Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru
SC(3) CR-R16
1. Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) represents the 22 local authorities in Wales, and the three national park authorities, the three fire and rescue authorities, and four police authorities are associate members.
2. It seeks to provide representation to local authorities within an emerging policy framework that satisfies the key priorities of our members and delivers a broad range of services that add value to Welsh Local Government and the communities they serve.
3. The Association welcomes this inquiry as a clear opportunity to develop a broader consensus on the issue across all stakeholders. This is an imperative if real progress is to be made. It is vital that all sectors understand the role that they can play and what the expectation is and can plan and resource accordingly. The Association will be making further submissions on Transport and other issues as part of the Committee’s future work.
4. The target represents a significant challenge given the stock of housing in Wales.
5. The need for real leadership on this issue is clear. The need to broaden the debate with the public and help them understand how they can turn their concern over Climate Change into effective action is key. The work of organisations such as the Energy Saving Trust is critical to this. As is the role that the third sector can play with the support of Local and national Government. It is vital that this engagement is positive and energises people to make changes. There is a real danger issues such as this are characterised as having to give up opportunity rather than perhaps enabling a more fulfilled simpler life.
6. The WLGA are currently looking at initiatives such as the LGIU voluntary carbon trading scheme for local authorities (LA’s). This may enable LA’s to begin to understand how they might approach this system http://www.lgiu.gov.uk/module2-detail.jsp?id=85§ion=who_we_are_lgiu&parent=1&selfid=85
7. There is also a clear need for a better informed evidence base upon which to take operational decisions within public services. The concern is that well intentioned decisions that are not fully evidenced could have a marginal effect but alienate the public. Local Authorities are working closely with organisations such as the Carbon Trust to ensure that practical well thought out decisions are taken. Initiatives such as that by Cardiff Council to reduce their Carbon Emissions in the next ten years is a good example of this. The WLGA will work to support all authorities in this process and help spread good practice. The results through savings in energy budgets speak for themselves and critically support the efficiency agenda. In this context it in LA’s interest to participate and by doing so will often make more progress more quickly than if it was a compliance issue. This will also operate as a clear signal to local communities that activity can be cost effective and carbon reducing. Clearly WAG will want to highlight this in the guidance notes on SD and Climate Change due to be issued in support of the new guidance on Community Planning.
8. Activity in this area must be clearly embedded within the Making the Connections agenda. A good example is procurement practice. There are significant social and environmental benefits (and through approaches such as local multiplier 3 LM3 measurable economic benefits) of procuring good quality locally, such as through local food suppliers. There is often a short term imperative on cost which directs what purchasers do and it is vital that this necessary consideration is balanced with issues such as whole life costing and understanding the triple bottom line.
9. Research undertaken on behalf of the WLGA has begun to scope out what a Carbon neutral Local Authority would look like (appendix one). It also begins to try and understand how this could be implemented at a Local Service Board level and finally what a carbon neutral community might look like. This last scenario is important in considering what contribution the residential housing sector might make. Whilst overall targets are effective in sending a clear message there needs to be a supported process to help drive change within the public sector. A range of processes currently do this in local government not least the Wales programme for Improvement. The WLGA have in conjunction with WAG developed a SD framework for local government http://www.wlga.gov.uk/content.php?nID=293;lID=1. The purpose of this work is to help embed sustainable thinking into mainstream activity. As the SDC highlighted in their evidence Climate Change is the result of living unsustainably so this will support this process.
10. The role of planning in this respect is critical. The location, type and relationship of development to support facilities, its orientation on the site, the building materials used, the potential for Combined Heat and Power (CHP) energy generation and on site renewables, use of water and other scare resource are all important issues in some way determined or influenced through the planning system. The development of Local Development Plans over the next four years with a far greater emphasis upon sustainable living will do much to alter our perception of community and ways of living. The joint WLGA/WAG/Environment Agency/CCW and POSW research into SD and Planning system seeks to understand the land use planning implications of SD (appendix two). It outlines the kind of policy that LPA’s may wish to adopt in their LDP’s and through Supplementary Planning Guidance and gives an analytical tool to deliver those policies through the development control system (shortly available on the WLGA web site). There is an extensive community engagement process in developing and adopting these policies before they can begin to be implemented. However this will do much to facilitate a debate with the people of Wales on these issues in a way which makes sense and impacts in a tangible way upon their lives.
11. The residential housing sector represents a significant opportunity but presents real difficulties as well. As the Committee has already heard in previous presentations there has been real progress in this sector with savings of 28MtC since 1970 mainly through energy efficiency measures. Energy Saving Trust (EST) estimate that a further 40MtC can be saved through existing technologies. This reinforces the role that Home Energy Conservation Act (HECA) activity can play. The WLGA will continue to seek to develop partnership working with EST and Local Authorities to deliver this more effectively. The recent WAO report into the implementation of HECA does raise some key lessons for authorities and their management of this scheme. It is a paradox that certain activity around fuel poverty such as installing central heating systems may increase carbon production. Whilst those with a large carbon footprint may have the wherewithal to effect a significant reduction but choose not to and clearly cannot access the means tested grant system. This will be a difficult policy decision, how to incentivise behaviour in this group in an equitable manner.
12. WAG have been very successful in driving change in the social housing sector through the policy levers they currently have such as conditions around Social Housing Grant. However there have been issues as the development industry in a wider sense is not currently geared up to way of thinking e.g. eco homes. This does have some impact upon delivering mixed and balanced communities which is a key WAG priority (often a way of securing affordable housing is for a developer to hand over a proportion of dwellings on a site that are all built to the same standard). This illustrates the need to fully understand the potential impacts of any statutory proposals within a whole system approach.
13. Another key thought for the committee is that requiring such improvements built into social housing means that they are on average 7-9% more expensive to construct, this has implications for how far SHG goes and how many units it delivers. This is pertinent given the target for 6,500 new affordable homes within One Wales. In rural areas Home buy is more important and this invariably is used to purchase housing not built to the higher eco standard and consequently this means that rural areas are missing out. WAG should also consider the longer term impact as the additional energy efficiency does much to alleviate issues such as fuel poverty which is a fundamental WAG objective. Therefore additional funding for social housing to this higher standard should perhaps be sought from other budgets within the overall WAG budget.
14. There does have to be honesty about what the potential impact upon services across the public sector will be and to understand the resource implications. There needs to be a process of reviewing progress that allows for some flexibility to both take advantage of significant opportunity but consider balanced growth.
15. This efficiency programme should be linked very closely to the Making the Connections agenda within the public service. 16. In terms of the private sector where competitive advantage is critical it is essential that similar requirements are placed on all the players to ensure a level playing field.
17. In broader strategic terms there is a real need to try and decouple sectors away from dependence upon non-renewable energy sources. This is both in terms of growing a sustainable market for new technological solutions and making those markets economically viable against the alternatives. The danger is that market fluctuations in the cost of oil and gas could significantly undermine the resilience of public services.
18. Local government recognises the clear role it has to play in this agenda. This is from a perspective as a significant generator of Carbon, from a Community Leadership and partnership role and as a key player within Welsh Communities. At a recent WLGA Council it was resolved to investigate more fully the implications of carbon neutral working.
Question 1
19. It is difficult to see how the WAG could commit to a reduction target beyond its area of devolved competence. However what is critical is that Carbon reduction is embedded across all policy development and clear leadership is demonstrated. There will come a time when difficult decisions have to be taken that may require for example a decision which reduces short term economic growth to meet wider Carbon targets. It is important that this fact is acknowledged. The setting of this target within One Wales is an important landmark.
