Shaping Europe’s sustainable energy policy: what the first decade of Covenant of Mayors tells us about future perspectives

Abstract

The Covenant of Mayors (CoM), launched in 2008, supports the EU 20-20-20 strategy through a voluntary, bottom-up, municipality-led approach. With over 11,000 signatories, it has been key in implementing local energy policies via Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SEAPs). This study analyzes energy consumption and GHG emissions reductions using CoM and IEA data, focusing on SEAP signatories, their plan submissions, and monitoring. It profiles participants and evaluates the impact of actions taken over a decade, prior to COVID-19 and recent global conflicts. Similar analysis showed that, although the wide participation and appreciable results, up-scaling, and transferability issues, as well as decreasing commitment of local administrations need to be pinpointed. EU leadership in this field so far has boosted indeed massive support to green transition, thus highlighting potential criticalities for smaller municipalities in the long-run, thus requiring stronger multi-level mechanisms to enhance global action effectiveness, especially beyond European boundaries.

Keywords

• Covenant of Mayors
• sustainable energy planning
• multi-level governance
• mitigation
• action plans
• renewable energy sources