Building capacity of Public Authorities towards meeting Public Building stock Renovation challenges

The huge potential of the building sector towards an environmentally friendly and climate change transition, brings Europe in the forefront of challenges towards triggering Renovation Wave, as a core priority of the EU Green Deal growth strategy, envisioning to at least double the annual energy renovation rate of residential and non-residential buildings by 2030 and to foster deep energy renovations. Renovating public buildings, such as administrative, educational and healthcare facilities is among the areas deserving specific attention in the strategy, while it is stated that they should be considered as a priority for policy and financing, because they offer huge potential for increasing renovation rates, while delivering large energy savings and healthier and more comfortable buildings for citizens. Municipal renovation strategies are crucial to ensure long-term planning and Member States will reach their energy saving targets if these are implemented at the municipal level; but multiple obstacles are encountered by municipalities towards building renovation, such as lack of information about the energy consumption, lack of harmonisation of regulations, lack of preparation of public technicians.

CaPABle project overall aim was to enhance Public Authorities’ capacity building in meeting the challenges faced upon renovating the public building stock, and thus enable behavioral change and prepare key players of the Public sector to become true factors of change for reaching the EU environmental, sustainability, climate change and energy efficiency targets. The project enabled the access to high quality learning opportunities, by facilitating peer to peer learning and making available flexible learning offers adapted to the learning needs of national, regional and local authorities staff/ officials/ officers, through involving the provision of virtual, digital and blended learning opportunities and fostering the sharing of information, mutual learning and experience from each other in a transnational spectrum, as well as by learning from good practices. Therefore, key competence areas have been strongly addressed, aiming to tackle the respective skills gap of public authorities, to meet the needs of key stakeholders from the building renovation industry, as well as to prepare the education sector to better accommodate the training challenges generated by the renovation revolution and the climate change transition.

a) CaPABle Transnational competence Handbook. The activity facilitated raised awareness and knowledge transfer among key stakeholders and will foster expertise in the subject matter, enabling the CaPABle capacity building program and training material to be properly developed and be as up to date and efficient as possible. b) Deployment of the CaPABle capacity building program. It offers flexible digital based learning opportunities and provide Public Authorities from national, regional, and local level with advanced competences and capacity to lead by example and better addressing and engaging with renovation of the public building stock, and consequently empower their multiple roles as decision makers, planners, developers, regulators, advisors, motivators, energy producers and suppliers, energy users and facilitators. c) Training Activity: Transnational capacity building of CaPABle training ambassadors. The activity delivered pilot training to training ambassadors, Public authorities’ staff, and provide recognition of their skills through Europass Mobility, who will replicate the program delivery in their respective country, and thus ensure its diffusion to the wider community. d) Engagement with renovation as a key driver for

The following outputs, innovative resources and tools are freely available to any interested party: - CapABLe Transnational competence Handbook: It provides Public authorities with evidence and localised examples of common challenges identified reflected by the public sector and the building renovation industry, lessons learnt from relevant good practices and key competence needs to deal with public building renovation with particular focus on financial support mechanisms, tools and technical capacity instruments available for the renovation of public buildings, entailing also a snapshot of public building renovation strategies and an inventory of case studies. - CaPABle capacity building program that will provide participants (public authorities’ from national, local, regional, staff officers and officials), with up-to-date knowledge and advanced competences in addressing technical challenges, legal and institutional challenges, financial mechanisms & investment solutions, as well as with up- to date knowledge and raised awareness in relevant energy transition policies and in benefits gained through public building renovations. - Deployment and provision of the CaPABle capacity building program in a compact digital platform, free