How to give cities the staffing means for their climate ambitions?

To achieve their climate neutrality goals, the EU and its Member States need strong local public services, especially in the energy field.Energy Cities assessed in its publication “Human capacity in local Governments: the bottleneck of the building stock transition” the gap between the necessary and the existing staff focusing on the European building stock transition. The positions to be filled are diverse: energy analysts, project managers, urban developers, engineers, experts in citizen and stakeholder engagement, energy advisers, communication officers, public building experts, and social housing experts. The results are the following:

Around 2.5 additional full-time positions per municipality per year over the next 9 years (including 2022), or 214,000 new local employment positions across the European Union (per year, in average).
In terms of costs for municipalities, this will be around €16 billion per year at the EU level, which, in 2019, represented only 3% of local governments’ public expenditures

This webinar has been the opportunity to present the results of this study for the building sector and discuss with EU policymakers and local government representatives the measures the EU, the Member States and the local governments can take to face this gap!

This webinar is part of the EU wide campaign “more local staff for the climate” conducted by Energy Cities and its core partners: Climate Alliance, Eurocities, ICLEI, FEDARENE, PNEC, ECODES. Check our website and sign the manifesto: www.localstaff4climate.eu