Cross-Departmental Collaboration for Municipal Climate Action
On September 10th and 11th, representatives from BEACON municipalities in Poland, Romania, Czech Republic and Germany came together in Písek, Czech Republic to discuss how to engage with colleagues from across departments in the municipal administration on ambitious climate action. They addressed questions such as where do responsibilities lie in the individual municipalities and what mechanisms can help the present municipal representatives to engage/collaborate with colleagues across departments?
The workshop included reflections on the organisational charts of participating municipalities in country groups and discussions on where connections and communications channels to different departments could be improved when addressing climate action. Râmnicu Vâlcea (RO), Pirna (DE) and Bielawa (PL) presented on successful examples of climate change management in their administrations.
The participants also visited a school building renovated with the help of energy performance contracting and a new water treatment plant in Písek in which smart technologies are employed. This new plant uses 30% less electricity than the old plant and functions in part as a hydro power plant producing a portion of its own electricity.
Another workshop on this topic with BEACON’s Greek and Portuguese municipalities took place in June 2019. The BEACON team behind the Písek workshop included SEVEn (CZ), PNEC (PL), OER (RO), adelphi and Navigant.
