A ticking time bomb? Liverpool declares a climate emergency: What next?

Under the Climate Change Act 2008, ¹ the UK Government had set a goal to cut Green House Gas emissions by 80 per cent compared to baseline levels of 1990 by 2050. ² In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a special report arguing that radical change was needed to deal with climate change across the globe. ³ It stated that to limit global warming to 1.5°C, carbon emissions would need to fall by 45 per cent as compared to 2010 levels by 2030. The following month, Bristol, the first city in the UK, closely followed by Manchester, put forward motions declaring a climate emergency and set their own specific targets according to their localities to be carbon neutral by 2030 and 2038, respectively. ⁴

These declarations were made on a voluntary basis; there is no legal requirement to do so. Since then, over 100 councils in the UK have followed suit and have also passed motions declaring a ‘climate emergency’. ⁵ On 1 May 2019, the UK parliament followed the lead taken by these councils across the UK and unanimously agreed to the motion put forward by Jeremy Corbyn to declare an environment and climate emergency. He argued it was necessary, given the direct action that had been taken by school children and climate change groups such as Extinction Rebellion who had undertaken strikes earlier on in the year which had shut down roads and bridges in London. ⁶ He also said that at current trends, the UK would not meet its zero net emissions until the end of the century, by which time our grandchildren would be fighting to stay alive on a dying planet. What an unthinkable prospect. It is a catastrophe waiting to happen, unless radical change is taken now to tackle the problems.

The next day, the Committee on Climate Change (which was created by the Climate Change Act 2008) published its report saying that a 1.5°C rise in temperature was dangerous for climate change. ⁷ It took a more cautious view saying that the UK would not be able to reach net zero emissions by 2050, unless the government ramped up policies in a major way and backed it with money. And that at present, the way things were going the UK would not be able to meet its current legal obligations to reduce carbon emissions by 2050. ⁸ The report also forewarned that even if other countries followed the UK, there was only a 50 per cent chance of meeting a net zero target by 2050. ⁹ Consequently, as a result of this report on 11 June 2019, the former UK Prime Minister Theresa May declared that the UK will aim to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. ¹⁰ The previous target set out in the Climate Change Act 2008 has been amended to reflect this. ¹¹ By way of direct response to central government’s declaration of a climate emergency, on 17 July 2019, Liverpool City Council (which also works together with six other local authorities in the North West of England to form the Liverpool Region Combined Authority) became the latest authority (at the time of writing) to declare a climate emergency at a special debate. ¹² So in such a short period of time, we have now reached the point where climate change is now readily recognised as being a climate emergency by the mainstream media and across numerous organisations and all levels of government.

The way in which climate change will be tackled by each local authority across the UK will be different. Liverpool is a fascinating but an extremely complicated city and has some of the most pressing social problems to deal with in contrast to the rest of the UK. ¹³ It will, as a result, have some of the most difficult decisions to make in terms of how to reduce its carbon emissions. But at the same time, it has a long history of innovation, and it declared at its special council meeting recently that it is prepared to think differently and work out ways of how to reduce CO₂ emissions faster than before. It recognises that in order to effect change, we must all work together, which is why a combined authority has been proposed to deal with issues such as air pollution. Liverpool City Council has, however, yet to produce a fully costed plan setting out how it is going to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2030 across all its various departments, and the various services it provides to its 480,000 residents. It hopes to produce a plan by December 2019. And that is not to say it has not been doing its bit. It has, for example, started installing 27,000 LED lights across its city, it has planted 12,000 trees with 4,000 more planned, its company Liverpool Streetscene Services Limited (which deals with refuse and recycling) now recycles metal that has been illegally dumped by people rather than it being sent to landfill, ¹⁴ it has introduced electric vehicles, and it has managed to secure s.106 agreements from developers via the planning system to fund the creation of green spaces across the city and to plant trees. ¹⁵

Planning for climate change is key to its delivery. At the special debate, Liverpool’s mayor also announced that he had appointed a dedicated officer to join the cabinet to deal with climate change. ¹⁶ The council, however, needs substantial funding and also an array of change agents working across its departments to deliver the plan and to encourage its officers to think outside the box with regard to how to deliver climate change as best as possible, given the financial constraints they are under. The officers in turn need an array of tools and powers to deliver climate change, and central government will need to be more proactive in finding mechanisms which local authorities can easily adopt in order to make change happen.

The problem is multifaceted and so too are the solutions that will need to be adopted. On 30 July 2019, the mayor submitted a £230 million bid to Prime Minister Boris Johnson for a ‘Green City Deal’, which aims to create economic opportunities while at the same time creating a greener economy. ¹⁷ As part of this proposal, one of the components is a green housing programme, with new and refurbished properties being delivered to low carbon standards. This is positive, but the mayor fails to recommend that the space in and around such sites should incorporate green spaces and tree planting as part of this to help improve people’s quality of life and offset CO₂.

Liverpool is one of the many councils trying to find ways to address climate change mitigation, but without central government support and significant funding, and the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit moving closer, it is extremely unlikely that it is going to be able to do so. It is a most depressing thought; however, it is hoped perhaps that the resilient people of Liverpool will take up the challenge, and they themselves will be the catalyst for change. What is needed is coordinated action by various people within the council, between its respective departments, other authorities, organisations, key stakeholders and residents. If the council does not take coordinated action, it will miss opportunities to deliver climate change and not meet its target. But the sense of urgency must not be understated. As even James Lovelock, author of the Gaia theory of how the Earth regulates itself like a living organism, ¹⁸ has argued, the Earth and its inhabitants are now incapable of preventing catastrophic climate change. We have actioned too little and we have left it too late. Reducing carbon emissions in order to reduce the temperature to stop the ice caps melting and sea levels rising is just one part of the problem. The other part of the problem is that the ice caps are now melting faster than even the scientists had envisaged and in a shorter time period. ¹⁹ There is now too short a time period for the people around the world to refocus the economic system in order to reduce carbon emissions, and not only that, the developing countries do not have much money to deal with the problem.

Everybody is talking about Brexit, but climate change is far more important than this. It requires action. Draconian measures are needed to deal with climate change urgently. There has been a lack of belief in the scientific evidence of climate change, and as time goes on, the problem will get more and more serious. Next month, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres will convene a climate action summit, ²⁰ where the world’s leaders will meet to discuss which key sectors they should concentrate on to accelerate the pace of change, and the following year in 2020 they will meet again in the UK to partake in the UN Climate conference ²¹ to potentially agree what they are prepared to commit to, but time is running out. Action is what we need, and we need it now.