Overview of the project

Bridging European and Local Climate Action (BEACON) is a project promoting climate action and facilitating exchange between national governments as well as municipalities and schools in Europe.

Through joint learning, networking and tailored advisory services, policy-makers, municipal actors and educators will gain technical and process-related skills that help them develop, refine and implement measures for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Good practices of successful emission reduction measures will be disseminated based on an EU-wide analysis of successful national climate protection instruments with a focus on the buildings, transport, small industrial installations and agriculture sectors.

Furthermore, good practices on the local level will be identified and shared in a network with regular meetings of 34 municipalities from the Czech Republic, Romania, Greece, Poland, Portugal and Germany.

Back home, participating municipalities will receive technical support and on-the-job coaching for transferring good practices and successfully implementing them in their local context.

Also, five city partnerships on climate action will be promoted within the network. To increase awareness about climate change and action on the individual level, educational institutions in the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria and Germany will be involved in the project.

The project team will analyse school curricula and climate action in existing educational programs, develop incentive models for energy saving and energy saving action plans in schools, as well as conduct workshops, trainings and study tours to Germany for educators from participating schools in partner countries.

On behalf of the German Ministry for the Environment, the project is carried out by a consortium of 11 organisations with Navigant, adelphi and the Independent Institute for Environmental Issues coordinating the work from Germany and Energy Cities acting as a network partner. The local implementation of the project across Europe is ensured by SEVEn (Czech Republic), the Association of Municipalities Polish Network “Energie Cités”, Energy Cities Romania, Environ Association (Romania), National Trust Ecofund Bulgaria, Institute of Social Sciences – University of Lisbon (Portugal) and the Centre for Renewable Energy Sources and Saving (Greece).