Bridging the Gap from Planning to Action: Capacity Building for Regions and Municipalities in Implementing Clean Energy Transition Strategies

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Local and regional authorities often lack the capacity, integrated approaches, and organizational structures needed to effectively deliver and implement clean energy transition plans and aligned sectoral strategies such as heating and cooling strategies. To address this, PLANtoACT develops, demonstrates, and promotes a stakeholder-driven, action-oriented, spatially detailed integrated energy planning approach. This approach produces transition pathways and strategies aligned across multiple levels (national, regional, municipal) and sectors (electricity, heating & cooling, industry, transport), with a specific focus on comprehensive Heating & Cooling strategies. Crucially, PLANtoACT emphasizes the Implementation Roadmap Phase, bridging the gap between conceptual planning and concrete action by defining detailed, time-bound actions and specifying the priority of intervention. The project's knowledge hub serves as an online repository of resources, best practices, and tailored capacity-building programs, enhancing LRAs' skills in technical, legal, financial, administrative, and social innovation aspects. It also features innovative multi-level governance structures and showcases insights from co-creation processes. PLANtoACT will apply these solutions in five diverse pilot regions across Europe, each involving a pilot city/province to test the multi-level approach. The project will develop or update five regional-level and at least five city/province-level clean energy transition strategies, along with at least five heating and cooling strategies, all with a strong focus on actionable implementation roadmaps. These roadmaps will include concrete, prioritized actions tailored to local political timelines. The project will also identify financing options for prioritized actions, drawing from national, regional, and European sources, and will establish tailored monitoring frameworks to track progress and impacts of the clean energy transition in each pilot region.