Local Management for Climate Change Response: October 2011

The windmill farm just outside Liepaja rising around us while driving towards the UBC IX General Conference awoke a perfect positivism inside just before the CHAMP regional final conference in Liepaja. The purpose of our trip was to participate in the UBC General Conference as a CHAMP delegation and conduct the regional final conference of CHAMP in the Baltic Sea Region.

The three year CHAMP project is moving closer to the end. October 4th – 7th in connection to the UBC IX General Conference, the CHAMP BSR final conference was held in form of two workshops. The first workshop on Success stories of Local climate change work in the Baltic Sea Region gathered Finnish CHAMP cities Lahti and Kotka to present and share their success stories. Besides hearing about the good practices and development in CHAMP cities, another theme was cooperation.

Swedish Climate Municipalities introduced their activities in supporting Swedish municipalities to a joint effort towards success in climate work. As a comment speech of parallel action in Finland the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities, also a CHAMP partner, shared their experiences from their Climate Campaign. At the same time one of the new initiatives connecting cities and the signature of the Covenant of Mayors, NET-COM Networking the Covenant of Mayors was presented.

It is clear that cooperation is also needed in future, but how? In our opinion it will be in form of the European Partnership for Integrated Sustainability Management, launched in June this year. The partnership will consist of Training hubs offering support and IMS trainings to local and regional authorities,

Quoting a famous business quote and Pekka Salminen, Project Manager for CHAMP,
“If you want to be incrementally better: Be competitive.
If you want to be exponentially better: Be cooperative.”

The second part of the workshop, How to master climate change; success factors in local integrated climate management, put the focus on the elements of successful management, implementation and stakeholder involvement of local climate change work. Tampere city working towards carbon neutrality and a presentation on Successful stakeholder involvement from the Danish Board of Technology gave inspiration and set a base for discussion on various solutions in different cities.

Thinking about the expected outcomes of the CHAMP project – a Capacity Development Package, Publications, Case studies and continuity in form of the European partnership are now presented. Back from Liepaja, we are now at the office reprocessing the great work done by cities, but heading towards the Final Conference to be held December 14th – 15th. The Online conference European Climate Champions will have a great impact on the total carbon footprint of our project and will therefore fulfill the expected outcomes set three years ago. It’s time to assure proper headsets and connections and prepare for cooperation to become exponentially better in European climate work.