20. The assumption is that activity will progress across a wide range of areas within the context of UK initiatives. It is important that if Wales is not to lose its economic edge that this is closely monitored to ensure that the culminative effect of policy is not detrimental.
21. There needs to be a mechanism to respond to any emerging scientific findings that suggest a revision in the targets. This should be linked to the monitoring and evaluation process. In much the same way as the Carbon Bill recognises that broader issues such as an unusually cold winter or other factors may put progress off course there has to be a capacity in the WAG system to consider these short term externalities. It must also be necessary to understand where progress is being made and how those lessons could be learnt. Both the Making the Connections agenda and the work of this committee will be critical to that.
Question 2
22. Any emission target should ultimately be for both consumption and production to give a holistic understanding of what is happening within Wales. This is vital if areas such as public sector procurement practice and whole life costing is to progress. This more rounded view allows focus upon the behaviour of organisations and consumers. Whilst it is true that Wales is a higher producer through its heavy industry and energy generation than some other parts of the UK there are a number of initiatives such as the European Carbon trading scheme that address those concerns once the cost of carbon becomes more realistic. The Carbon Reduction scheme will also have an impact.
23. There is a real job to be done in influencing the public and the type of small businesses which predominate in Wales. There is a significant hurdle given the ability of Welsh agencies to influence wider consumer behaviour. Previous UK government campaigns to do this seem to have had a limited impact. Consumer behaviour suggests that people are generally happy to make changes at the margin by for example recycling more, but will not make the fundamental changes unless forced to. The development of green taxes to drive behaviour is a clear example of this. The development of the environmental LCO may provide WAG with an opportunity to help drive behavioural change. The microgeneration consultation is well intentioned in hopefully promoting more microgeneration which then often leads to greater lifestyle changes in the behaviour of the individuals concerned. There are practical concerns over the implementation of this which the WLGA will raise through that consultation process.
Question 3
24. Wales faces a range of specific issues relating to its carbon dioxide emissions in relation to households. These include;
25. In terms of household emissions the following areas suggest themselves as priorities:
Question 4
26. This is an emerging picture however the SDC evaluation of moving from pioneering to implementation is probably broadly fair. A great deal in influencing and leadership has been undertaken. The emphasis is upon making it a reality to a greater extent. Hence the timely work of this committee. Significant work has been undertaken in the Planning and Climate agenda with the publication of the Ministerial Interim Planning Policy statement last year, microgeneration permitted development consultation, the adoption of BREEAM excellence standards for WAG funded activity, eco standards for social housing, carbon neutral aspirations amongst others. However other sectors and players have to also take greater responsibility for their own activity where appropriate.
Question 5
27. It is clear from the WAO report that additional efforts must be made to incentivise energy efficiency for the private market. This would ideally be one of the key purposes of the Climate Change Commission for Wales and activity must be derived from a more substantive review of what is likely to work, and the social equality aspects of any policy.
28. There is evidence that social housing schemes which have attempted to realise higher environmental performance have not always been funded. In one scheme two submissions were made and it was the one without environmental features which was funded. There may be good reasons for this such as the expenditure was disproportionate to the benefit. However the RSL got no sense of this.
Question 6
29. It has been suggested that new homes in Wales should be built to the Passivhause standard plus. This means that they do not require a heating system and can generate electricity which can be sent back to the grid. There are obviously significant implications of this but worthy of further exploration as part of the wider Building Regulation debate.
30. WAG may choose to investigate if premiums to feedback tariffs could be funded.
31. The HEES scheme needs revisiting to determine if the focus should move away from traditional energy efficiency into funding renewables and replacing wasteful heating systems.
Question 7
32. The devolvement of Building Regulations is critical to ensure that WAG ambitions are realised is if the 2011 target is to be realised. In terms of microgeneration then the rate at which electricity is sold back to the grid is significant in terms of viability. In conjunction with this there needs to be a mechanism to ensure that the electricity grid facilitates this. There are concerns that the Planning White Paper proposes an independent Planning Commission to decide on major infrastructure including energy within a UK national policy framework. This has obvious implications for Wales and issues like the suggestion that Wales considers smaller scale CHP stations linked to residential/urban areas. In many ways as illustrated by innovative Councils such as Merton and Woking, it is possible to do a lot currently.
33. There needs to be greater assurance that where LPA’s refuse planning permission on sustainability grounds that the policy framework is robust enough to ensure that this is backed up at appeal.
Question 8
34. Specific sectoral targets should perhaps be explored but on the basis that there should be broad confluence in the longer term. This would allow evidence based decisions to be taken on where the greater impacts can be realised in the shorter term and where more substantive systemic change in a sector may take longer. This is within the proviso that there must be a clear regulatory impact assessment to determine the scope and cost of change and ensure that the public sector is sufficiently funded to deliver this, or there is a wide spread public acceptance that services may have to be altered. This must also be closely monitored in terms of the operation of the sectors where long term economic viability must be balanced against progress in this area. It is also critical that there is a coherence within WAG policy on this issue and in many respects the new portfolio of the Minister gives real hope of this. However the symbolism of actions such as funding major road infrastructure needs to considered even if the net impact is marginal.
For further information please contact:
Craig Mitchell - Policy Officer Craig.mitchell@wlga.gov.uk
Welsh Local Government Association
Local Government House
Drake Walk
Cardiff CF10 4LG
Tel:029 2046 8600
Appendix One
Levett-Therivel sustainability consultants
2 April 2007
Contact: Roger Levett, tel/fax 0117 973 2418 roger@levett-therivel.fsnet.co.uk
39 Cornwallis Crescent, Clifton, Bristol BS8 4PH
As an extension to the Environmental Champions project, the Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) asked Levett-Therivel to write a discussion paper on 'what carbon neutral would mean and break that down into three areas - for LAs on their own, for LSBs and then for entire communities in areas’.
This paper is the result.
The paper draws on previous Levett-Therivel work and publications, especially:
Research for the Birmingham, Coventry and Black Country Chief Executives on carbon neutrality for the city region (whose report is not in the public domain)
Carbon emissions from the South West, and implications for the Regional Spatial Strategy, South West Regional Assembly, 2006 http://www.swra.gov.uk
Living well with less energy: a political problem and Fun with Fractions in Heat and Light - UK Energy Policy in Context, New Statesman supplement, 12 May 2006
Leading the way: how local authorities can meet the challenge of climate change, Local Government Association, London, 2005: http://www.lga.gov.uk/Publication.asp?lsection=0&id=SX7E81-A78309C9
Planning For Urban Sustainability: An Ecosystems Approach, Royal Town Planning Institute, London, 2005: http://www.rtpi.org.uk/resources/policy-statements/2005/aug/
A better choice of choice, Roger Levett with Ian Christie, Michael Jacobs and Riki Therivel, Fabian Society, London, 2003 www.fabian-society.org.uk/press_office/display.asp?cat=24&id=177
Toward the Ecopolis, Roger Levett and Ian Christie, Demos/Comedia, 1999
Section 2 introduces the idea of carbon neutrality and its significance as a policy goal.
Section 3 clarifies some issues around the meaning and definition of carbon neutrality, including apportionment of responsibility for emissions, which emissions should be considered, how the proportionately greater damage from aircraft emissions should be accounted for, the role and limitations of offsetting, and the minimum rate of reduction needed.
