Coal Regions in Transition Initiative

#SDGAction42736

Description

Intro

As Europe progressively shifts away from coal, regions with coal mining industry are facing a challenge of diversifying their economy to bring new sustainable jobs and growth. The scale of the challenge is substantial as over 400,000 direct and indirect jobs rely on coal production and use in the EU today. In that context, the aim of the Coal Regions Initiative is to assist coal regions in devising transition strategies, helping them identify a pipeline of projects to kick start the transition and assisting with the identification of financing strategies based on EU funds and support programmes.

Objective of the practice

The end goal of the Coal Regions in Transition Initiative is to help bring sustainable jobs and growth to the regions which rely on coal mining today for employment and wealth creation. The initiative combines the following policy fields: clean energy policy, regional development policy, labour policy, environmental and climate policy. From that point of view it constitutes an interesting example for SDGs which are also inter-linked in nature. The initiative is managed on an innovating policy-making approach which consists of working beyond silos in multi-sectoral teams on pilot cases. It is a voluntary initiative which is open to all stakeholders interested in successful transformation of coal regions.

Partners

The Initiative is based on two dedicated tools: a multi-stakeholder Platform for coal regions in transition and dedicated Country Teams which work on a bilateral basis with national and regional public authorities to provide support to pilot coal regions.
The core of the work is carried out by the Country Teams in pilot coal regions, currently 13. The Platform serves as a forum for best practice exchange and public consultation for actions undertaken in the pilot coal regions. It is an open event attended by representative s of national and regional public authorities, trade unions, NGOs, industry and expert community.

Implementation of the Project/Activity

The project was formally launched in December 2017 and is envisaged to be continued for at least 4 years, or until the end of 2021 (coinciding with the end of the current budgeting period). The project can be extended beyond that date if it delivers the expected results.
The project is coordinated by the Secretariat General of the European Commission and led by Directorates General for Energy, Regional Policy and Research. Existing in-house resources have been used to run the project, with nominated experts for each of the Country Teams working simultaneously on their files and contributing to the work with pilot coal regions based on their expertise. A small team of 2 experts has been coordinating the initiative.
The execution of some tasks under the project are now being transferred to a contracted third party to allow the European Commission to focus on political oversight and steering the process.

Results/Outputs/Impacts

After only a year of operation the initiative brought clean energy transition on the agenda of 13 coal regions which have signed up to work with the European Commission in the pilot phase.
3 regions are receiving technical assistance to develop long-term transition strategies and identify project proposals.
9 regions have identified priority projects and are working on implementation and financing with the Commission experts.
Funds were ring-fenced for grants to coal regions in transition projects in 3 coal regions in Czechia and Poland.
Partnerships were concluded with the European Investment Bank, the World Bank and Bloomberg Philanthropies to join forces in supporting transition in coal producing regions to shift away from coal-based economy.

Enabling factors and constraints

The Initiative is on-going and is bound to bring additional results over the coming years, however early success stories in bringing on-board the most important coal regions in the EU, delivering technical assistance and encouraging project definition are mainly driven by the novel approach to policy-making at the EU level which consists of enabling rather than legislating change, facilitating the transition process in a very hands-on manner, building capacity and working hand in hand with the regions to identify solutions to their problems in an integrated manner, across all relevant administrative units of the Commission.

Sustainability and replicability

All strategies and projects discussed as part of the initiative must be compatible with the EU climate and energy goals, including the Paris Agreement.
The initiative does not entail any additional new costs as it works with existing funding in order to better focus existing funds on priority challenges faced by the EU. It aims to help coal regions tap into existing resources in a more effective way because they often lack the administrative capacity to use existing support frameworks effectively.
In the first phase of the initiative the focus is on regions which actively mine coal today. In the second phase the initiative will be extended to all carbon-intensive regions which can be affected by the transition to low-carbon economy.

Conclusions

The coal regions in transition initiative provides a good practice for delivering place-based policy solutions by an international organisation such as the European Union in the context of economic and technological transition with potential socio-economic impacts. It also a good example of an initiative which combines bottom-up actions based on an inclusive approach bringing together all relevant stakeholders and leadership at political level.<br />
It offers an interesting approach to deliver on the objective of "just energy transition" which is becoming increasingly important in the context of recent events in France where citizens affected by the costs of climate policy took it to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with lacking consideration for social impacts of policies.<br />
In that context the Coal Regions in Transition Initiative provides a good example of a pro-active policy which facilitates transition and aims to re-distribute the benefits of clean jobs more equally across regions to avoid "winners vs. losers" divide.

SDGS & Targets