Memorandum submitted by the South East
Climate Change Partnership
ABOUT THE
SOUTH EAST
CLIMATE CHANGE
PARTNERSHIP
The South East Climate Change Partnership (SECCP)
is the leading forum that engages, inspires and empowers the development
and implementation of solutions for a South East region that is
resilient to climate change and low-carbon, benefiting current
and future generations.
The Partnership is an independent, not for profit
organisation funded by our members. We bring together more than
50 public, private and voluntary sector organisations from across
the South East.
We work in the following ways:
Sharing good practice
— Encouraging partners to address climate
change and to be champions for their stakeholders and communities
by sharing good practice and through education.
Solutions-driven
— Providing, advising on and advocating
effective climate change solutions relevant to the South East
region.
Joint working
— Championing joint working between
partners and with others to be more effective in tackling the
impacts and reducing the causes of climate change.
Staying Informed
— Communicating and interpreting scientific
research and information on developments in climate change policy
and guidance, linking them to real-world solutions.
Aaptation focused
— Building on our strong track record
in this emerging area, the Partnership will continue to play a
unique role through our focus on adaptation to the impacts of
climate change. In all of our work, we will look for opportunities
to improve the region's resilience to the impacts of climate change
and to integrate climate resilience with carbon reduction.
We work closely with national organisations
such as the UK Climate Impacts Programme and those in other regions
of the UK who are addressing similar issues.
Further information about the Partnership and
copies of our publications and newsletters can be found on our
website www.climatesoutheast.org.uk This response outlines the
views of the Partnership. In addition, some of our Partners may
submit detailed individual responses.
GENERAL
We welcome the opportunity to share our views
and experience with the Environmental Audit Committee on this
important subject. The science of climate change has progressed
very rapidly in recent years, along with our understanding of
the urgency of the response needed. However, our experience tells
us that the implementation of the required changes is generally
progressing very slowly, if at all. This is especially true in
the field of adaptation to the impacts of climate change, where
much depends on an assessment of expected risks and the solutions
are not always well developed or demonstrably cost effective,
especially in the short term. However, the severe impact of the
floods of summer 2007 on households, businesses and infrastructure
demonstrates the need to prepare for the effects of extreme weather
events.
Policies and targets are being developed at
all levels and pockets of good practice exist in both reducing
greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate
change. These must gather momentum in order to move ahead at the
pace needed. This will require strong leadership, coordination
and cooperation between the different levels of government and
dedicated resources. It is vitally important that adaptation to
the impacts of climate change is prioritised clearly alongside
mitigation of the causes.
RESPONSE TO
SET QUESTIONS
1. How can central government best support
and encourage local authorities, regional government and devolved
administrations to take action on mitigation and adaptation, and
other climate change related areas like waste and transport? What
funding, powers and structures are required to improve joined
up delivery of climate change policy at all levels of government?
— Showing leadership and setting clear
national goals through the Climate Change Bill and a programme
to deliver it, including guidance for regional implementation.
— Providing clear, consistent and useable
methods for setting baselines and recording carbon emissions.
— By integrating climate change mitigation
and adaptation policies more clearly into national policies, eg
on waste, transport (including aviation and shipping) and energy.
— By providing financial incentives,
eg through the taxation system, to householders, businesses and
communities for practical and proven mitigation and adaptation
responses, helping local authorities to achieve local targets.
There may also be opportunities to support regional bodies and
councils that offer such incentives at a local level, eg linking
water and energy efficiency to local taxation.
— By widely disseminating established
good practice and encouraging take-up. There are many examples
of good projects and good practice that work, but these are not
being widely replicated.
— Supporting partnership working. Working
in partnership enables regional and local bodies to engage with
and learn from other similar organisations and with the private
sector. Pooling knowledge, skills, experience and resources is
vital if change is to happen at the pace required and if national
targets are to be met. Regional climate change partnerships such
as the SECCP have proved a successful model, enabling members
to access the latest information, keep up to date with policies,
network effectively and develop tools and guidance for local authorities.
However, Partnerships require full-time coordination to be successful.
Government should encourage membership of such partnerships and
show its support for their work by funding a proportion of the
running costs.
2. Is there clarity about the role played
by local authorities, regional governments and devolved administrations
in tackling climate change? How can their actions be coordinated
and monitored? How can the accountability and transparency of
response at a local level be improved? How effective has the Nottingham
Declaration process been?
In the South East, the regional agencies have
begun working together to develop a joined-up strategy. There
is still some way to go on this, especially as the future roles
of the agencies are unclear in the light of the government's Sub-national
Review. It seems that the Development Agencies will have increasing
responsibility for delivering challenging climate change targets
and this will involve working very closely with local authorities.