Section 4 explains the hierarchy of methods for achieving carbon neutrality, with avoiding or reducing climate-damaging activities as the top priority, followed by energy efficiency and low carbon energy sources, and offsetting only as a last resort.
Section 5 discusses how individual local authorities can work toward carbon neutrality, including easy wins, building carbon screening into all decision taking, using options hierarchy advocated in SEA guidance, and the idea of carbon neutral packages of measures.
Section 6 describes how potential low-carbon communities could also offer a better quality of life.
Section 7 explains how we are locked in to high carbon lifestyles, and the need for systemic interventions to transform current vicious cycles into virtuous ones.
Section 8 outlines the importance and potential for Local Service Boards (LSBs) to help achieve this transformation, both by helping individual organisations take a 'whole system’ approach to service delivery rather than.
Section 9 argues that one reason why we are currently locked in to high carbon living is that the UK’s entire political economy is institutionally anti-sustainable, and needs to be reformed at a range of levels: public service performance management, smarter regulation including proicing structures and increased energy prices, and treating trade, competition and economic growth as means to promote human wellbeing with reduced environmental damage instead of ends in themselves.
Section 10 draws conclusions.
2:1 At its simplest an action or decision - or an industry or a building - is 'carbon neutral’ if it does not add any carbon dioxide to the air. This first section explains why release of a particular gas has suddenly become a hot policy topic.
2:2. Carbon dioxide is one of a number of 'greenhouse gases’ that retain solar radiation in the atmosphere. Without the substantial natural 'greenhouse effect’ the surface of the earth would be too cold to support life as we know it. But too much warming could also make the earth inhospitable to humans.
2:3. For the last 200 years human activities have added significantly to the natural greenhouse effect. There is now overwhelming evidence that these human emissions need to be reduced by at least 60% by 2050, to avert a serious risk of catastrophic and irreversible climate change. Carbon dioxide emissions, directly or indirectly from burning fossil fuels, account for 85% of the UK’s human additions to the natural 'greenhouse effect’.
2:4 Just what the 'safe limit’ of emissions is, how responsibility for making cuts to reach it should be shared out between countries, sectors and communities, and what emissions trajectories over the next few years could be regarded as consistent with long term targets, are all hotly disputed and likely to continue to be. The latest science suggests that the cuts needed for a reasonable assurance of avoiding disaster are much faster and deeper than the 'benchmark’ 60% by 2050: that in fact 60% is needed by around 2025, on the way to 80% by 2050 and even deeper de-carbonisation subsequently.
2:5 This is still contentious. However it is now beyond dispute that on any credible basis of assessment, Wales, along with the rest of the 'developed’ world, is currently emitting greenhouse gases at well over a long term sustainable rate, and needs to make significant cuts as soon as possible. It follows that any further increase in net emissions in Wales would reduce rather than increase climate security, and would therefore be unsustainable in the most literal sense of the word. Thus carbon neutrality is a minimum condition for anything new in Wales - any new building, business, piece of infrastructure, service, decision, plan, etc - to be regarded as sustainable. (Of course this applies to the rest of the developed world too.)
2:6. Of course it is not enough just for changes and new developments in Wales not to add to greenhouse gas emissions. It is also necessary for existing life to greatly reduce emissions. Some activities are much harder to decarbonise than others, so aiming for carbon neutrality wherever possible would be a sensible and indeed proportionate rule of thumb.
2:7. Moreover, even a 'no net increase’ rule will be challenging in many areas. Any additional development - new housing, offices, shops, public services - intrinsically adds to energy use. Even if it is much more energy efficient than older equivalents, that only reduces the increase in emissions it causes, not the total. Infrastructure, especially transport infrastructure, generally responds to demand for more energy consuming activity, and in turn enables more growth. So getting from reducing the increase of emissions to reducing the emissions themselves is often a big step. It often requires a jolt into new ways of doing things, not just doing existing things a bit better. However even the smallest incremental improve can play its part in reducing the size of the hill we have to climb, and starting to get people to think and act in a 'carbon literate’ way. This paper therefore discusses both incremental improvements and big shifts.
3:1. The simple account in 2.1 implicitly raises various complications. This section explores them in detail. Readers uninterested in the 'small print’ can skip to the heading 'a slightly more complex definition’ which takes account of their implications.
Apportionment of emissions
3:2. Statistics on emissions are easiest to collect by the location where they take place. Most international reporting and targets are produced on this basis. However this means that (for example) if people in Cardiff buy and use more washing machines, computers etc made in China, China’s emissions go up, not Wales’s, but if more steel is made in Port Talbot for export, Wales’s emissions go up not those of the countries that import and use the steel. This has various unfair and misleading results:
3:3. For these reasons it is better to apportion emissions to the place (or activity etc) responsible for them: for example to include in Wales’s figures all emissions which are related to consumption by the Welsh, including imports but excluding production within Wales for consumption elsewhere.
Which gases?
3:4. The point of carbon neutrality is to avoid catastrophic climate change. Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are responsible for about 85% of the UK’s 'greenhouse effect’. Therefore interpreting 'carbon neutrality’ as 'no net carbon dioxide emissions’ is a reasonable proxy. Certainly the difference between reducing climate change impacts by 85% and 100% is not worth getting worried about at present when 60% is still a rhetorical ambition which way outstrips current initiatives which will at best secure savings of the order of 10% to 20%.
3:5. However it would only be prudent for a 'carbon neutral’ strategy to avoid anything that might undermine its purpose by increasing other greenhouse gases, and to take what opportunities might come up for reducing them.
3:6. The obvious example is methane. Molecule for molecule it is 28 times as potent a greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide. It is produced when organic matter decays anaerobically (ie in the absence of air.) Capturing and burning methane from (eg) landfills and mine workings achieves both saves fossil fuel and reduces the climate change effects of the gas to 1/28 of what it would have been. This is why flaring waste methane, while it looks wasteful and is less good than capturing it and using it as an energy source, is still much better than letting it escape into the atmosphere.
3:7. Methane from mine workings does not 'count’ as a renewable energy resource. We have not been able to identify figures on methane loss from mine workings in Wales, but suspect that, given the intensity of coal mining in South Wales, it may be significant both as a current addition to Wales’s emissions and as a future energy opportunity.
3:8. Cattle release methane as a result of their digestive processes. Beef and bovine dairy products are therefore markedly more climate-damaging, portion for portion, than other animal products. Animal products in turn are intrinsically more climate damaging than vegetarian equivalents because animals only convert a proportion of their food into meat or milk. Intensive 'industrial’ animal rearing methods increase the conversion efficiency - that is one of their main commercial attractions - but at the expense not only of animal welfare and food quality, but also greater greenhouse emissions from more mechanical processing and transport of feeds and energy use in buildings.
Aviation uplift
3:9. As the Aviation White Paper acknowledges (para 3.36), 'The impact of aviation on climate change is increased over that of direct CO2 emissions alone by some of the other emissions released and their specific effects at altitude. These effects include increased tropospheric ozone, contrail formation and a small amount of methane destruction. The environmental impacts of aircraft have been assessed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1999) and more recently by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (2002), and they are thought to be 2-4 times greater than that from CO2 alone.’ These extra effects occur over different timescales so are not precisely comparable with the basic impacts of CO2 emissions. However a fair reflection of climate impacts of aviation requires at least a doubling of the CO2 figure.
