Empowering councils to act locally would halve the cost of delivering net zero nationally
Climate change is one of the biggest threats facing our communities and ranks high in people’s priorities.
Eight in 10 are concerned by it, three-quarters want to deliver net zero by 2050, and half want to bring that target forward.
Councils recognise the urgency and scale of this challenge, with more than 300 – plus the LGA – declaring climate emergencies.
Their central role in housing, transport and energy means councils have some impact on more than 80 per cent of an area’s greenhouse emissions, and direct impact on over a third of emissions.
The impact of taking local action on climate change can be enormous.
The Government’s own research found that local climate action would achieve net zero by 2050 for half the cost of a national approach and deliver three times the financial returns and wider benefits.
Local government is united in our call for devolved approaches to realise this potential – a call we reiterated in late October in a letter to Claire Coutinho, Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, signed together with colleagues from the District Councils’ Network, County Councils Network and London Councils.
Unfortunately, it is still unclear how councils fit into the national plan for net zero and climate adaptation.
Councils receive no core funding for climate action and are forced to compete for short-term pots of funding that come and go over time, taking up resources and creating uncertainty.
Take heat networks for instance – there are four schemes. For retrofitting homes and buildings, there are six. For decarbonising transport, there are nine. For woodland and trees, there are eight.
The model has not worked. Too many centrally controlled programmes remain underspent and underwhelming. Some interventions even contradict others, for instance spending on the social housing decarbonisation fund is undermined by cuts via the social housing rent cap.
We want government to back local climate action by putting in place a national climate action framework with policy, regulatory, and investment certainty up to 2050, with set milestones and a clear role for councils leading local climate action.
All councils need adequate and stable core funding to take forward climate action across their own services; multi-year place-based funding allocations to lead decarbonisation across their areas; and support to secure greater private investment into local climate action.
Ministers also need to introduce a ‘local climate action test’, ensuring all government policy and funding decisions – from housing to skills – contribute to local climate action.
Climate change is creating a new era of opportunity, as the mission for safeguarding a habitable future brings about the best in innovation and creativity, and the greatest growth opportunity since the industrial revolution.
Human ingenuity has created increasingly better and cheaper technologies that harness abundant, free, clean energy – wind, water, and sun – to power every aspect of our way of life.
But having technology is one thing, deploying it everywhere is another. On this, councils are critical.
National action is essential in setting the framework and taking the big decisions. But transition will be different in each of our cities, towns and villages, and that complexity cannot be managed from a Whitehall desk.
Only councils working locally with partners can embed and connect this creativity and ingenuity into the everyday lives of people in the real world.
Ten missions for local climate action
The LGA’s Make It Local campaign is calling for national and local government to accelerate local climate action on 10 missions.
These are:
- Build public trust and inclusivity – by stepping up engagement on the community benefits of climate action, including street-by-street help for households.
- Rapidly retrofit social and fuel-poor homes – by bringing forward funding and devolving the majority to councils.
- One Public Estate retrofit – bringing forward investments in the whole-place retrofitting of local public buildings (councils, schools, hospitals), in single, scaled programmes.
- Local energy revolution – establishing a pipeline of projects for local energy generation, capture and use, involving councils and the local electricity system.
- Electric and people-powered transport – delivering whole-place transport by devolving to councils the means to locally mix active travel, electric vehicles, and public transport.
- Grow the natural world everywhere – ask all policy and programmes to protect and grow biodiversity, not just planning, and empower councils to drive nature recovery.
- Place-making to reduce emissions and raise adaptation – expand the Future Homes Standard into place-making on climate action and allow councils to enforce higher standards.
- Jobs, opportunity, workforce – enable councils to link skills, careers advice and employment interventions with national reform and local climate action and job creation.
- Funding and finance – reform public funding for local climate action, including by providing long-term core funding certainty to councils.
- Accelerating local adaptation – prioritise adaptation alongside net zero in everything, with a five-year local adaptation accelerator programme.
Carbon bubble: engaging with residents
Climate change is a challenging subject: most people only have a very vague understanding of what concepts such as ‘greenhouse gases’, ‘net zero’ and ‘carbon footprints’ mean.
Staffordshire County Council wanted to find ways to break down these terms and make them relatable for residents, to encourage them to take meaningful actions to help combat climate change.
It started by tackling people’s understanding of ‘carbon’ – by using an enormous, vibrant orange sphere emblazoned with the words ‘One tonne of CO2’.
The carbon bubble was used at eight events across Staffordshire to spark meaningful conversations with residents, with council climate change experts on hand to answer questions and debunk common carbon myths.
There were face-to-face conversations with more than 1,000 residents; more than 340 people used the council’s carbon calculator to assess their carbon footprint; and the visits helped achieve 3,471 responses to a climate change consultation.
Tree canopy cover
Babergh and Mid Suffolk District Councils had no clear picture of what tree cover their areas had, nor how much trees contributed to the local environment.
They used Bluesky’s National Tree Map to establish tree canopy cover across both predominantly rural districts and found it was well below the national average.
They then used a range of available data to identify both where there is potential space for new tree planting, and where new planting would provide maximum benefits to the environment.
This has supported a successful application under the Local Authority Tree Fund to plant more than 1,800 trees with the grant awarded valued at £50,000, and completed this winter.
Elsewhere, the councils’ planting strategy is contributing to the design of a new public
open space, supporting a local school to encourage more tree planting in its parish, and helping to justify new street tree planting on highway land.
- Find out more about the LGA’s proposals for acting on climate change – part of its Make It Local campaign.
- Find out more information about these and other case studies of how councils are tackling climate change, including videos and contact details.