Interview with Mia Dragovic Matosovic, Scientific Researcher, Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy
The Climate KIC community comprises a rich diversity of expertise, skills and perspectives across our alumni, start-ups, innovation partners, advisors and associates, all of whom contribute to our innovation capacity.
This week, we speak to Mia Dragovic Matosovic, a scientific researcher at the Institute for European Energy and Climate Policy (IEECP) about her work on PROSPECT.
What’s your role?
My main area of expertise is the policies and economics of energy efficiency. IEECP deals with a variety of projects on the broader subject of sustainability however.
What are you working on with Climate KIC?
IEECP mainly works on leading the Horizon projects on sustainability topics. In PROSPECT, one such project that IEECP is coordinating, Climate KIC is an important partner. Julia Woth and Christoph Auch lead the certification of professionals in the PROSPECT learning programme, and they were also in charge of creating a learning platform for the programme based on Climate KIC’s own established online education platform.
What are three implications of this work?
The concept of PROSPECT is that we find people in cities who have successfully implemented a sustainable project using innovative financing. Those people then mentor other city professionals for free, sharing their experiences and best practices so that other cities may adapt the projects.
Through PROSPECT, up to 150 European cities will get an opportunity to learn about available innovative financing mechanisms for their energy efficiency projects. They will then be able to implement more projects, and increase energy efficiency as well as financial savings. On top of realising their individual energy efficiency goals, the cities are able to share knowledge and contacts through group learning and thus foster partnerships for future sustainable endeavours.
What or who gives you hope or inspiration in the fight against climate change?
People willing to fight climate change, not as part of their job, but as a service to others. Concretely, the mentors in the PROSPECT learning programme have been a true inspiration. Seeing that there are many individuals whose only motivation is to share and help other cities—cities that are also usually quite far away and maybe even completely different—is truly humbling. Even when the programme introduced a financial award for mentors’ time and effort, many of them refused to accept it and still went on to mentor for free.