'Zero carbon’ versus 'carbon neutral’
3:10. A helpful distinction is emerging between 'zero carbon’, meaning no net carbon emissions from a building or activity itself, and 'carbon neutral’ meaning no net emissions from the building or activity together with any associated off-site measures. Brenda and Robert Vale’s house in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, is genuinely 'zero carbon’: it is heated and powered entirely by the sun (heat stored by massive walls with high levels of insulation on the outside; photovoltaic panels charging batteries which power all the lights and appliances): it has no gas supply, and a connection to the electricity grid solely to export power at times of surplus.
3:11. This is unusual. It is more common, and easier, to reduce the carbon impacts of a building or activity by buying the energy it uses from renewable sources off site, or by paying for 'offsets’ - activities elsewhere that reduce emissions. This raises the question: given that a tonne of carbon has the same climate impacts wherever it is emitted, is there any reason why carbon neutrality can’t be achieved easily and painlessly just by buying offsets wherever they are cheapest and easiest to achieve? The next section considers this.
Offsetting: principle
3:12. The climate change effect of a tonne of carbon dioxide is ultimately the same whether it is released by motorists commuting into Cardiff, houses being heated in Caernarfon, rainforest being cut down in Thailand, or an inefficient power station in China. If it is cheaper per tonne of carbon emissions saved to replant some trees, or license cleaner technology to the Chinese than to reduce traffic or insulate homes in Wales, surely it’s sensible to do so. Indeed isn’t insisting on the (more expensive) local solution bad for climate protection as well as economically inefficient, because a given amount of money buys less carbon reduction than it could through offsets?
3:13. There has been great political enthusiasm for offsetting as a potentially cheap and painless way to meet ambitious carbon reduction goals. It was given a major boost by the inclusion in the Kyoto Protocol of provision for countries to meet their obligations at least partly by buying surplus emissions rights from other countries, or funding projects to achieve reductions in developing countries.
Offsetting: pitfalls
3:14. A backlash is now starting as evidence emerges that offsetting is often less effective or reliable than has been assumed, can create further environmental and social problems, provides an pretext for failing to take action, and at worst can be an outright scam. Some of the problems and drawbacks are as follows.
3:15. Additionality Clearly offsetting only produces genuine benefit if the greenhouse gas savings bought under an offset scheme would not have happened anyway. However this is often hard to prove. Many offsets in circulation may be accidental results of closures of polluting factories or installations of more energy efficient processes that were going to happen anyway.
3:16. Ironically, the better a bargain a proposed offset appears to be - ie the less money the offsetter is asking in return - the less likely it is that the offset payment made the offset happen when it would not otherwise have done so. There is therefore a contradiction at the heart of offsetting as a free market business: driving the price down intrinsically makes the goods less likely to be the real thing.
3:17. Certainty. Many offsetting projects depend on actions or results in the future which are outside the control of the offset merchant and intrinsically risky (for example forests in remote places continuing to be managed competently over many decades to maturity, and then being harvested and used in ways that replace fossil fuels). There are also technical questions about how much carbon various initiatives actually save. Notoriously, some forestry projects may cause more climate change than they reduce because of factors such as methane emissions from roots.
3:18. Time preference Because of the inertia of the climate system, a given reduction in emissions now is far more valuable for climate security than the same reduction at some point in the future. At the very least this means that future reductions need to be sharply discounted for fair comparison with increases now. For example if an installation of low energy light bulbs is expected to save 1 tonne of CO2 a year for 30 years, that might not offset 30 tonnes of extra emissions this year, but maybe only 20 or 10. Indeed, given the urgency and potentially decisive importance of lowering the 'peak’ of greenhouse gas concentrations, it can be argued that offsets are only valid if they happen at more or less the same time as the emissions they are intended to offset.
3:19. Policy overtake If a future policy change makes everyone do something that was previously the subject of voluntary offsetting, the offset will cease to make a difference. For example, subsidising low energy light bulbs will not make any difference beyond about 2016 now that the European Union has agreed to phase out sales of energy-inefficient bulbs by then anyway. (This is an example of all three of the earlier points, additionality, uncertainty and time preference!
3:20. Equity and exploitation As in any other unregulated global competitive market, carbon offset merchants look for the cheapest source of their product. As with food, fibre, timber, minerals and oil, the cheapest source of carbon farming is often turning out to be developing countries where indigenous peoples are too poor, desperate or politically disenfranchised to organise themselves to defend their interests or even hold out for a fair price, especially where corrupt local regimes are happy to connive with foreign companies to profit from the sale of environmental resources over the heads of local people.
3:21. Idealistic demand does not guarantee responsible supply It is dangerous to assume that the environmental idealism that prompts the demand for offsetting will automatically suffuse the ethics of the companies which are aiming to make a commercial profit from its supply. Now offsetting is a competitive globalised business, much of what it does is nearer in its social and environmental effects to logging rainforest or Shell’s activities in Nigeria. Offsetting is often just a new form of economic colonialism, enabling the wealthy in developed countries to offload responsibility onto the poor elsewhere.
3:22. Costs will rise There is, however, a deeper limitation to offsetting. Climate security requires that, overall, enough action is taken to reduce emissions substantially below their current levels. Offsetting can in principle facilitate and accelerate the first moves towards this by making money available for the 'low hanging fruit’ - the cheapest and easiest opportunities for action. However projects that demonstrably avoid all the problems just identified are already likely to be a lot more expensive than the sort of offsets currently offered by unregulated competitive businesses. And the more offsets are bought, the more expensive they will get, as the easiest opportunities are taken first.
3:23. Impacts have to be reduced In any case it will not be physically possible to cut emissions enough for climate security without significant reductions in energy use in developed countries. Offsetting would have to start paying for reductions in just the sorts of activities, such as air and car travel, which people are currently being encouraged to buy offsets in order to continue. This is obviously nonsensical. Enthusiasm for offsetting should not distract attention from the need to reduce these activities. Indeed, naïve enthusiasm for offsetting is dangerous if it allows people to believe that increasing energy consuming activities can be reconciled with climate security by payment for offsets.
Conditions for valid offsetting
3:24. We conclude that:
3:25. As a rule of thumb, the closer in time, space and character the offset is to the activity being offset, the more likely it is to meet these criteria clearly and provably. One example would be to insulate a building thoroughly at the same time as extending it so the total emissions of the enlarged building were less than before. At a larger scale, improvements to local facilities or public transport which caused some existing residents of a neighbourhood to drive less could offset the extra driving generated by new housing.
3:26. Mediating such 'internal offsetting’ or 'local offsetting’ is a potentially powerful tool which we will discuss further later.
A slightly more complex definition
3:27. In the light of the previous discussions we propose that carbon neutrality should be defined as 'no net addition to human-caused climate change caused by the activity, household, organisation or area in question, including impacts incurred elsewhere to produce goods and services consumed in it, but excluding impacts incurred by it producing goods and services consumed elsewhere.’
3:28. The term 'human-caused climate change’ is used instead of 'greenhouse gas emissions’ to cover the fact that it is the 'global warming potential’ of air travel that needs to be measured, not just the carbon dioxide released.
Working towards, but how fast?
3:29. 'Working towards’ carbon neutrality could mean working very slowly towards it! However a claim would (rightly) be derided as 'spin’ and window dressing unless it entailed significantly more ambitious action than would be required to meet the Government target (soon to be enshrined in legislation anyway) of a 60% reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2050. The Mayor of London’s Climate Change Action Plan does not set a goal of carbon neutrality, even in the long term, but it does adopt a target of 60% reduction from 1990 levels by 2025 - ie in less than half the time the UK government plans. The action plan makes a wholly convincing case that this is the minimum rate of reduction that could be regarded as consistent with a prudent response to climate change. We suggest it should be treated as the minimum rate consistent with a genuine commitment to carbon neutrality.
