KöP

Climate Protection Management in Public Projects

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Germany

2018 - 2021

Clients

German Ministry of the Environment (BMU)
ifeu – Institute for Energy and Environmental Research

Beneficiaries

Municipalities in Germany.

Key Partners

Climate Alliance
Dr. Minu Hemmati Consulting

Although climate protection is becoming increasingly relevant, only a few actors in local governments see themselves as responsible for it. Stakeholders in all departments and offices are usually already busy fulfilling their daily tasks. It is also often the case that climate protection goals contradict other goals of municipal work, e.g., short-term cost savings. Thus, conflicts of objectives arise between individual departments, offices, and working groups. In addition, there is often a lack of knowledge and methods on how to deal with the novel, complex and interdisciplinary problems that arise from climate change.

At the same time, the public debate on climate protection has increased the political pressure to act. As a result, integrated climate protection management is becoming increasingly crucial so projects can be carried out successfully, coordinated, and economically sustainable.

The KöP project aims at establishing climate protection as a component of successful project management in public administrations. Local governments are supported in mainstreaming climate protection and integrating climate protection into the direction of public projects. Over several months of cooperation with six pilot municipalities, we developed and tested a catalogue of instruments. The aim is to enable municipal employees to think about and incorporate climate protection more consistently than before in local government processes – be it in integrated urban development concepts, the redevelopment of commercial areas or in transport planning.

The approach was tested in a simulation workshop and further developed on an ongoing basis. The main aim is to systematically include climate issues in areas not related to climate protection per se. We know that the acceptance of the relevant actors is crucial for the success of change measures. They can be both the driving force and the brake. For this reason, qualitative factors such as communication and motivation are indispensable in managing change processes and are an integral part of the toolkit.

In this project, we developed and tested a needs-oriented toolkit. This consists of tried and tested instruments tailored to the structures and challenges in municipal climate protection management to support municipal actors in climate mainstreaming measures. In specific, we offered the following services:

Empower