Over 40 Pact Ambassadors and Partners came together to celebrate climate action driven by the people in their communities. Jan Dusík, the European Commission’s Deputy Director-General for Climate Action, opened the Climate Pact’s citizen-led climate action event on 8 October in Brussels.
Martin Brocklehurst from Pact Partner Project AURORA, introduced the pilot project from Aarhus University Denmark that has the potential to empower a community of over 46,000 students, and staff to make a positive contribution to the energy transition for their University. They have already installed solar panels on the university’s rooftops. They are now working to monitor their energy performance using the Aurora energy tracker app. The app can also be used use to monitor their personal carbon emissions from heating and powering the buildings where they live and from the daily transport decisions they take.
Throughout the day Pact community members got a chance to share their ideas with EU policy makers and initiative leaders. Project AURORA was able to meet up with key officials from DG Energy to explain the barriers blocking progress in the establishment of energy communities within Universities across Europe. As a direct consequence further meetings are planned in November to explore how these barriers can be addressed and encourage organisations such as the European Univerities Association to get more involved in Energy Communities.
Links were made to many EU Climate Pact Ambassadors and Climate Pact Partners across Europe as AURORA seeks to gain support for the idea of a European wide citizen science project to tackle Climate change mitigation.
Many youth and sports leaders attending were keen to learn from project AURORA and be at the vanguard of citizens efforts to accelerate the energy transition and tackle the 30% of climate carbon pollution produced by citizens through heating and powering homes and the transport choices they take.