3:30. This does not necessarily imply any particular reduction rate in the short term. It can be argued that serious reductions require systemic 'step changes’ which will need take time to set up, and that hitting this target could therefore be perfectly consistent with little or no reduction in the early years. However it could also be argued that that easy wins / 'low hanging fruit’ will come first, so we should expect a faster rate of reduction in the early years, tailing off later. The most plausible 'rule of thumb’ might be to argue that these two considerations cancel out and that a 'straight line’ reduction is the most plausible rate. This was the reasoning behind the south west regional assembly setting a target of 30% reductions by 2026 as staging post towards 60% by 2050.
3:31. A 'straight line’ path towards 60% lower emissions than 1990 in 2025 would imply a roughly 3% reduction a year as the minimum credible rate of 'working towards’ carbon neutrality. Friends of the Earth (England and Wales) have called on the Government to set 3% as an annual reduction target.
Low-carbon energy sources
4:1 Nuclear power and renewables (including biomass, wind, hydro and solar voltaic) are not totally carbon free: they all require installations and infrastructure of various kinds which require fossil energy. However on a 'whole life’ basis they all typically produce a tenth or less of the carbon emissions of gas, and a twentieth or less of those from coal, so they can be regarded as pretty much 'zero carbon’ alternatives.
4:2. In principle it would be possible to achieve - or at least get close to - carbon neutrality just by replacing coal, gas and oil with low carbon energy sources. However, developing renewables on a large enough scale to replace all current carbon intensive energy sources would raise huge environmental and social problems. Development NGOs are already voicing concern that policies of developing biofuels for transport will increase the risks of malnutrition and starvation by competing for the bioproductivity that poor people rely on for their food. The concern over the effects of even current proposals for wind power in Wales should provide a warning over the prospects for much larger scale (and more intrusive) developments that would be needed to make a significant dent in current fossil fuel use.
4:3. Nuclear power is politically hugely contentious. Even if the government manages to bring in the highly favourable planning and regulatory regime set out in the 2006 energy review it is far from clear that the nuclear industry will be able to make a new generation of power stations stack up commercially - unless government provides massive further subsidies and/or takes on the big risks and costs of decommissioning and waste management itself, which will be politically difficult during a period of public spending restraint. In its submission to the Energy Review, the Sustainable Development Commission concluded that further nuclear power development was unnecessary and unjustifiable. And would a rash of new nuclear power stations project the image Wales wants? We therefore suggest it is safest to assume that nuclear power will at most continue to play its current modest role in Wales’ energy mix.
4:4. Renewables can only plausibly meet a relatively modest proportion of Wales’s current levels of energy demand. This can make an important contribution to carbon neutrality, but only if combined with other measures to reduce demand.
Limitations to demand side efficiency improvements
4:5. Energy efficiency (now subsumed under resource productivity) has been government’s preferred framework since the 1980s because it holds out the prospect of reconciling environmental sustainability with continued economic growth painlessly, and vindicates the government’s emphasis in its industrial policy on competitiveness, innovation and technology in industrial policy.
4:6. However even if successful, efficiency improvements reduce energy consumption but do not eliminate it. They can therefore only take us part of the way towards carbon neutrality. Moreover, technical energy efficiency improvements in isolation from behaviour change often achieve little or no reduction in energy use, since they effectively reduce the cost of energy-using activities and products, which increases demand for them - the 'rebound effect’ first identified by economist Stanley Jevons 150 years ago. British homes became considerably more energy efficient on average between 1970 and 2000. But energy consumption per household stayed exactly the same: as efficiency improvements reduced the amount of energy people needed to use to keep warm, they responded not by maintaining the same temperatures with less energy, but by using the same amount of energy to enjoy higher temperatures.
4:7. The same has happened with cars. Despite steady improvements in the efficiency of car engines (in terms of power output per unit of fuel) the average fuel consumption of new cars sold remained static from 1994 to 2001, because motorists responded to the effective cut in the cost of performance by choosing bigger, heavier, faster cars, with more heavy and energy-draining powered accessories. (The real picture was even worse because the figures exclude SUVs, whose sales grew rapidly over the period.)
4:8. Rebound effects can also operate indirectly. For example if people need to spend less on carbon intense activities such as heating their homes, they will generally spend the money saved on other goods and services, which will not necessarily be any less carbon intense than the activities they substitute for, and may even be more so - for example more holiday flights. Thus energy efficiency, like renewables, is valuable but not sufficient.
4:9. Energy efficiency measures should be pursued to the greatest extent. But they need to be combined with measures to ensure that efficiency benefits are largely taken as reduced consumption rather than higher performance.
Reduce energy using activities
4:10. The previous sections have shown that all the technical measures politicians and administrators tend to reach for first in search of painless decarbonisation - offsetting, renewables and energy efficiency - have serious and intrinsic limitations and perversities which mean they can at best contribute to carbon neutrality. We therefore need to address he simplest and most reliable and foolproof way to reduce carbon: reduce or avoid the carbon intense activities.
4:11. The need for demand reduction is signalled in a one of the first speeches Alastair Darling made after being moved from Secretary of State for Transport to Secretary of State for Trade and Industry: 'So reducing demand is essential. It will also help tackle problems caused by higher prices … If we can reduce energy demand - in absolute terms - we could reduce the need for some of new power stations that we will otherwise need, with carbon emissions and energy security benefits. And it is demand reduction, not just energy efficiency has to be our real goal. Energy efficiency is in fact just a means - the real end has to be to reduce demand. We have to continue to do this but on its own it is not enough.’ (DTI Internet > Press Room > Ministerial Speeches, To The Fabian Society, London, 05 June 2006)
The carbon hierarchy
4:12. The argument so far implies that:
4:13. The carbon reduction hierarchy should therefore be:
1. Reduce or avoid the activities which give rise to carbon emissions. For example, reduce car and aircraft movements, the amount of space heated, and the temperature
2. Improve the energy efficiency of buildings, vehicles, appliances or machines so that they deliver the same service or benefit with less energy input;
3. Replace carbon-intensive energy sources (coal, oil, gas) with low-carbon ones (nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, tidal, energy crops, or potentially fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage);
4. Offset carbon emissions by causing (eg paying for) reduction measures outside the organisation or area in question (which could be any of the things under 1, 2 and 3.)
5. Carbon neutrality within a local authority
5:1. There is an extensive literature of guidance and case studies dating back to the 1980s on energy management in local authorities. It has been shown again and again that basic 'good housekeeping’ measures - turning off lights, appliances and building services when not needed, ensuring heating is not on any longer, or to any higher temperatures than needed - can save typically 10% - 20% of an authority’s energy bill at virtually zero cost, and often with improvements in working conditions. (For a helpful recent formulation of some time-honoured advice, see http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/energy/startsaving/business_activities_office_based.htm.) A further 10-20% can typically be saved in offices and public buildings by simple measures with short (ie under 2 year) paybacks such as insulation, draughtproofing, better controls (and better use of controls!), draught lobbies, on-demand water heaters in loos and kitchens to allow boilers to be turned off when heating not needed, and a raft of similar technically straightforward commonsense measures.
