Climate Alliance – leading the Helpdesk and Monitoring work

Climate Alliance manages the Covenant of Mayors Office (CoMO) in partnership with four other local/regional government networks (Energy Cities, CEMR, Eurocities and Fedarene).

Established and funded by the European Commission, the CoMO is responsible for coordination and daily management of the initiative. It provides signatories with administrative support and technical guidance, facilitates networking between Covenant stakeholders, and ensures promotion of their activities.

The Covenant of Mayors team

As a leader of the Helpdesk and Monitoring activities, the main missions of Climate Alliance within CoMO are the following:

• Coordinating the Covenant Helpdesk and capacity-building activities:

The Covenant Helpdesk deals with thousands requests related to the Covenant procedures (adhesion, SEAP submission and delay requests etc.) and methodological principles.

The Helpdesk provides local authorities with information and guidance on the preparation and implementation of both their Baseline Emission Inventory and their Sustainable Energy Action Plan. It ensures capacity building of signatories via webinars and the development of an e-learning platform. CoMO / Climate Alliance also liaises with a pool of national experts to further decentralise the helpdesk operations and be even more embedded in national and regional processes.

• Developing scientifically sound guidelines for Signatories:

Climate Alliance works in day-to-day cooperation with the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission - to equip signatories with clear technical guidelines and templates to assist them in the delivery of their Covenant commitments.

To make sure that the methodological framework best responds to signatories’ needs, the CoMO and the JRC are working in cooperation with a group of local energy experts and experienced practitioners from signatory cities.

• Monitoring the Covenant implementation and results on the ground:

Within CoMO, Climate Alliance is also in charge of monitoring the overall results achieved by the Covenant community. The online catalogues of SEAPs and Benchmarks of Excellence have been elaborated respectively to give highlights of the submitted action plans and enhance the visibility of the actions implemented so far. Both platforms make monitoring results accessible and understandable to a wide audience.

Via the ‘Covenant in Figures’ section, a set of aggregated indicators provides a snapshot of the methodological approaches adopted by the Signatories when developing their SEAP and demonstrates the impact of the Covenant initiative as a whole.