Green cities, green skills
Eleven UK cities are currently on the Carbon Disclosure Project’s A List. Getting more of them on there is going to take skill.
To score an A, among other actions, a city must disclose publicly and have a city-wide emissions inventory, have set an emissions reduction target and a renewable energy target for the future; and have published a climate action plan. An A List city must also complete a climate risk and vulnerability assessment and have a climate adaptation plan to demonstrate how it will tackle climate hazards. And it must be making progress towards achieving its ambitious but realistic goals.
Source: Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), A List Cities
As of the end of 2021, only 95 cities worldwide have made it on to CDP’s A list. Eleven of them - Edinburgh, Newcastle upon Tyne, Sunderland, Greater Manchester, Nottingham, Leicester, Bristol, Reading, Greater London, Southend on Sea, and Bournemouth-Christchurch-Poole (BCP) - are in the UK. Huzzah for Blighty!
It isn’t just CDP looking at green cities, of course. There’s Coalition for Urban Transition, Orega, Carbon Neutral Cities and others. But just looking at the UK, there’s a growing list of increasingly greening cities. The recent National Audit Office report reveals that 232 authorities (91%) have adopted at least one commitment to decarbonise and in 2020-21 £1.2bn of grant funding was made available to local authorities relevant to net zero actions.
And rightly so. Cities account for 75% of all carbon emissions. Recent analyses indicate they can be reduced by 90%. And most of these emissions come from just a few sources, notably buildings, transport, and general waste management.
Getting on the A List
Most of the cities we’ve looked at have been active for 4 or 5 years and are already showing some great progress with the policy and operational levers at their disposal:
Image: BMI
While cities and city regions have an advantage over many local and district councils insofar as the powers they possess, local councils still have a bunch of powers that they can bring to bear for the environment and green economy. Building regulations; council tax and business rates; planning; housing; parking; waste collection and disposal; environmental health and protection; economy and employment development; sports centres and planning fields; street lighting; traffic management, passenger transport; transport planning; strategic (spatial) planning; emerging planning; trading standards (including EPC certificates); education; public health; social services; and further education and skills. Did we miss anything?
A key role for local authorities is their leadership and convening role. They can create joint agendas and mobilise stakeholders to move the agendas forward. A good example is Lambeth Council, which it is working with London South Bank University to examine the retrofit skills challenge. Meanwhile, Enfield Council is working with Kensa Contracting and Engie to install the largest shared ground loop array of heat pumps to date, servicing 400 flats in 8 tower blocks.
Green skills for green cities
For skills to support the greening of cities, though, the picture is somewhat patchy. The data are still relatively weak and little progress has been made to address data-driven approaches such as the one proposed by Nesta, which calls for a national jobs and skills data common framework, a standardised taxonomy of skills, and an eco-jobs classification. Despite this, we do see some cities making their own inroads. The GLA and the four London borough partnerships1 have done two major pieces of research into green skills, while Scotland’s Climate Emergency Skills Action Plan has also produced some useful figures.
For England, we believe the key drivers could be the local skills plans produced by the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs). But when we look at these plans, we see contrasts, disconnects and even contradictions. For example, the skills plan for the Dorset LEP, whose area is dominated by the Bournemouth-Christchurch-Poole (BCP) conurbation (a CDP A List city, if you were paying attention earlier) seems to pay no attention to the skills needed for BCP Council’s comprehensive Climate and Ecological Emergency Action Plan.
On the other hand, we find the skills report for the West of England LEP (covering Bristol, South Gloucestershire, Bath, North-East and North Somerset) to be comprehensive, making clear where green skills and employment and the various funds are being focused. Add to this the LEP’s ‘green audits’ of local FE and HE curricula, together with the operation of the South-West Energy Hub and a Careers Hub, and we see here a very engaged and active programme.
The Green Edge is steadily working its way through the green skills plans for the 36 LEPs to see what pictures emerge. We’ll get back to you on that in a future post.
Meanwhile, outside of the LEP structure, other regional groups are producing valuable resources, like Net Zero North West, which has created a Net Zero Skills Plan to ensure young people in the region are better equipped for a career in green jobs:
“The North West is already leading the UK’s net zero future, slashing carbon emissions and carving a new path by creating a green industrial economy with a workforce of over 600,000. But, the availability of the right skills will be a significant risk to reaching our climate goals if we don’t act now.”
Carl Ennis, Chair of Net Zero North West and CEO, Siemens Great Britain and Ireland.
Speculate to accumulate
Mapping local plans to national programmes, and assessing their capacity to meet our green skills over the next 8-10 years, is a huge task. At the very least it will need to align with, and feed into, the work of the new Green Jobs Delivery Group. As we commented in our recent post, we hope to know much more about this Group very soon.
Meanwhile, we see promising pockets of work being done to address the combined challenges of climate emergency with the COVID recovery. The Edinburgh Climate Commission, for example, has produced a coherent set of priorities around green economic recovery, jobs, reducing emissions, and building a better, fairer city. By 2030, Edinburgh is set to create at least 16,000 jobs and will pay back the original investment in commercial terms over 12 years. The Commission also notes “other studies show that for every pound invested in a green recovery, cities can realise 3-8 times their initial investment in returns, and much higher multipliers in social benefits.”
In our opinion, every UK city needs this type of thinking to have a chance of making it on to the CDP’s A List.
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