Birmingham and the path towards net zero
SCOTLAND was much in the news last week, but seemingly with far more tales of actual or notional trips for Covid tests than references to the nation’s staging of its fifth annual Climate Week.
Understandable, but still disappointing. And yes, fifth – Scotland’s Climate Week has become an annual feature, very different this year obviously, with fewer and mostly online events. Nevertheless, it went ahead.
Definitely not, then, a cobbledtogether substitute for the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), scheduled for Glasgow this November, but inevitably postponed for 12 months.
That will be the real biggie, to which the UK Government will hopefully give the prioritisation it merits. Pre-Covid the UN was clearly exasperated by particularly the PM’s detached and “incoherent” approach to both the Conference and the May Government’s own voluntary but legally binding commitment to cut climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions to ‘net-zero’ by 2050.
‘COP26’ is the clue to the Conference’s global importance – the 26th Annual Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Meaning the Convention was negotiated back in 1994, and subsequently ratified by 197 countries – the Parties – comprising pretty well everyone bar Turkey and Iran. It has met annually ever since, almost everywhere it seemed, apart from the UK. Finally, though, for a fortnight next November, Glasgow will be the guaranteed centre of the concerned world’s attention.
The UK’s belated selection was naturally welcomed by Government ministers as an international vote of confidence. But 26th choice speaks for itself, and even – indeed, particularly – school students nowadays can cite statistics evidencing the gulf between talking the talk and walking the walk, naming, for instance, the tax haven-registered companies systematically exploiting African fossil fuel resources.
Glasgow’s selection to host COP26 seemed admirable and justified. Scotland’s annual Climate Week is much more than window-dressing. It reflects the Holyrood Government’s significantly more committed climate change agenda than Westminster’s.
Setting itself, for example, a legally binding target to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2045, against the national UK’s 2050. Planning from 2017 to phase out the need for new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2032, rather than 2035 as announced by UK ministers just this February.
One can, of course, dismiss all such policies involving relatively distant target-dates as a form of willy-waving. Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, obviously makes it a bit trickier, without even mentioning the UK Prime Minister. The reality is, though, that in this most vital policy field little, if anything, is achievable without some kind of stage-by-stage target-setting, the monitoring of which is exactly what COP26 will be about.
What’s that? Did someone say they remember years ago buying an official Climate Week T-shirt from Tesco, so we must once have had national Climate Weeks?
You’re right, madam/sir! We did, for several years from 2011 – those of the Conservative-led Coalition, in which the rather more environmentally concerned Liberal Democrats held some key roles, including current Lib Dem Leader Ed Davey, as Minister for Energy and, yes, Climate Change.
The T-shirt, incidentally, was the real McCoy – organic, ethically manufactured, designed by the reputedly famous Eley Kishimoto, decorated chiefly with very green fir-type trees, and marketed by Tesco, Climate Week’s headline sponsor.
Last year London picked up the dropped baton, with the first London Climate Action Week in early July, hosted by Mayor Sadiq Khan and the Greater London Authority and comprising over 180 events.
This year’s is arguably even more ambitious. July’s digital first instalment brought together world experts and policy makers to discuss aspects of green economic recovery from Covid-19.
November’s second instalment will be larger, with representatives of London’s cultural, political, educational, faith and community institutions collectively exploring transitional routes to an equitable net zero carbon world.
Glasgow, London… vital as these matters are, just where, Post readers might reasonably ask, does Birmingham feature? To which the answer is, as geographically, right at the centre.
For, just a fortnight ago, Climate Assembly UK, the first UK-wide citizens’ assembly on climate change, published its final report, The Path to Net Zero. It outlines a clear path for how the UK can meet its 2050 net zero emissions target, and, while stemming from a parliamentary select committee initiative, the pre-Covid meetings of the 108 Assembly members took place face-to-face here in Birmingham.
This column has discussed citizens’ assemblies before – particularly on the future funding of adult social care – because I’m in principle a fan. The rules are simple. Citizens from across the UK and collectively representative of its population are randomly recruited by a kind of computerised ‘civic lottery’.
They commit to meeting together for, in this case, six weekends – the last three here enforcedly online – to hear expert views and balanced information about how the UK might meet its net zero target. They then discuss, deliberate and arrive at agreed recommendations.
It sounds like a process geared to producing consensual, almost LCD (lowest common denominator) proposals, but there are several exceptions – notably in Ireland where citizens’ assemblies contributed to both the removal of the constitutional ban on abortion and the legalising of same-sex marriage.
Perhaps with this in mind, Extinction Rebellion protesters called recently for precisely this kind of climate crisis citizens’ assembly, hoping that it would help them reach their goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. Birmingham’s wouldn’t have, but its easily accessible deliberations and conclusions are still well worth reading.
Chris Game, Institute of Local Government Studies, University of
Birmingham