5:2. Many Welsh local authorities have followed these recommendations and reaped the benefits. But others still have not. With energy prices rising, and likely to continue to do so, and carbon reduction now understood as a moral responsibility as well as a cost saving opportunity, there is really no excuse for any local authority not to employ enough dedicated professional energy managers to secure the quick wins across the authority’s buildings and facilities, and with enough budget to pay for the straightforward fast-payback measures. (Funding for slower wins is discussed later.)
Managing for carbon reduction
5:3. Arguably the hardest step in any strategy for carbon neutrality strategy will be the simple sounding first step of starting to make ordinary day to day decisions consistent with serious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Every local authority (and other public body) has massive momentum. Whatever policies on carbon reduction are adopted by members and top management, day to day decisions and actions will continue to be made as usual - which generally means increasing emissions - unless and until decision takers are made to stop, consider the carbon consequence, and take all practicable action to reduce emissions as part of the normal decision process.
5:4. One way to make this happen would be for a local authority to subject all policies, plans, programmes and decisions to a conscious and systematic process of 'carbon screening’:
(a) consider the likely impact of the decision / plan etc on greenhouse gas emissions
(b) if negative, look for alternatives [see discussion of options hierarchy below]
(c) if not possible to find an alternative without negative impacts under either a or b, explain and justify if there are special reasons the policy (etc) should go ahead anyway
(d) offset the negative impacts (with the provisos set out under 'conditions for valid offsetting’ above).
5:5. Where policies (etc) are subject to Sustainability Appraisal or other formal appraisal, the climate test should be embedded in it by including an appraisal criterion of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and another of improving resilience to climate change, with any adverse score triggering a requirement to consider alternatives, and, if none with a better score can be found, explain why, and justify continuing with the policy or option despite it.
The options hierarchy
5:5. A helpful way to consider climate impacts is offered by the 'options hierarchy’ set out in (for example) Sustainability Appraisal of Regional Spatial Strategies and Local Development Documents Guidance for Regional Planning Bodies and Local Planning Authorities:
'[1] need or demand: is it necessary?
Can the need or demand be met without implementing the plan at all?
Can the proposal (development, infrastructure etc.) be obviated?
[2] mode or process: how should it be done?
Are there technologies or methods that can meet the need with less adverse effects than 'obvious’ or traditional methods?
[3] location: where should it go?
[4] timing and detailed implementation: When, in what form and in what sequence, should developments be carried out? What details matter and what requirements should be made about them?
Applying the options hierarchy
5:6. This might prompt the following sequences of questions from a specific climate change viewpoint for some typical projects.
New or changed public service provision (eg schools, hospitals, libraries, offices)
5:7. Need / demand:
can new or changed service requirements be accommodated in existing buildings or facilities, eg adding functions or multiple use of existing buildings; for example community use of school sports facilities and buildings? Can some of the need or demand for services be met without additional physical action or facilities, eg making payments or searching planning applications over the web?
Mode / process:
can new technology enable use of existing space more efficiently? Any new buildings should be carbon neutral; any major refurbishment of existing buildings should include the highest practicable levels of energy efficiency
Location:
locate outlets near users, and with good pedestrian and cycle access, and good public transport access for users beyond walking range. Avoid any change in location or pattern of service delivery that increases the amount of fuel that staff use providing the service and that users use to get access: for example:
Timing / detailed implementation
Ensure sustainable access options are working at the time of opening?
Housing
5:8. Need / demand:
Maximise use / adaptation of existing housing before new build: eg promote 'living above the shop’, conversion of large houses, provision of appropriate smaller / sheltered / accessible housing to encourage / enable people to release larger homes.
Mode / process:
It is physically possible to build new housing with much lower carbon emissions than current norms, through (1) high levels of insulation, (2) design and orientation to make maximum use of natural heating, lighting and ventilation, and minimise heat loss and cooling requirements (3) make maximum use of renewable energy, and combined heat and power, both on- and off-site. These measures should be used to the full.
Location:
near amenities, jobs, non-car transport.
Timing / detailed implementation
Co-ordinate housing development with renewable energy: ideally combined heat and power using biomass and/or waste. Ensure schools, shops, parks, social infrastructure provided together with housing to minimise need to travel.
Transport provision
5:9. Need / demand: Consider ways to reduce the need to travel on a corridor rather than provide for more mobility. Could services and facilities be provided to reduce journeys? Could existing vehicle movements service more person movements: eg give more incentive to share rides through multiple occupancy vehicle lanes, preferential parking spaces / charges.
Mode / process:
Follow the 'transport hierarchy’: walking and cycling first, public transport next, car only if greener modes impossible. Promote shared / community options, eg car clubs, eg with reserved parking spaces, council tax discounts. Differential taxation / access to promote more fuel efficient vehicles, eg Richmond higher residents parking permit charge for 4x4s.
Location:
Ensure cycling, walking, public transport are as direct as possible / follow desire lines. Reallocate road space to sustainable modes.
Timing / detailed implementation
Ensure sustainable options are available no later than car access.
5:10 Procurement offers an important opportunity both to improve local authorities’ performance and to help develop low energy goods and services. This could be promoted by making carbon a criterion in all procurement of goods and services, including buildings and vehicles. For all products and services where there are generally recognised standard measures of energy performance, specifications should whenever practicable to seek energy performance in the top quartile of the alternatives that are otherwise fit for purpose. Authorities should only consider alternatives with worse than mean energy performance if there are compelling reasons. For categories of goods and services without established measures of energy performance, authorities should encourage purchasing consortia to develop them.
Carbon neutrality packages
5:11. We argued above that, as a rule of thumb, the closer in time, space and character a carbon offset is to the activity being offset, the more likely it is to be valid and avoid the problems outlined in section 3. This means that, if a full and determined application of the option hierarchy as outlined above, a decision or action still fails to reduce emissions, the next thing to consider should be whether something closely related can be done to offset the increase. The following table offers some examples:
An increase in emissions caused by: could be offset by :
5:12. The concept underlying this is of ensuring that the overall package of measures reduces emissions.
Other public bodies
5:13. The points just made about local authorities apply very largely to other public service providers including hospitals, schools, police forces and indeed government agencies. Local Service Boards could play a valuable role in helping organisations within each area adopt carbon reduction standards systematically and consistently through means including:
Joint adoption of commitments to carbon screening
Sharing the costs of staff training and capacity building
Swapping staff to help with carbon screening: as with other appraisal processes, the combination of internal experts and 'critical friends’ with a fresh perspective is likely to achieve better results than either alone;
Shared district-wide offsetting arrangements.
5:14. The following chapter about carbon neutral communities implies a potentially highly important role for Local Service Boards, so this is discussed later.
6:1. The Local Government Association’s 'Leading the way: how local authorities can meet the challenge of climate change’ (2005) sets out detailed scenarios for how 'normal life’ might look in a seriously de-carbonised future (see chapter 6, A Future Vision: Anytown 2025 and chapter 7, lessons from Anytown). Key elements of this include:
In Helsingor, Denmark, in the late 1980s a new municipal waste collection system was introduced. Householders had to put out separate containers for recyclables, wet organic waste (including cooked and raw food waste, garden waste and nappies), and dry combustible waste including wood. The combustible waste went to the town incinerator. Because it was freed from wet material it released more heat; this was used to drive a power plant and provide waste heat to a district heating grid. The wet waste was digested, releasing methane, which was used as a fuel for another power generator, and the waste heat was again put in to the heating grid. The liquid effluent from the digester was sold to farmers as fertiliser, the dry fibrous residue was given away to local citizens as a soil conditioner, and only a small fraction of plastic from bags and nappies remained as waste needing to be landfilled.
