Deadline: 28-Oct-2020
The European Commission is currently accepting applications for the European Green Leaf Award 2022.
The European Green Leaf (EGL) Award is open to towns and cities between 20.000 and 99.999 inhabitants from EU Member States, EU Candidate Countries, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
Objectives
- Recognise cities that demonstrate a good environmental record and commitment to generating green growth;
- Encourage cities to actively develop citizens’ environmental awareness and involvement;
- Identify cities able to act as a ‘green ambassador’ and to encourage other cities to progress towards better sustainability outcomes.
Outcomes
The outcome of the selection process of the European Green Leaf Award is to:
- Award the title of European Green Leaf 2022 to maximum 2 winning cities per title year;
- Award a financial prize of EUR 200.0008 per winning city.
Eligibility Criteria
- This call for entries to the competition for the European Green Leaf Award 2022 is open to the following applicants:
- Applicant cities from EU Member States, EU Candidate Countries, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
- Applicant cities from the countries listed above which have between 20,000 and 99,999 inhabitants.
- A ‘city’ is understood to be an urban area and an administrative unit governed by a city council or another form of democratically elected body.
- In countries where there is no city with more than 20,000 inhabitants, the largest city is eligible to apply.
- In any given year, cities can apply for either the European Green Capital Award or European Green Leaf Award, but not both at the same time.
- Past winners may not apply again after they have been awarded the European Green Leaf title.
- The signatory should be the Mayor or highest ranking city representative, authorised by national law to legally represent the city. All candidates shall complete all sections of the common application form for the European Green Leaf Award for each of the 6 topic areas.
- Candidate cities are invited to comply with the following formal requirements when drafting their application. Applications which do not follow these requirements at preselection stage shall not be examined further:
- The full application shall be written in one of the official languages of the European Union. However, submission of the application form in English is encouraged for the smooth and timely running of the assessment of the applications.
- Candidate cities shall answer all the questions and complete all sections of the application form. In the event that a question cannot be answered, reasons should be given.
- For the pre-selection stage, the applications shall adhere to the word limits indicated per section of the application form. Any words above the specified limit will not be taken into account and may leave application responses incomplete. Text included in the body of graphics / tables will be included in the word count. Text included in the captions and heading (titles) of graphics/images/tables will not be included in the word count, however these shall not exceed 20 words. Cities may be contacted by the Secretariat in case of clerical and / or administrative errors or for missing documents.
- There is a limit of graphics/images/tables to be provided per Topic Area and Good Practice section of the application form that should be adhered to.
- For the pre-selection stage, applicants shall submit their application in word document format in the official EGLA 2022 application form and upload through the application portal on the European Green Capital Award website.
Evaluation Criteria
The selection of a city awarded with the title of European Green Leaf is assessed on the basis of six topic areas (topic areas are based on a set of environmental indicators):
- Nature, Biodiversity, Sustainable Land Use and Soil
- Air Quality and Noise
- Waste and Circular Economy
- Water
- Climate Change and Energy Performance
- Sustainable Urban Mobility
For more information, visit https://ec.europa.eu/environment/europeangreencapital/news/EGCA-2023_EGLA-2022_Competition_Open.html