The response to climate change is best determined
at a local level in order to identify the most suitable ways to
reduce greenhouse gasses or adapt to the expected impacts on the
local community. The regional and local authorities should therefore
play an important role in implementing agreed targets on the ground.
This will require local authorities to tap into and provide support
for local community initiatives. Such initiatives seem, in our
experience, to be most effective when visibly led by the local
community, but with support from the local council.
The Nottingham Declaration has been extremely
useful in engaging local authorities and many in the south east
are signatories. It is effective in generating interest and discussion
and sets some actions against which the councils can report and
be scrutinised. However, the Declaration is just a first step
and coordinated local and regional action is needed to deliver
and move beyond these commitments. It is vital that local commitments
are supported by clear and achievable delivery plans and that
they contribute to achieving national targets.
Currently regions and authorities are struggling
to identify clear methods for either setting a baseline of current
or historical carbon emissions, or of adequately tracking current
and future emissions. Progress is being made, but it is extremely
important that these calculations are made as consistently as
possible and without much further delay so that reporting can
begin and provide reliable data for assessing and comparing local,
regional and national progress.
3. What, if anything, needs to be changed
in the framework governing the actions of devolved administrations,
regional government and local authorities? For example, does there
need to be a more explicit reference to climate change in the
local government performance framework and will the new performance
indicators on climate change be enough to stimulate action?
We strongly welcome the inclusion of key performance
indicators on climate change in the new Local Area Agreement framework.
We are especially pleased that an indicator on adaptation to the
impacts of climate change appears for the first time. This will
encourage local authorities to consider the impacts of climate
change on investment projects and infrastructure, avoiding considerable
additional costs over the coming years and decades. However, there
is currently no requirement on local authorities to include any
of the climate change indicators in their agreement, which is
likely to result in patchy reporting and progress, which may affect
our ability to meet regional and national targets. This seems
to run contrary to government statements which declare climate
change to be the greatest challenge we face. As the Stern Review
indicates, there is a strong economic case for investing now to
reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of
our changing climate. While local authorities must have flexibility
to identify the best local responses, climate change should be
at the core of their strategies.
4. To what extent should there be disaggregated
targets for different levels of government? How should independent
targets, for example Scotland will set its own emissions target
for 2050 (80% reduction rather than the UK target of 60%) and
the Greater London Authority has committed itself to making a
60% cut by 2030, fit together with national carbon targets and
budgets? How can Government monitoring and forecasting of emissions
be improved so as to disaggregate emissions and the impact of
carbon reductions policies, in different regions and nations?
The logical starting place for emissions reductions
targets should be in scientific evidence. The latest reports from
the IPCC indicate that in order to keep global temperature rise
within or close to 20C, above which "dangerous" climate
change is expected, we need to stabilise global atmospheric CO2
concentrations at or below 450 parts per million. For the UK to
play its fair share in achieving this reduction, we would need
to cut our carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 (the target until now
has been 60%). It would be helpful for the UK government to work
as quickly as possible to define the targets that will be included
in the Climate Change Bill (or to set a clear timescale for the
review following its introduction). It is our view that these
targets should be in line with the scientific evidence to aim
to avoid dangerous climate change and to encourage other countries
to follow suit.
Regional Bodies and Local Authorities have rightly
moved ahead with setting their own targets and are starting to
deliver on them. However, only when the national targets have
been defined can we piece together how the various local, regional
and national targets feed into each other and make any necessary
adjustments. In order to make sense of and effectively monitor
such long-term national targets, we need a clear trajectory of
interim targets, ideally of around 3% per year. This would enable
government to plan out, in cooperation with the regions, how the
targets fit together. For instance, some regions may offer opportunities
for larger or earlier savings than others so regional targets
and timescales may vary so long as the overall direction fits
with the trajectory. In the south east, work is already underway
to map out what this trajectory might look like in the region,
but it would be helpful to have more certainty about national
targets and emissions monitoring methods and about the future
roles of the regional bodies in implementing the required carbon
reductions.
The regional bodies and some local authorities
in the South East have already set themselves ambitious targets
and are making progress towards achieving significant carbon reductions—it
is important that this progress is valued as the current delays
in setting national targets may lead to some authorities delaying
action until such time as they can be sure it will be recognised.
5. How advanced and co-ordinated are local,
regional and national programmes of adaptation to climate change?
What support is there for adaptation? How vulnerable to climate
change are the local authorities, regional government and devolved
administrations?
At a regional level and in some local authorities,
adaptation to the impacts of climate change is beginning to be
integrated into strategies and policies, but generally it still
has a lower priority than mitigation of the causes. This is a
cause of concern as the scientific evidence is now very clear
that we are already experiencing climate change and that we can
expect, in the south east, to be more severely affected than any
other area of the UK by rising temperatures, summer droughts,
winter flooding and sea level rise.
