- Reassessing Opportunities and Resources: Serbia’s Response to Energy Production and Climate Change at the Local Level    746 kb by    Bajic-Brkovic, Milica | bajicmb@gmail.com    Short Outline The paper presents how Serbia is dealing with climate change challenges at the local level: employing its rediscovered assets and opportunities, reshaping behavior, and developing proactive strategies focused on actions and result producing tactic. Abstract Dealing with the climate change challenges ranks among the priority tasks spatial planners and all those who are responsible for development of cities and towns, are faced with. The task is a multifaceted one, and embraces different policies and actions at the national and regional level, as well as concrete and proactive actions local communities undertake in accordance with their capacities, jurisdiction and responsibilities. Serbia is a country where man induced climate change factors do not rank as high as in many other places. As the energy production and energy use take the main toll, most of the actions and decisions taken so far are directed toward reshaping general policies, diversification of energy production sources, targeting levels of energy production and consumption, and giving the renewable energy resources a more prominent position. The issue, however, could be effectively tackled on the local level as well. It is the area of planners’ work that this paper will bring to our attention. It will explore and present how has Serbia faced the challenge at the local level by focusing on the following issues: (1) Trends, threats and the raising awareness, (2) Hidden assets and opportunities rediscovered, (3) Soft and hard strategies, (4) Reshaping behavior, and (5) Actions, and the result producing tactic. The local level is viewed as crucial, as it is the place where the results are most visible, and are directly experienced by people in their everyday life. The paper will draw attention to the competencies local communities have in this very specific area of working for public interest, and will point out the concrete actions they can initiate and implement in meeting a challenging relationship between energy and climate change. Keywords climate change, energy, local governance, local community Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2012: Fast Forward: Planning in a (hyper) dynamic urban context   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper