Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning (SUMP) is one of the key element of the new EU Urban Mobility Framework. The European Commission has offered variety of programs in the previous years, such as the Horizon 2020 to support Member States to promote SUMPs in their region, and still offers funding for range amount of sustainable settlement and transport related projects. At the same time Member States are also keen on to maintain the roll out of SUMPs within their national support program, with public transport, walking and cycling at its heart. In the last decade the authors took part in the development of many SUMPs and since 2020 the authors participated in an international, so called UrbanSCOPE—Urban Sustainable Mobility in focus: student education, community involvement and participative planning, Erasmus+ project, that aim was to improve the quality of teaching in universities, by offering students a methodology in the preparation of a SUMP for a locality in their cities, actively involving local communities and local authorities in the process. During the project educational packages: learning materials for students and teaching guides for lecturers were developed, in order to let understand sustainable mobility better, than before and as well as to experience the rights of participation in the planning of sustainable mobility. With the contribution of the authors new digital tools were also introduced for teachers and students during the COVID’19, that helped to rise the efficiency of planning during restrictions and lock down.

The results of the paper are based on a research project which examines the renewable energy investments carried out in Hungarian rural settlements. The study will focus on the municipality-led renewable energy developments, determining the most important local benefits and the aspects of the local community involvement. Altogether 748 rural settlements have been identified, which have implemented at least one renewable energy project through the Environmental and Energy Operative Program between 2007 and 2013. A questionnaire has been sent out to these municipalities, and 159 full answers have been collected and analysed. We have investigated the importance and presence of local benefits deriving from renewable energy investments, and examined what effort is put into the information and involvement of the local community. The study concludes that although several local benefits occur at local level while implementing renewable energy projects, the effect of direct benefits remain at a low level. Furthermore, it can also be stated, that only moderate effort is put into the issue of local community involvement. The study also determines several major threats that can endanger the successfulness of the previous investments, and prevent the further renewable energy developments at local level.