Climate change Official won’t say if city will hit its emissions target
BRISTOL’S top climate change official has evaded a question about when the city will find out if it will hit or miss its ambitious carbon zero goal, saying it has bitten off more than the government.
Alex Minshull, climate change manager for Bristol City Council, told councillors the authority had committed to a job that is “six to nine times bigger”.
Bristol council was the first in the country to declare a climate emergency in November 2018, and was followed by other local authorities and Parliament.
Elected mayor Marvin Rees has set a goal for the city as a whole to be carbon neutral by 2030.
In contrast, the UK Government has set a statutory target for the UK to be net-zero carbon by 2050. And crucially, whereas the national goal relates to territorial emissions only, Bristol’s goal includes all carbon emissions – those emitted directly by energy production and transport (scope one and two emissions) as well as those linked to consumption of goods and services.
At a council committee meeting this week, Green councillor Paula O’Rourke asked when the city would know if “we will or won’t” meet this target.
Mr Minshull replied by describing the scale of the challenge the city had set for itself.
He said: “The government’s current national legislative target is that the UK is carbon neutral in 30 years’ time for half of its emissions, broadly speaking – the territorial emissions, which we might say are a bit like scope one and scope two [emissions].
“The motion the council passed was to do what the national government has said that we want to happen nationally – to do it three times as fast, and two or three times as much.
“The job is six to nine times bigger than the national statutory target, and we of course have the levers that are available to a municipality and to the local actors in the city – businesses and systems that we can mobilise – which are not necessarily the full suite of measures available to a national government that has Treasury and law-making powers.”
He added: “We estimated that to decarbonise the city from scope one and scope two emissions would (cost in) the order of £10billion and £4billion for housing stock.
“So, broadly speaking, we could spend all the current round of government funding in Bristol and still not complete the job.”
Mr Minshull was referring to £3billion of Covid-19 recovery funding announced by the government to retrofit public buildings such as schools and hospitals and privately owned homes to make them more energy-efficient.
His comments came after he updated members of the growth and regeneration scrutiny commission on progress with the mayor’s climate emergency action plan.
The One City Environment Board, co-chaired by Mr Rees, was set up to provide strategic leadership for the city, and a committee of technical experts, the Bristol Advisory Climate Change Committee, was established to provide independent advice.
The One City Climate Strategy was approved by the board in February and by the mayor in March and was supposed to then be followed by an action plan.
But Mr Minshull said the development of the mayor’s action plan has been delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, but that there had been some progress.
Mr Minshull said: “It’s about how quickly can we mobilise people. So our focus has been drawing together the full range of organisations in the city, identifying that common challenge and purpose and then starting to mobilise them through the delivery of plans into very specific, nailable sort of interventions”.
Among other things, the council has won £375,000 lottery funding for six communities to develop their own climate action plans and has plans to launch a website to advise citizens on how to do their bit shortly.
The council itself has made strides in reaching its target of eliminating its own direct carbon emissions by 2025, but has the final and most difficult 20 per cent to go, Mr Minshull said.
It invested £250,000 last year and £150,000 this year into its climate change work, and has plans to spend £300,000 next year and each year going forward.
It also allocated £3million of its financial reserves to climate change projects in February, but cabinet will be reviewing in November whether the planned funding is still affordable.
Green councillors on the commission praised the “solid foundations” but wanted firmer assurances effective action would result and the goals would be met.
❝ The job is six to nine times bigger than the national statutory target Alex Minshull