of public spending. ePLANET is a three-year project that will develop a proof of concept over three regional pilots (Girona, Crete and Zlín regions) during the first half of the project, to ensure the correct deployment of developed tools and to fit the real needs of public authorities in the energy transition. The rest of the project will focus on extending and implementing the ePLANET tools and methodology across Europe. To ensure new regions and local authorities’ engagement, the project will leverage existing initiatives (CoM and ManagEnergy) in which the project partners have strong influence (ICLEI and FED in particular).