The action that’s needed to address and arrest the impacts of climate change is wide-ranging and profound.
Local authorities carry a significant proportion of the burden in delivering this. Their statutory roles will need to be fundamentally disrupted to transition to carbon neutral activities.
During a time of decreasing resources and increasing demand for services, this transformation will require bold choices and ground-breaking technologies.
It’s clear that councils recognise the urgency and significance of this situation, with 95 per cent having some strategy, policy or target reflecting their commitment to net zero.
Innovative businesses have also been working hard to provide the step-changing technologies to deliver on this ambition, but much of it has yet to be deployed at any significant scale.
This has been explored in Innovate UK’s report: ‘Getting to net zero: bridging the innovation gap between places and companies’.
Innovate UK sees the enormous opportunity for the UK to prosper environmentally, economically and socially from being the fastest transitioning economy to net zero. With this in mind, it set out to explore the mechanisms to accelerate the uptake and scaling of net zero technologies among local authorities.
Earlier work with local authorities had indicated that there are a range of critical barriers hindering roll-out of innovative net zero technologies. These include:
- a lack of alignment between the challenges prioritised by local authorities and the innovation sector’s understanding of those challenges and translation of these challenges into relevant, deployable products and services
- the complexity, expense and risk associated with procuring net zero innovations at scale
- a lack of clearly articulated and understood business cases for investment in net zero solutions and associated infrastructure
- an under-utilisation of dedicated options for procuring innovation.
Innovate UK looked to address some of these barriers by working with Innovate UK KTN and the East of England LGA (EELGA) on a ‘net zero regions’ pilot in the East of England.
EELGA provided a critical convening role, encouraging participation and brokering communications with its 50 local authorities. Innovate UK KTN ran the workshops, which identified eight shared challenges across the region.
It then implemented its ‘innovation exchange’ process to identify the optimal solutions in the market to extending the life of fleet vehicles via low or zero carbon technologies.
The pilot concluded with a networking and showcasing event at Homerton College, Cambridge, where local authority delegates could share their priorities and plans, and the delivery partners could share the learning for this pilot exercise.
Our explorations suggested that the following needs to be in place:
- a project partner engaged with, and credible to, regional local authorities to ensure good levels of participation and trust
- an environment of genuine open dialogue between authorities, to ensure that valuable experiences along the journey, rather than just success stories, are shared
- connections and communication with other relevant regional and national stakeholders (for example, net zero hubs, Crown Commercial Services, central government bodies).
Innovate UK recognises the extraordinary help of EELGA and Innovate UK KTN, without whom this project would never have happened, and is enormously grateful to the local authorities in the East of England who participated so enthusiastically.
We will be employing the lessons learned during this pilot in developing a new, ‘net zero living’, place-based innovation programme, which we hope to launch toward the end of 2022.