National efforts so far have mainly focussed
on identifying the trends in the UK and providing guidance on
how organisations can identify and assess the risks and opportunities.
This has been extremely helpful but, as with mitigation, we now
need to rapidly make the leap from understanding what needs to
be done to putting in place thorough strategies and action on
the ground.
Local and regional preparation for the impacts
of climate change is especially important as extreme weather events
tend to be fairly localised. The effects of severe weather depend
on both the natural conditions of the area and on human development,
eg extreme temperatures are exacerbated in built up areas by the
urban heat island effect and the effects of flooding depend on
the extent of development in flood risk areas. Central government
must play a role in supporting the development and implementation
of adaptation strategies, but the assessment of risks and opportunities
and the best solutions will generally be most effectively done
at a local level, drawing on local knowledge.
All local authorities in the south east and
most areas of their services, infrastructure, facilities and ways
of working will be affected in some way by the kind of changes
we expect to see in our climate over the coming years and decades.
These effects are both economic, eg flood damage to infrastructure
and businesses and social, eg the health risks of overheating
for the young and the elderly. Local Authorities' response to
the impacts of climate change will also partly determine how effective
they will be in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, eg if buildings
have to install air conditioning to cope with summer temperatures
or if new, more efficient buildings are rendered unusable by sea
or river flooding, or if public transport systems cannot cope
with severe weather, emissions will rise.
To date the main support for adaptation responses
has come from the UK Climate Impacts Programme. Their scenarios,
maps and tools have been invaluable in allowing interested organisations
to begin assessing risks and developing strategies to cope with
the impacts. UKCIP have played an active role in the various regional
climate change partnerships, including SECCP and have achieved
a lot with limited resources. However, UKCIP is not staffed sufficiently
to provide the kind of support that is available to local and
regional businesses, authorities and individuals for mitigation,
through the Carbon Trust and Energy Savings Trust. There does
not appear to be the same level of support for communications
of adaptation issues to organisations and householders, as there
has been on mitigation. In order to deliver a coordinated and
coherent response to climate change, tackling both the causes
and the effects, we need to increase support at the national and
regional level for adaptation and integrate it more closely with
mitigation. Government could send a clear signal of its commitment
to a joined-up response to climate change by committing itself
to long-term funding of UKCIP and provision of regional support
to adaptation.
At a regional level the only current support
mechanism for regional and local authorities is through the regional
climate change partnerships. These partnerships have developed
independently of each other and vary in structure, funding and
work programmes, but share a focus on adaptation to the impacts
of climate change and work together to share experience, good
practice and to feed into policy development. The partnerships
provide the link between the UKCIP scenarios and tools and the
regional and local bodies who need to use them. Some of the regional
partnerships work exclusively on adaptation to climate impacts,
while others, like the SECCP, work on climate change in the round.
The Partnership is the only region-wide forum in the south east
where regional bodies, local authorities, private businesses and
non governmental organisations come together to share and coordinate
climate change solutions through sharing information, learning
and case studies, developing guidance and tools, communicating
the issues and successes and feeding in jointly to policy development.
The SECCP has developed a good working relationship
with Defra and other relevant government departments, but has
received no central government funding for its coordination or
administration. The Partnership meets its running costs through
membership funding, but would benefit enormously from the added
value some central financial support would give, both through
the message this would give to local authorities about the high
priority and urgency of adaptation and also through the increased
security of funding to enable us to focus on delivering solutions
on the ground and to widen our communications. Currently not all
local authorities belong to or take part in their regional climate
change Partnership, although an increasing number are joining
as climate change becomes a higher priority for them. More active
central support for the Partnerships and encouragement of local
authorities to get involved would be very beneficial, eg as a
natural follow-on to signing the Nottingham Declaration and as
part of the means to deliver the Local Area Agreement targets.
6. How should the Committee on Climate Change
reflect the interests and needs of the different levels of government
across the UK?
As stated above, local responses to climate
change are vital to ensure that the solutions adopted are the
most suitable and are sustainable. Coordination between national
legislation and local councils and their communities will be key
to delivering carbon reduction targets. The Committee on Climate
Change should advise on making and improving the links between
national and local implementation and, as such, should include
individuals with a good knowledge of the workings of regional
bodies, councils and communities. This could, but does not necessarily,
mean that the committee should include members of regional or
local authorities. What is, perhaps, more important is that the
committee should have strong links to and communications with
regional and local bodies and that it should pay attention to
regional and local differences in the advice that it gives.
7. What are the barriers to greater local
or regional action? Do the different levels of government have
sufficient powers to take action? What changes in policy are needed
to support action at a local level? What policies are working
well?
