COP26 may not have offered the perfect outcome but its stress on the importance of local communities underlines the need for central government to back council efforts to tackle carbon emissions.
Mark Davies
The recent COP26 in Glasgow highlighted the huge conflicts of interest that arise in bridging the gap between the causes of climate change and the solutions to climate change.
The COP26 agreement recognises the need for collaboration, best scientific advice, urgency, funding, mitigation, adaptation etc. It underscores the point that climate change is caused by humans and that in order to address it humans will need to make significant changes and quickly.
Role
What resonated in the text of the agreement was this line:
“Recognizing the important role of indigenous peoples, local communities and civil society, including youth and children, in addressing and responding to climate change, and highlighting the urgent need for multilevel and cooperative action, …”
Working for a district council it is easy to be distracted by the many and wildly varied day-to-day issues. It is also easy to think that climate change is an issue for another layer of government.
But, easy isn’t best.
The recent Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE) local government commission recently produced its findings in a report Local by Default (which should be required reading for all involved in local government).
It concluded that properly funded and empowered local government can deliver positive outcomes for current and future generations. The reason? It is best placed to understand its people and communities.
As we learned from COP26, addressing climate change is dependent on local communities, therefore, local government has a huge role to play.
An example of how this could work in practice has come from Lancaster City Council. Following on from our declaration of a climate emergency, in 2019, a People’s Jury was commissioned. Its role was to examine the response to the climate emergency so far and produce recommendations that would guide the future work of the council and a range of other organisations across the district.
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Verdict
The question considered by the Jury was: ‘What do we need to do in our homes, neighbourhoods and district to respond to the emergency of climate change?’
The 26 jury members agreed a set of wide reaching recommendations which they framed within the context of the following statement:
- “We are facing a climate emergency which makes us concerned and worried about the future.
- We have heard from a range of experts and we now believe that if we take immediate action, we have the tools and the hope that we can address this emergency.
- We believe that the only suitable response will be one that brings many organisations and individuals together to work collectively and not separately. This is bigger than Lancaster.
- We recognise that many difficult decisions lie ahead but that we must act immediately and not allow a quest for perfection to get in the way of making progress. We need to take action today, not in 30 years time. A journey starts with a small step which all of us can achieve.
- The people of the Lancaster district need to see confident leadership, positive changes made and a clear plan for the future.
- Our city and county councils must accept that progressive change to fight the climate change emergency will have financial implications. Not being able to fund the recommendations we have listed here is no reason for inaction as money won’t matter in a world that won’t exist as we know it.
- The response to the climate emergency needs to be one that moves away from politicians making all the decisions but instead reaches out to the wider public and communities for ideas of how to achieve our recommendations. It’s time for our councils to listen to the people of Lancaster and district and take action now, leading the way to make changes in response to this emergency.”
The work of the People’s Jury had already convinced me that the energy, enthusiasm and pressure to properly address climate change will be driven by our communities. This was reaffirmed by COP26.
From the perspective of international, national, regional and local governments we know there are huge challenges. COP26 both addressed some of these and also exposed them. There are many conflicts.
Local Government exists to serve its communities. In the case of my district it is clear what our communities want.
The job now is deliver on that. The COP26 agreement recognises that appropriate funding is required to tackle this emergency. Much work needs to take place to ensure that funding is, a) made available, b) used in the most effective way. Appropriate powers need to be given so that local government can address climate change in its communities. These are just two examples.
Local government is already leading. Given appropriate funding and tools we can also deliver.
Mark Davies, is director for communities and environment, Lancaster City Council.
Max Wilkinson
Are local areas going to get the power and money we need to address the climate emergency as a result of COP26? The answer is that we don’t yet know. However, thanks to lobbying by local government, the Glasgow Climate Pact makes some important points. For this we owe a debt to local government voices at the conference including my colleagues councillors Joe Harris and Pippa Heylings, alongside many others who attended the conference.
The pact recognises nations’ duties to protect local communities from the impact of climate change, as well as the role of local areas in responding to the threat posed.
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Local
It urges integration in planning between national, regional and local levels. It recognises the important role local areas have in protecting ecosystems through the planning system. Governments are urged to involve local areas in the response to climate change and, equally, local areas are urged to include young people in decision making.
The effectiveness of the overall pact will continue to be debated, after some high profile failures which have been investigated elsewhere at some length.
Regardless of those issues and the causes for hope from elsewhere, the government must now live up to its word as a signatory of the pact. That means acknowledging the need to devolve money and power to local areas.
Backing its words with action should mean an end to ever decreasing local council budgets. Making local plans for the environment is difficult when every budget setting process reduces authorities ever closer to providing only statutory services (and many are already doing little more than the minimum).
Being true to the pact will also require more generous funding pots for key public sector decarbonisation workstreams. National pots worth hundreds of millions of pounds sound big at first, but these are inevitably over-subscribed and spread thinly across many local areas. Cheltenham Borough is the grateful beneficiary of SHDF and PSDS funding, but we need so much more.
Action
We’ll need to see long-awaited planning reform to enable us to demand better from private developers too. Pioneering local authorities like Cheltenham are pushing boundaries by building carbon neutral council houses, and yet private developers are still allowed to meet much lower standards.
The new secretary of state Michael Gove, whether you like his politics or disagree with him, has proven himself an effective reformer in his past departments. He’s also been effective at fighting the corner of the sectors within his purview. As a details man we can be assured he will have read the Glasgow Climate Pact. Let’s hope he’s ready to act.
Max Wilkinson is a councillor at Cheltenham Borough Council.
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