Almost a century later, Alba-Iulia has preserved its historical significance, but its relevance has shifted to encompass other areas; foremost among them the municipality’s efforts to develop the city in a smart, sustainable way. For the name of Alba-Iulia is increasingly recognisable in urban sustainability circles in Europe and beyond. Most recently, the town was listed by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) as one of the few municipalities in continental Europe to derive more than 70% of its energy from renewable sources.
Alba-Iulia’s success with climate action at the local level is not a coincidence. A signatory of the Covenant of Mayors, the most prominent global alliance of municipalities and local governments dedicated to combating climate change, since 2010, Alba-Iulia has made painstaking efforts to benchmark energy consumption, and its environmental, social and economic development needs; to set climate and development goals; plan strategies and projects aligned with those goals; seek external expertise from institutions like the World Bank about its strategies and goals; apply for external financing for projects, when necessary; and engage with the private sector to carry them out.
This well thought-out, painstaking process could sound laborious and unexciting to lay audiences, but is how climate action, be it adaptation or mitigation, needs to be carried out in practice at the local level in order for it to be effective. As Clara Grimes, communications officer at ICLEI- Local Governments for Sustainability explained in an interview with bne IntelliNews, “[local climate action] requires that municipalities change the way they work, that their different departments collaborate more and that their urban development plans have sustainability at their core. That is because climate change cannot be solved with one (or several) infrastructure projects; addressing it requires long-term thinking.”
Alba-Iulia is one of the over 7,400 municipalities and local governments around the world that have signed the Covenant of Mayors to date, thus publicly assuming their part of the responsibility to address climate change. In the aftermath of the 2015 Paris Agreement, a UN climate change accord signed in 2015 by most UN member countries (the exceptions are war-torn Syria and the US, which chose to withdraw in 2017), there has been an increase in attention paid to local action against climate change. For, while national and international accords and policies are important, carrying them out will require the involvement of actors at different levels of governance.
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