In Kalundborg, Denmark, a series of businesses evolved a rich network of waste and energy exchange. The Asnaes coal-fired electric power plant supplies steam to the Novo Nordisk pharmaceutical plant and the Statoil refinery, and waste heat to a district heating system serving 3,500 homes. The refinery removes sulphur from its natural gas, selling it to Kemira, a sulphuric acid manufacturer, resulting in a cleaner gas, in turn bought by Asnaes. Asnaes sells fly ash to a cement plant and waste gypsum to a wallboard plant, and uses still more waste heat in greenhouses and fish farms it operates. Sludge from Novo Nordisk becomes fertiliser for local agriculture, and refinery wastewater feeds the powerplant. Http://www.natlogic.com/resources/nbl/v04/n23.html
Benefits and synergies from carbon neutral living
6:2. There are important positives about this. First, the components of low carbon life are mutually supportive and reinforcing, both within and between policy domains. For example:
6:3. Second, a low carbon society could offer a better quality of life. Current Government research on the 'wellbeing agenda’ suggests that health, personal relationships, time and energy to enjoy voluntary and leisure activities with other people, pleasant living surroundings and strong local communities are the most important determinants of wellbeing. The low carbon lifestyle sketched above would generally be better for all these.
6:4. For example a community (whether a city, suburb, town or village) in which people travelled much less than is now normal, and did more of their remaining travelling on foot, cycle and public transport, would have the following wellbeing benefits in addition to the environmental ones already identified:
More time and energy for social and community activities because of less time needed for travel;
A more equal society, because not having a car would not reduce opportunities and life chances as at present;
More community cohesion, trust and mutual support through more chance meetings on the street and in public places;
Better health as a result of more routine daily exercise;
Better community safety as a result of more people being out and about.
6:5. A community which grew and processed more of its own food and energy could potentially offer more fulfilling and secure jobs to people at all levels of ability, energy and education than an economy seeking to compete for footloose investments. It would also be more resilient to external shocks.
6:6. There is no necessary or inevitable conflict between decarbonising life and quality of life - provided we take a broad, wellbeing based view of quality of life rather than assuming that it depends on GVA growth through economic competition. Indeed, given the likelihood of increasing climate related disruptions to long distance trade and transport and increases in energy costs, reducing carbon dependence would help 'future proof’ Welsh communities.
Low carbon living: a scenario already written
6:7. We thought of illustrating this section by describing a day in the life of an imaginary low-carbon Welsh town. We thought of calling the town Llaregyb in honour of Dylan Thomas’s creation. We then realised that writing this was quite unnecessary, since Under Milk Wood already describes a day in the life of a low carbon community far more vividly than we could manage. But this makes the idea itself even more persuasive. Think how much of the intensity and incident of life in Llaregyb depends on people encountering each other at walking pace, in distinctive places - shops, pubs, street corners - within small distances. Think how insipid and diluted a modern day Llaregyb would be by comparison, with Dai Bread commuting to work in a baking factory, everybody driving to Tesco on the edge of town to do their weekly food shop, half the men commuting to office jobs in other towns, and the non-employed whiling their days away surfing the net or watching the shopping channel. Night would be sodium-yellow with streetlights rather than 'Bible-black’, and the continuous drone of traffic along the bypass would muffle all other sounds.
6:8. Of course Under Milk Wood is fiction. It abstracts the exciting and interesting from a pattern of small town life which one suspects had plenty of tedium and banality to those who actually lived it. But still the thought experiment of what Llaregyb might be like today can cast an interesting light on the losses as well as the gains from the half century of carbon intense 'development’ that has occurred since Thomas wrote it.
Systemic barriers
7:1. If carbon neutral living is as good as the last section suggests, why don’t we already do it?
7:2. Our current way of life became established during a 'golden age’ when energy security was seen as a solved problem, costs kept going down, and climate change simply wasn’t an issue. This way of life has various built in reinforcing mechanisms that lock us in to high carbon lifestyles and resist change. These tend to limit, and even neutralise, the effect of piecemeal incremental efforts to reduce carbon dependence. The resulting ineffectuality of apparently sensible actions can create a perception that the problem is hopeless. This can lead to demotivation, despondency and denial either that climate change really matters that much, or that current efforts are failing to avert it.
7:3. A successful transition to low- or zero-carbon living is possible provided it its tackled systemically rather than piecemeal, we need to understand the problem of 'lock-in’: the reason why adoption of lower-carbon methods generally lags so far behind what is technically possible, necessary for climate security, and desirable for broader policy benefits. That is the role of this section.
7:4. Lock-in example 1: school biomass heating Even an apparently simple change - a switch to wood chip heating in a school - requires several things to be co-ordinated: procurement and installation of a suitable boiler and the associated equipment for woodchip storage and handling; provision of a reliable local supply of woodchips, and the creation of a business to collect the material, process it to the right standards, and deliver it to the school. If this was a well established industry, individual biomass users, growers and processors could enter the market at different times, and expertise and advice would be available.
7:5. But because it is currently exceptional, biomass often looks difficult and high risk compared to conventional alternatives. At the point each of the players - potential energy users, farms seeking diversification and budding rural entrepreneurs - makes the decisions that would make the biomass option happen, the unsustainable approach is always easier, lower risk and/or more profitable. For example, arranging the wood waste fired CHP system for BedZed was a major challenge. Only a few exceptional people work against the flow, and they are not enough to 'flip’ the vicious circle into a virtuous circle where the entry barriers are low, so a thriving sector develops, which further lowers the entry barriers, encouraging more entrants, and so on.
7:6. Lock-in example 2: neighbourhood combined heat and power The same problem applies at a larger scale to energy and heat sharing projects of the kinds outlined in boxes 1 and 2. These require both 'donors’ and 'recipients’ with reasonably matching requirements to be able and willing to install heat exchange technology at the same time - and for someone to be willing to pay upfront for the capital intensive infrastructure to link them.
7:7. Again, once an area has a working heat distribution system, it would become relatively easy to expand it incrementally - hooking up new houses and offices to it when they are built, putting in grid-linked combined heat and power plants instead of standalone boilers when big institutions in the area need to renew their heating plants, and so on. And once enough areas have systems like this to provide a steady stream of projects, it would become possible for some businesses to build up specialist expertise in district heating and combined heat and power, and improve the quality and reliability of systems and reduce their costs.
7:8. This is the case in much of Scandinavia, where integrated district energy and heating has been normal for decades. This is why many Swedish cities and towns are able to move confidently towards becoming 'oil free’ by 2020 with confidence. This requires major infrastructure investments. But they are of kinds which are already well known, and which municipalities already know how to specify and commission, and which businesses have the skills and capacity to design and deliver.
7:9. Lock-in example 3: Transport Over many years, shops, employers, leisure amenities have tended to seek sites with good road access and parking because the users they want prefer to come by car. These have generally been outside existing city and town centres. This has resulted in a dispersal of the places many people need to get to as part of their weekly routines. Normal lifestyles increasingly depend on complicated criss-cross journeys at specific times to get from one commitment to the next. These are often too long and/or hilly for most people to cycle or walk (especially for trips involving heavy shopping or children), and too sparse, fragmented, individual and time-critical for even heavily subsidised public transport to service effectively. So living without a car becomes increasingly inconvenient and restricted, so more and more households acquire one. Most of the costs of car ownership are fixed, with each mile actually driven only costing a few pence at the margin, so once a household gets a car, it’s cheaper to use it even for journeys they could make by bus. So the bus service loses ticket income and gets worse, more people desert it for car, trip generators get even more incentive to move to car-accessible sites, life without a car gets even more inconvenient … and so on.
