In February 2019 Hastings declared a climate emergency thanks in part to pressure from Hastings Green Party. Other councils have taken a similar step.
Now an independent agency, appropriately called ‘Climate Emergency UK’ and funded by a variety of charitable bodies and private donations, has quizzed councils across England and Wales to assess their progress.
Climate Emergency UK seeks ‘to provide the tools to take action on the climate and ecological emergency at a local level in the UK, by providing accessible information and transparent data.’
To gain a clear picture they asked each council – from local and borough to county and unitary – a spectrum of approximately 90 detailed questions, ranging across seven categories from transport, to building and heating, land use, governance and finance, biodiversity, collaboration, waste reduction and food.
Each council was marked against these criteria and given a right to reply. This work was completed between January and August 2023. It’s a serious effort to create a national picture, and is publicly available: search for ‘Council Climate Action Scorecards’.
In addition to the seven criteria, each council was given an overall score. How is Hastings doing? How do we compare, say, against Lewes? Or Rother? Or Brighton?
East Sussex as a whole managed 42% (which isn’t bad: the top county council was Oxfordshire, with 53%). Lewes District Council came in at a creditable 46%. Brighton managed 50%.
Hastings got 24%. The average for all districts was 29%, so we fell somewhat behind the unimpressive national figure.
Rother rather let the side down with an overall rating of just 16%.
The scorecards provide a useful local checklist. For example, Hastings scored relatively well on buildings and heating – one of the biggest carbon emitters – with a respectable score on retrofitting. Our score for installing renewable energy, however, is lamentable for a town on the sunny south coast. We scored zero for working with local community energy coops, with whose support we could install solar PV on many council-owned buildings. We just don’t have the officer capacity to deliver this obvious win.
We did poorly on planning and land use, and below average on governance. Notably, we have not involved the local community in creating a local climate action plan. There is still no reporting on the council’s own carbon reduction targets.
The point of this exercise is not to beat our hardworking officers over the head with a stick. It’s to create a detailed and accessible picture of where to focus our efforts.
During this last week the officers of the council pushed everything aside to deal with the latest flooding. It’s hard, when you are understaffed and overworked, to think about climate change. Yet the floods show it’s essential for the future of our town to embed climate action and adaptation into every decision we make. We will have to work together to solve the flooding issues. Perhaps this will finally give us the incentive to set up proper structures for working together in our town.