How can cities tackle the climate crisis?
Ten lessons for the urban journey to net zero.
Cities will play a central role as the climate crisis unfolds. They produce around 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions and they will suffer many of the worst impacts of climate change — over-heating, flooding, and resource-shortages. At the same time, these urban agglomerations are also the sites of low-carbon innovation and ingenuity.
Cardiff University convened an event ‘City Strategies for Net Zero’ to learn about what different people in different cities are doing, to examine what’s worked and what hasn’t, and understand what more is needed. We brought together city leaders, academic experts, and hands-on practitioners for what turned out to be a rich and energising discussion. Speakers explored the need to engage citizens more, to plan more realistically, and to devolve more powers and resources to city administrations. I drew ten lessons.
1. Be ambitious. “Shoot for the Moon” advised Simon Chrisander Deputy Mayor from Malmo in Sweden. To drive innovation, you can’t wait to know precisely how you’ll do it. Simon cited early alignment to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and an ambitious project with E.ON exploring deep geothermal to provide energy for the city. Participants felt that leading cities should not just reduce their minimum allocated share of emissions but should also push further. This “willingness to take on the challenge” was according to Rachel Huxley, Director of Knowledge and Learning at C40, part of their attempt “to understand the full impact of their emissions beyond their direct boundaries and take a consumption-based emissions approach”.
“It’s important to connect climate mitigation with local problems”
2. Build from your city context. Yes, learn from best practice elsewhere, but also recognise your particular cultural, social and environmental context. “Not everything in transferable” explained Dr. Linda Westman, from the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. Cities should understand their historical and cultural contexts in terms of what they tackle and how they do it. She added, “It’s important to connect climate mitigation with local problems…tackling waste, air pollution, congestion, mobility, housing, health and quality of life”.
3. Have a clear science-based plan. Cities should have strategies that align with the 1.5 degrees international target. Transport, buildings, energy generation, and waste were identified as the big blocks to tackle and there was lots of experience shared about how to shape these plans and the stages cities need to work through. Ben Smith, Director, Energy, Cities and Climate Change at Arup, explained how to priortise actions around “carbon reduction benefits, the costs, and the jobs and economic co-benefits.” C40 have recently published a how-to-guide Dan Dowling, Director, Cities, Climate and Sustainability at PWC, added: “The plan itself is only one point in a long journey…and the effort really starts after that, in terms of working out who needs to come together, who has the power, where the funding sits, and where you can go for more funding.” A number of speakers talked of the need to better monitor progress and adjust plans accordingly.
“We don’t want something which is just a glossy document. We want something that really transforms”
4. Be realistic about how hard it is. “There’s no point having amazing plans if you’re not realistic about delivery” cautioned Arup’s Ben Smith. There was general agreement about the need to be more open about the challenges. Andrew Gregory, Director Planning, Transport & Environment at Cardiff Council, said: “we don’t want something which is just a glossy document. We want something that really transforms,” and he was very open about the task, for example in making retrofit happen at a sufficient scale. “Of course it’s good to be doing hundreds of homes a year but the city has hundreds of thousands of homes”. Others pointed to a skills and capacity gap in local authorities to run such a major transformation programme.
5. Recognise the unequal social and economic impacts Yes, celebrate the successes and the shiny high-profile projects, (like cycling in Copenhagen, circular economy in Amsterdam, or zero-emissions buildings in Vancouver, but don’t let that distract from ‘ordinary cities’ and less high-profile problems faced by citizens. Linda Westman asked “Why are some cities invisible in the debate?” She said, also, that we should recognise that there will be winners and losers both between cities and within cities themselves. “There are going to be benefits and drawbacks for different groups and that’s just reality of this”. Participants felt that people want ‘fairness’ in terms of who felt the impacts and with the choices that they are offered. There was broad support on the need for a ‘Just Transition’ and most speakers also suggested looking for the co-benefits, with Andrew Gregory from Cardiff Council pointing to the need to simultaneously tackle health inequalities.
“We may be experts in the policy design, but people are experts in their own lives”
6. Engage with and trust your citizens. It is tempting to engage in what Rebecca Willis, Professor in Practice at Lancaster University, called “climate policy by stealth” — focusing on decarbonising the grid or on big infrastructure projects and not making decarbonisation part of the wider democratic process. Linda Westman felt: “Communities know very well what their needs are, so we need to listen to them”. The need to trust and engage people more was a strong theme, with speakers pointing to the Climate Assemblies happening in the UK and around the world. Rebecca Willis summed this up “We may be expertsin the policy design, but people are experts in their own lives, and so, if we listen to people and involve them in the changes we will get better, more robust outcomes”.
7. Be clear what cities can and cannot do. City administrations need powers, skills, and finances to act. Local governments in the developing world often don’t have access to international funds, which are distributed at the national level. And while city administrations have a lot of levers to pull as regards buildings, transport and waste, they can generally do less on energy supply. Referring to the UK, Dan Dowling pointed to a “Complete disconnect between local ambition and the purse strings, the policy structures, and reforms that live elsewhere”. He felt that “with our current governance structure and powers given to local authorities, we have a whole systemic reform issue in order to deliver the radical change at the speed and the scale that’s required.” A number of speakers pointed to the billions of pounds that would be needed to fund the transition in each city, the fact that this is not currently in city budgets, and the fact that central government would need to get more serious about closing the funding gap.
“Build a community of actors across multiple different stakeholders”
8. Collaborate across a community of actors. There was a recognition that although city administrations have some powers, and are taking action, they need to involve a much wider range of actors. Ben Smith said “In order to deliver a city-level Climate Action Plan, you really need to build a community of actors across multiple different stakeholders — utilities, private sector businesses government agencies, community groups and NGOs — to come together and work on the plan as one”. Rachel Huxley pointed to the example of how the Melbourne administration coordinated 14 organisations in the city to collectively purchase power, supporting the construction of an 13 megawatt wind farm to serve the city.
9. Shape city institutions to match the problems. 20th Century city institutions may need to be reorganised, or follow different processes, to tackle 21st Century problems. Malmo’s Simon Chrisander said “one of our biggest challenges is cooperation within the city between different departments, silo thinking, so we are really trying to get past that” For Andrew Gregory at Cardiff Cardiff “it requires transformation, — not just having a few projects — but transformation at the Council, of our partners, of how the city works as a whole”. Rachel Huxley concluded “that you can’t expect success if you don’t have real commitment from the top, and if you don’t organize around it and have the decision making authority, the expertise and the budget in order to do it”.
“Make it easy for your citizens to make sustainable choices”
10. Support citizens to do the right thing. Getting to net zero requires a combination of millions of individual actions with big infrastructure and policy changes. Rebecca Willis complained “that it always gets presented as an ‘either-or’ — either infrastructure system change or individual behaviour change — and of course they’re intimately connected…infrastructure greatly influences behaviour…a lot of places in the US don’t have paved pavements and that dictates whether people walk or not.” Speakers and participants argued for better understanding the linkages between individual behaviour and infrastructure with city administrations framing and enabling low-carbon options. Malmo’s Simon Chrisander summed it up: “Make it easy for your citizens to make sustainable choices”.
While there was brutal honesty about the scale of the challenges and the tough realities facing city administrations, I was left feeling optimistic, with a sense that there is growing political appetite, that the pathways are becoming clearer, that there are untapped resources in citizens, and that Mayors across the world are stepping up. Cities will be playing their full part in the journey to net zero.
