Methods for local energy and climate planning : A Case stuudy on the Urban Community of Dunkirk

Sammanfattning: Energy management concerns were raised in France after the oil crisis in the 1970s. From then, the local actors developed policies to better control the energy production and consumption on the territories. Climate considerations and the need to limit greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions were then added to these energy issues in the early 2000s. The Climate Plans first appeared in France in 2004, in the National Climate Plan. This regulatory document outlined the desire to apply national and European energy and climate objectives at the territorial level. This initiative laid the foundations for the principle of territorial climate-air-energy planning, which became statutory in 2015 for Public Establishment of Intercommunal Cooperation with over 50,000 inhabitants. A regulatory framework has defined the ins and outs of this planning exercise, but the first results have shown that not all local authorities have fully taken up these planning issues, due to a lack of internal competence, means and method to answer the formal exercise. Tot heir credit, the regulatory objectives imposed by the National Low Carbon Strategy were quickly judged to be out of touch and disconnected from local reality, particularly for industrial territories. More recently, a growing number of local authorities have chosen to flesh out their territorial strategy by drawing up an Energy Master Plan, a roadmap that outlines a comprehensive and integrated approach to managing energy resources. Based on a case study of the Urban Community of Dunkirk, this thesis investigates how local authorities have taken up these energy and climate planning challenges, the difficulties they face, and how the Plan Climat-Air-Energie Territoriaux (Local Climate Air Energy Plan) could become essential monitoring tools for the low-carbon transition of territories if they were equipped with real decision-support tools. The case of the Urban Community of Dunkirk is emblematic. Responsible for 4% of France's GHG emissions due to its port and industrial activities, the urban area has committed itself to implementing accelerated decarbonisation. An exploratory study is carried out based on a comparative analysis of the 2022 revised climate plan of the Urban Community of Dunkirk and the Energy Master Plan developed by the Greater Lyon Metropolis in 2019, as well as a series of interviews with the departments and researchers specialising in environmental and territorial planning. On the one hand, results identified approximations in the calculations of emissions reduction, and in particular on the formulation of the working and calculation hypotheses for energy and carbon trends by 2050 in the revised climate plan of the Urban Community of Dunkirk. They led to a lack of clarity in the presentation of the territorial strategy defined by the community. On the other hand, results showed that the Energy Master Plan of Grand Lyon allows to build a more robust action plan, whose strength lies in integrating economic, temporal, technical and governance issues. However, a number of limitations have been identified, related to the cumbersome nature of implementing integrated tools for local authorities and the rapid obsolescence of the energy diagnoses carried out on territories resulting from a difficult updating process. Finally, results showed that the decision-support tools that will be developed must meet the technical needs of fine-tuned modelling of territories, the practical needs of coordinating actions over time and measuring their impact, and the cross-sectoral needs of organising governance between all the players involved.