Informaciones de Europa

Talking about what is easy to measure, I can give you some examples for my region (Emilia Romagna):

• From about 40 municipalities on the Covenant of the Mayors to about 300 (97% of population)
• From 2 municipal councilor dedicated to energy and emission to more than 80
• From 8% of population assisted by and public energy point to 30%
• From 0 to 36 municipal experts networking within the region
• …and so on

This creates the conditions to develop:

• Cultural density (dense awareness of problems, visions and possible solutions)
• Political will to “put the money where we need it”
• Unlock of markets (building retrofitting, renewable energy, and so on…)
• Communities’ priorities reorganisation”

 

It sat with me an anecdote Cristiano told about to the “cultural density”: in his town now, once traditional Italian town, now… you feel something changed – often, you get in the local bar and groups of people tell stories about… the retrofitting they did, the energy they changed… 🙂

 

From the floor:

We had quite a lot of questions and really good comments. We know how to recognise a good sign – when people start to quote you, you have your sign – and that was the case.  Main subjects of the questions:

• Do we see any efforts from others to look at things systemically?
• Do we work using the principles of change agents?
• What is the real problem? How can we learn with each other?
• There is a gap between the local level and the one above responsible to determine the law
• Is there interest from the EU about the work we do and what is happening on the ground?

 

After the hearing we still had long talks with some people, particularly with Mercès Rius from Barcelona, Dirk Knapen from the Sustainable Energy Youth Network and a just starting policy officer in CAN Europe – Katrin Heeren. I promised to come back to them – started that :). Cristiano spoke with a german man who was particularly interested about the “density” concept (we do not know who this person was…).

 

What now?

Now, the EESC is working on this opinion. I think that will be a key opinion for local change as the Rapporteurs will carry, advocate and document the elements of the opinion to the EU institutions and to other levels of the system. My plan is to help the EESc rapporteurs having a solid file on what concerns the Transition Movement. I will let you know of any development… 🙂

 

Well, a development is that they are showing the documentary DEMAIN/TOMORROW to all EU Institutions and we are making the Introduction (Josué and I in a tandem)!!! That will be on 2 June.Wish us luck!
END (for now…)