On 30 October, the World Resources Institute and UNEP organized a kick-off workshop in Belgrade, Serbia to start up the city’s Building Efficiency Accelerator and District Energy in Cities initiative . Belgrade, which is one of the cities committed to SEforALL’s Global Efficiency Accelerator Platform, will receive technical support from the platform as it works to improve energy efficiency in buildings and district energy systems
The municipal government was highly visible at the event, with representatives of key ministries and the expert community joining in discussions on priority areas for energy efficiency projects and policies. The Copenhagen Centre also contributed to the workshop, emphasizing the role of the city-level actions on energy efficiency, as well as the importance of exploiting the ways in which the building and district energy accelerators work with and compliment each other.
The Building Efficiency Accelerator has been holding similar events in several other co-called “deep dive” cities (Da Nang, Vietnam; Eskisehir, Turkey; Bogota, Colombia; Rajkot, India). Each of these cities will be supported by the Accelerator over the next year in developing and implementing at least one policy and one project on energy efficiency in buildings, as well as tracking progress and sharing lessons learned.