The SmartEnCity Academy for Zero Carbon Transition: An Online Training Course for Cities, Municipalities and Smart Decision Making

The aim of the SmartEnCity Academy for Zero Carbon Transition (click here to register) is to follow the straightforward steps of the “Cities4ZERO Urban Transformation Strategy for Cities’ Decarbonisation”, a strategy developed as part of the SmartEnCity project. It has been designed to qualify city and municipality representatives, planners and developers as ambassadors for a carbon free future and to provide them with the necessary tools to help their cities reach their goals of decarbonisation in the near future.

In four interactive sessions with hands-on examples, the speakers will take interested participants by the hand and explain the methodologies step by step, thus encouraging the participants to start their own smart zero carbon transition today. Moreover, especially invited external guest speakers from the Smart City community, such as experts from the sister Smart Cities and Communities projects or the related initiatives SCIS or EIP-SCC, will bring in additional expertise.

With this series of training courses, SmartEnCity offers practical instructions and a step-by-step guidance on how to plan, initiate and successfully carry out a zero-carbon transition. The format of the lessons will be clear explanations and practical examples from real life combined with interactive exchanges. The SmartEnCity Academy is different in that interested participants will be directly addressed before, during, in-between and after the individual lessons, in order to identify and meet their cities’ needs. Registered participants are thus invited to fill in a short assessment questionnaire prior to the training course in order to receive tailor-made advice from the SmartEnCity experts, experienced Lighthouse- and Follower City representatives and professionals from industry and politics.

Lesson 1 is called “The SmartEnCity Way towards Zero Carbon City: The Cities4ZERO Strategy and Integrated Energy Planning”. It will take place on 20 February 2020 at 2 PM.  Koldo Urrutia Azcona of TECNALIA Research & Innovation, responsible for developing an integrated and systemic urban regeneration strategy towards decarbonisation within SmartEnCity, will introduce the Cities4ZERO Urban Transformation Strategy for Cities’ Decarbonisation (the Cities4ZERO strategy) and the Integrated Energy Planning (IEP) methodology. In a subsequent panel discussion, the three Lighthouse Cities of SmartEnCity, Sonderborg (Denmark), Tartu (Estonia) and Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), will talk about their individual ways of approaching this journey. Speakers will be Juan Carlos Escudero from the City of Vitoria-Gasteiz, Jaanus Tamm from the Tartu City Government and Peter Rathje from ProjectZero on behalf of Lighthouse City Sonderborg.

In lesson 2, we will discuss how governance-related obstacles and political barriers can be tackled, and maybe even overcome. Lesson 3 focuses on the question “Where are we now?” going into more detail about city analysis and diagnosis, with insights from our Lighthouse City Sonderborg and Follower City Asenovgrad. The final lesson 4 presents the SmartEnCity planning process, illustrating how it has been addressed and implemented in practice in our Lighthouse Cities Tartu and Vitoria-Gasteiz and our Follower City Lecce.

The aim of the SmartEnCity Academy for Zero Carbon Transition is to spread knowledge generated from four years of SmartEnCity project and to train interested stakeholders to become Smart City specialists themselves. Participants that successfully attend all four lessons of the online training course will therefore receive a SmartEnCity certificate signed by the Project Coordinator.

As a European Smart Cities and Communities Lighthouse Project funded by the European Union’s Research and Innovation Framework Programme Horizon 2020, the online training course is free of charge. Neither the course itself nor registering for it comes with any obligations. Our goal is to share and exchange our knowledge and to encourage an ongoing dialogue about the development of Smart Cities!  

If you would like to register for the training course or simply would like to receive more information about the "The SmartEnCity Academy for Zero Carbon Transition", including specific dates, external speaker announcements and reminders, please click here.