Angers Loire Métropole's Pilot City Activity: AMBITION (Action for Multifamily Buildings Innovation and TransitIon tOward Neutrality)
Background
Angers Loire Métropole (ALM) is dedicated to achieving a green transition, as demonstrated by its Mission City status and the European Energy Award 4-star recognition in 2023. The city aims to reduce 60% of greenhouse emissions by 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. ALM’s climate commitments include a strategy for reducing emissions in residential and mobility sectors, comprising 71% of the territory’s emissions. These commitments are detailed in the Territorial Climate Air Energy Plan (PCAET) and involve significant investments in energy renovation, sustainable mobility, and renewable energy.
Key barriers include information and knowledge gaps, financial and technical constraints, and behavioural and social barriers. These encompass a lack of understanding of environmental issues, high renovation costs, limited access to funding and technical support, resistance to change, and weak governance structures in multifamily buildings.
The main challenges are engaging diverse stakeholders, coordinating efforts across public, private, and civil sectors, encouraging behaviour change, and enhancing governance to improve decision-making in multifamily buildings.
The AMBITION pilot activity will address these barriers by developing and testing tools for behaviour change and carbon footprint reduction, enhancing stakeholder engagement through training and awareness programs, and establishing flexible, participatory governance to support the green transition in multifamily buildings.
Description of Activities
The pilot activities of AMBITION primarily focus on catalysing an ecological transition within collective private and social housing, aiming to drive behaviour change, innovation adoption, and community collaboration towards carbon neutrality. This includes deploying innovative solutions across various sectors such as energy renovation, mobility, and waste management, within multi-family buildings.
Planned activities include awareness-raising workshops for residents, training sessions for property and social housing management actors, and participatory events for elected representatives and local officers. Additionally, the project will establish collaborative communities through engagement tools and facilitations based on collective intelligence, fostering the emergence of proposals in areas such as housing improvements, alternative mobility, waste reduction, and biodiversity conservation.
These activities align with the project’s goals of building capacity, strengthening scientific research utilisation, and promoting sustainable living practices.
Objective
To facilitate the green and inclusive transition towards carbon neutrality in multifamily buildings by developing and testing new tools and methodologies to drive behaviour change, improve governance, and foster collaborative engagement among public, private, and civil society stakeholders.
Are the pilot activities building upon or part of a previous and/or existing activity?
The AMBITION pilot activity leverages the rich history of green transition efforts in Angers, building on successful strategies from previous initiatives like the Climate Action Plan, the Sustainable Housing Initiative, and the Eco-Citizen Engagement Programme. These foundational projects set targets for carbon reduction, focused on retrofitting buildings for energy efficiency, and fostered community involvement in environmental practices. AMBITION refines and expands these methodologies, emphasising a collaborative approach across public, private, and civil society sectors to achieve carbon neutrality in multi-family buildings. By integrating insights from projects like Nantes Métropole’s challenge to inhabitants and Grenoble’s pilot city project, AMBITION promotes the exchange of best practices and tools, such as the “Déclic platform.” This evolution ensures that AMBITION is grounded in proven strategies while pushing towards innovative and inclusive green transition, aiming for comprehensive behaviour change and enhanced stakeholder engagement.
Which emissions domains will the pilot activities address?
Systemic transformation – levers of change the pilot activities will exploit
Stakeholder types that the city would like to engage in the pilot activities
Transferable features of the pilot activities to a Twin City/ies
- Engaging a diverse ecosystem of stakeholders, including public sector, research community, and civil society, to co-create solutions and action plans.
- Development of comprehensive tools and methodologies to measure individual and collective carbon footprints and behavioural change. These tools include the General Ecological Behaviour (GEB) scale and bespoke carbon footprint calculators.
- Targeted training sessions for multi-family building residents, trustees, social lenders, public officers, and elected representatives to raise awareness and build capacity for ecological transitions.
- A structured programme encouraging households to commit to specific actions to reduce their carbon footprint, supported by workshops, personalised action plans, and continuous follow-up.
- Facilitating the co-creation of action plans with decision-makers and inhabitants, ensuring community involvement and buy-in.
- Establishing robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks, including regular satisfaction surveys, performance indicators, and feedback systems to adapt and improve project actions continuously.
- Comprehensive communication strategies, including press releases, social media, newsletters, and public events, to raise awareness and promote project successes regionally and across Europe.
- Developing a detailed toolkit with methodologies and tools that other cities can adopt to replicate project successes and ensure long-term sustainability.
This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.
Enabling conditions that will support the successful replication of your pilot activities in the Twin City
The enabling conditions that could support the successful replication of our pilot activities in the Twin City mainly relate to governance and skills within local administration:
- A toolbox (guidebook/ methodology) on how to lead a carbon challenge within multifamily buildings. It will list the methodology and specify, among other things, the brakes and obstacles identified by citizens and partners, which behaviour change support systems have been tested and their results, as well as the levers to be activated within institutions, infrastructures and the social and economic ecosystem.
- An inventory of solutions and public policies related to skills and attitudes within local administration.
- Multi-family building green transition label and the creation of a network of ambassadors for housing green transition.
This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.
What does the city want to learn from Twin City/ies?
- Barriers and levers to behaviour change for individuals and groups
- Inventory of local solutions for implementation (innovative support solutions)
- Innovation tools for financing the transition
- Governance between actors in the private housing ecosystem
- The low-carbon challenge as a tool to support change
This answer is not exhaustive and simply an indicative one.
