What is the ClimatePact?

With the signing of the Climate Pact 1.0 in 2013, the municipality of Niederanven has been committed to the fight against climate change for almost 10 years. In order to sustainably develop this commitment, the municipality joined the national Climate Pact 2.0. on 21.04.2021, and thus this cooperation between the municipality and the State of Luxembourg was extended for another 10 years (2021-2030).

With this extension, the municipality confirms its previous objective in the areas of sustainable protection of natural resources, especially in the areas of energy and raw materials, soil, water, air, climate, biodiversity, nature and cultural landscape, as well as to achieve and, if possible, exceed the targets set out in Luxembourg's integrated national energy and climate plan for the period 2021-2030 "PNEC".

In return, the state supports the municipalities financially and technically in the implementation process. Thus, the Climate Pact 2.0 enables the state to support the municipality's climate policy efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption. This, however, is in harmony with the stimulation of the labour market, investments and economic activities.

In order to confirm the success of the local climate strategy, the planning and implementation of concrete measures in this regard is indispensable.

To begin with, the municipality should set itself - in writing - objectives for its future climate policy actions. These should be in line with the national climate protection targets and also cover all climate-relevant topics as far as possible. In order to ensure this, municipal action is primarily oriented towards the procedure defined in the Climate Pact of using the EEA (European Energy Award) as a basis.

This provides, among other things, for the creation of a "municipal climate protection mission statement" at the beginning of the work, which defines quantitative and qualitative objectives for climate policy work. This should be based on the EEA catalogue of measures, which contains a total of 74 criteria in the six subject areas of "development planning and spatial planning", "municipal buildings and facilities", "supply and disposal", "mobility", "internal organisation" and "communication and cooperation". Based on the processing of the EEA catalogue, the work done so far by the participating municipalities is reviewed and evaluated in an audit. Future measures should also refer to this catalogue of criteria.