Short-term economic decision making is perhaps
the key barrier to delivering the necessary changes, both locally
and nationally. The regional bodies are taking steps to overcome
this through setting long-term regional strategies, including
action on climate change. However, there remains some tension
between the sustainable development objectives in these strategies
and national policies, especially regarding housing development,
transport and energy policies. The regional bodies are working
to understand and resolve these tensions, but will need clear
prioritisation from central government. Many local authorities
are also setting clear and long term strategies for reducing emissions,
but again they would benefit from greater support from government,
both through leadership on climate change issues and financial
support for such long-term planning.
Climate change, including adaptation, is still
seen as a purely environmental issue by many local authorities
and is dealt with by an individual or small team within the authority,
rather than being fully integrated into decision making and policy
across the authority, eg planners, service providers etc, where
the real difference could be made. A shift in thinking is required
and increasingly we need to find ways to make sure that all planning,
reviews and decisions are put through a filter of the need to
(measurably) reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to ensure resilience
to the impacts of climate change. Some local authorities are already
successfully moving in this direction.
The South East Climate Change Partnership has
undertaken various pieces of work to identify the barriers to
actions in the South East. We are currently a partner in the European
funded ESPACE project on spatial planning and adaptation, led
by Hampshire County Council, which is examining the organisational,
policy and other barriers to adaptation to climate change with
a view to developing and trialling solutions and recommendations.
We would be happy to provide the committee with more information
and background reports.
Our experience is that strong and positive leadership
at a senior level within an organisation is most likely to lead
to the development and integration of strong and successful policies
on climate change, whether in reducing emissions, preparing for
the effects of climate change or both. The other main factor affecting
the response of a local authority is obligation to either fulfil
legislative requirements or to report and be measured against
targets. Planning regulations and legislation on river and coastal
management planning will help to quickly and consistently improve
standards and planning for some aspects of adaptation. While the
introduction of performance indicators in Local Area Agreements
will help, they are not compulsory so local authorities who are
not performing well in this area may opt not to include these
targets in their agreements.
8. What impact will the new Planning Policy
Statement on climate change have on emissions reductions and work
on adaptation? How are the so called "Merton rules"
affected? How might other planning guidance be changed to reduce
emissions?
We welcome the new Planning Policy Statement
on climate change and believe this will play an important role
in integrating climate change considerations into the planning
process. Our Partners may respond individually in more detail
on this point.
However, we are concerned that other changes
to national planning legislation will reduce local participation
in the planning process in order to enable more rapid processing
of applications for major infrastructure projects and that this
may lead to projects being approved which commit the UK (and particular
regions) to increased carbon emissions.
9. Are local authorities meeting their duty
to enforce building regulations in relation to environmental measures?
Does the enforcement regime discourage non-compliance?
We are not aware of any major problems with
non-compliance in relation to enforcement of the building regulations,
but our individual partners may submit more detailed responses
on this point based on their experience.
However, building regulations have, to date,
been much weaker on adaptation to the impacts of climate change
than on emissions reductions. This is especially true in relation
to the effects of high temperatures. Given that by the 2050s,
the heatwave experienced in 2003 is likely to represent a normal
summer, overheating potential should be actively reduced in the
construction of all new houses. This would have health benefits
and would also reduce the need for energy intensive air conditioning
to be installed in future—otherwise the gains in energy
efficiency achieved through the building regulations may be lost
as air conditioning is retro-fitted.
We are also concerned that the emphasis on building
regulations and planning consents means that the vast bulk of
our housing and infrastructure are being overlooked. Across the
greater South East, over 70% of the housing that will be around
in the 2050s has already been built. We must act swiftly to make
energy savings accessible and mainstream for all householders
and to better reduce and manage the effects of increased flooding,
drought and overheating on these buildings. The same is true of
our roads, railways, businesses, drainage systems, etc. All of
these issues should be accorded the same priority as changes to
and enforcement of the building regulations.
10. What good practice is there to be shared?
How is best practice shared and does central government support
for sharing best practice work? What role should UK Climate Impacts
Programme, IDeA, Salix Finance, the Carbon Trust and Energy Savings
Trust play in providing support?
See answer to question 5.
The regional climate change partnerships in
the UK, including the SECCP, all work closely with the UK Climate
Impacts Programme. For instance, a representative of UKCIP sits
on the SECCP Executive Committee and SECCP attends an interregional
meeting of the climate change partnerships together with UKCIP
and others three times a year to exchange information, best practice
and to feed in to policy development. The UKCIP scenarios and
tools provide an invaluable foundation for our regional projects
and guidance, and the UKCIP08 scenarios will help to improve local
risk-based planning.
The South East Climate Change Partnership will
continue to work closely with UKCIP, the Carbon Trust and others
as appropriate over the coming years to move towards our vision
of a climate resilient and low-carbon south east.
3 January 2008
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