Good practice:

Almada’s Climate Fund

In 2009 the city of Almada set up the “Almada Less Carbon Climate Fund” which aimed at reducing Almada’s carbon footprint by financing energy efficiency and renewable energy investments. After eight years of successful operation, the Fund has now been redesigned and upgraded to be given a revolving nature (revolving fund). This means that the part of the cost savings resulting from implemented energy efficiency measures will directly return to the Fund, ensuring the leverage of the fund and boosting further investments for a clean energy transition.
The ‘shared benefits’ approach is the most relevant innovation of the fund, which assumes different sharing schemes between the fund and the “beneficiary department”, based on the characteristic of the project and during its lifetime. The main assumptions and objectives are to ensure the sustainability and the leverage effect of the fund, automatically prioritising the most cost-benefit projects and to directly help the “beneficiary department”.
The new revolving methodology will make the savings more visible since:
• they will become part of the budgets of the involved departments;
• it will make monitoring continuous and more effective since the efficient operation of the projects has direct and visible impacts on the department’s budget;
• Improved governance for a low carbon development, making the strategic objectives for energy efficiency less dependent of political changes/orientations.

Almada’s Climate Fund was funded by City Council own resources. The total amount involved in order to run the practice was 1,6 M€, for the 8 year of project duration (between 2009 and 2016).

Between 2009 and 2016 it deployed roughly 1,6 M€ of investment, avoiding the emission of 953 tCO2/year and the reduction of 3 000 000 kWh/year (corresponding to a saving of 375 000 €/year on energy costs). Examples of measures implemented are: energy efficient lighting and HVAC systems in municipal buildings and energy retrofitting of social housing buildings.

This practice was transferred to several project partners: Southern and Eastern Ireland, Vzhodna Slovenija, in Slovenia, Bretagne, in France, Mazowieckie, in Poland and SachsenAnhalt, in Germany, during the interregional learning events (study visit held in Almada).
Both the partners from Ireland and France were particularly interested in Almada’s practice, as they had the intention of adapting and replicating it at the regional level. The initial idea was to be able to move to a more sustainable way of funding energy type projects, as Almada’s climate fund.
Also, the partner from Slovenia was particularly interested in getting insight Almada’s climate fund, as they were assessing the opportunity of setting up a sort of revolving fund, at the local level, where they will collect savings and some other sources of money and then use it for financing or co-financing energy efficient measures in the public and private sector.