As part of Innovate UK’s Net Zero Living Programme, Regen explored the varied approaches that local authorities are taking to embed climate action into their organisation. Join the Dots identifies three opportunities to clarify the roles and responsibilities of local authorities in relation to climate change. With devolution, local government reorganisation and other policy shifts underway, now is the moment for action.
Throughout the Net Zero Living programme, Regen and Carbon Trust have examined the role of net zero and energy planning in delivering successful projects. Our latest paper builds on ‘Maximising the value of local net zero planning’ which introduced the ‘Enable, Embed, Enact’ framework to describe the different roles that local authorities can play. We found that a key outcome of net zero planning approaches was how the process itself helped to ‘embed’ net zero into an organisation’s decision making and connect priorities across different teams.
To explore this finding in greater depth, we interviewed council officers involved in the Net Zero Living Programme. These discussions revealed diverse approaches are being taken, including making the wider outcomes of climate action the driving force of collaborative working, positioning climate as a strategic priority, upskilling colleagues across different teams, and improving decision-making processes and governance.
However, the interviews also highlighted significant variability between councils in the maturity of these approaches and their capacity to embed climate considerations across their organisations.
As council strategies are a valuable indicator of how well embedded climate is, we also reviewed 15 recent economic growth, transport plans and health and wellbeing strategies, focusing on those developed by Net Zero Living Demonstrators.
All the strategies we reviewed recognised climate as a key issue for their areas, but they varied considerably in how they framed net zero, either as an opportunity or a challenge. Some strategies integrated net zero more comprehensively and consistently than others. For example, some missed opportunities to highlight the wider outcomes of climate action and many areas struggled to acknowledge issues related to hard-to-decarbonise sectors.
In light of changes related to devolution and local government reorganisation, we identified several opportunities to further clarify the roles and responsibilities of local authorities in relation to climate and net zero. These include:
For more insights from the Net Zero Living programme, join our webinars on empowering communities and attracting public and private investment.
Power to places and people is one of Regen's strategic goals. To read more about this area of our work, reach out to Anna Cuckow.
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