7:10. This vicious circle is intractable because any single intervention is thwarted or negated by other parts of the problem. Because journey patterns are already fragmented, what most people now regard as normal life is difficult if not impossible without a car. This makes serious restrictions on car use politically impossible. But it also means that even if heavy subsidies succeed in making public transport good, attractive and reliable, few people will switch back to it from cars.
7:11. It doesn’t have to be like this. Many continental cities show that amenities concentrated together in compact walkable town centres and good public transport servicing them and car restrictions can form a mutually reinforcing virtuous circle which delivers both a better quality of life and lower carbon emissions. For example Vauban, a new sustainable urban quarter in Freiburg in southern Germany has shown that there are plenty of 'normal’ people who are happy to 'buy in’ to a package of what might be seen as pretty extreme sustainability living (including requirements to build to much higher energy efficiency than German standards, buy heat and power only from the on-site plant at a tariff designed to discourage use, and not to own a car unless you pay a steep extra charge for a parking space at the periphery of the site) in return for the benefits (including good on-site kindergarten that 5 year olds can safely walk to unescorted.)
Lock-in: common features
7:12. The examples share significant features:
7:13. In each examples we are currently in one fairly stable and self-maintaining state; we can identify an alternative state which, if we could reach it, would be equally stable and self-maintaining, and would be both much less carbon intensive and also better for other high level objectives (eg quality of life, resilience and security.) But to get from one stable state to the other would require us (as it were) to push the boulder up a slope before it can roll down the other side. The key lesson of the review above is that transition to carbon neutral living requires co-ordinated interventions, across a wide range of sectors and specialisms, to achieve system change: to get towns, industries, transport systems and complete communities out of the rut of carbon dependence and into a different pattern of low carbon living.
7:14. For example we could flip our current transport vicious circle into the continental virtuous one if we co-ordinated multiple interventions: a more proactive and coercive planning regime to make major trip generators move back to town centres, and funding inner-city schools and hospitals to make sure they are the best in the land and better public transport and serious car restraint.
7:15. No organisation has hitherto had the power to coordinate and see through such a range of interventions. Local Service Boards offer an important advance in capacity for coordination. We consider their role next.
8:1. The Beecham agenda for local services improvement in Wales offers exciting and positive opportunities for climate change (and for sustainable development more broadly) because it recognises the need for better coordination and integration of services in exactly the sense needed to work towards carbon neutrality.
8:2. Local Service Boards can and should play a decisive role in achieving carbon neutrality. The last two paragraphs of section 5 have already outlined some ways LSBs could help coordinate action between their members. This section suggests some more ambitious ways LSBs and their members could rise to the challenge of the systemic changes needed for carbon neutrality as outlined in the last section.
Dumping
8:3. Over the last two decades it has become standard practice to measure the success of public services in terms of the cost per unit of measurable outputs such as patients treated, miles of road swept, or tonnes of waste collected. This has undoubtedly created incentives to improve operational efficiency, reduce waste and focus on delivery.
8:4. But it has also given public services an incentive to do what commercial business has always done: 'externalise costs’, that is dump them on others. A business which (for example) decides to go beyond statutory requirements by paying extra for more careful sorting of its wastes for recycling will be less profitable than an otherwise identical one that does not do any more recycling than is legally required or commercially profitable. Dumping has long been an issue at the boundary between health and social services, with complaints about patients being discharged too soon by hospitals requiring excessive home care balanced by complaints about people needing to be admitted to hospital because home care was inadequate.
8:5. A pervasive form of dumping is pursuit of individual service efficiency through centralisation and relocation. It is often cost effective for an individual public service to concentrate delivery in smaller number of larger units (for example schools, hospitals or post offices). It is also often more cost effective to build a new facility on a vacant site where land is cheap and space unlimited, and avoid the complications, constraints and costs of renewing an existing facility on a cramped site. These decisions, perfectly rational from the point of view of the individual organisation seeking to produced the greatest output per unit of cost, tend to increase the distances people need to travel to access services, and reduce their ability to do so by means other than car. They both constitute 'dumping’ of costs and problems on both their users and on the highway authority which has to pay for the extra road capacity needed as a result of these decisions.
8:6. They may also have pernicious indirect and longer term effects: extra demands on health services, through reducing exercise, and on social services, because of the extra help and support vulnerable people may need to access hospitals and other services. The 'knock-on’ effects of people travelling more often outside their own communities, seeing less of their neighbours and adding to traffic are likely to weaken community and ties and exacerbate the social, behavioural and public safety problems which many public agencies already spend large proportions of their budgets trying to contain.
8:7. This matters for carbon neutrality because, as we have already seen, the vicious circle of increased personal car travel, and the social and land use changes it both encourages and responds to, constitute one of the main barriers to sustainable low carbon communities. If all public services avoided making service decisions which added to car travel or car dependency, this would make an important contribution to greenhouse gas reduction as well as to avoiding the other impacts on wellbeing, and on costs for other public services, just identified.
Macro and micro efficiency
8:8. The dumping problem just described is one example where pursuit of 'efficiency’ at the micro level of the money cost of particular public service outputs causes inefficiency at the more important macro level of the wellbeing and quality of life outcomes achieved by all the spending on public service in an area. Boxes 3 and 4 describe further examples of the same point.
Vienna’s 'inefficient’ trams
Vienna requires a new tram line to be completed and a full standard service to run before any residents move in to new satellite settlements. This is highly 'inefficient’ in tram service management terms: it worsens tram system performance on any 'commonsense’ measures such as cost per passenger kilometre. But it helps enact a city council policy that no Vienna resident should have to resort to using a car because public transport is not available up to standard. And that policy has contributed to city success in reducing urban traffic despite increases in population and prosperity.
Compare and contrast Milton Keynes where space was left for tram tracks down the main boulevards and trams were to be brought in as soon as there was enough demand. That happy day will never dawn, because in the absence of trams new residents adopt car dependent travel patterns that could make little use of trams if they did suddenly appear.
Vienna’s approach is possible because the tram system is a department of the city council. Its job is to implement council policy, not to make a profit, compete with other companies, or worry about its position in a league table of tram operators.
Bus deregulation
Deregulation of bus services (outside London) was intended to improve services by requiring operators to respond to market demand, with competition driving prices down. In one sense it worked: operators competed with each other for passengers on the busiest routes by putting on more buses, and keeping fares down by cutting staff pay, and minimising maintenance and investment. The result was a surfeit of buses on busy routes, often of poor quality, running far below capacity and just covering their running costs. This left no surplus to cross subsidise less busy 'feeder’ routes, which were cut unless public authorities stepped in with subsidies that had not previously been needed. The overall result was a worse service requiring more public subsidy.
Whole-system efficiency
8:9. An extremely important potential role for LSBs is to enable (and require) individual public services to promote whole system efficiency - that is, the overall public benefits achieved in aggregate by public interventions, including reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, rather than promoting separate and sometimes mutually undermining output efficiencies. Three very widespread examples are:
Maintaining a larger network of smaller, more local, service delivery units, at the expense of higher costs per unit of service delivery, for the sake of reducing transport dependence;
Employing more people to minimise use of machines, rather than vice versa (for example employing more static park keepers rather than patrols driving between parks);
Maintaining locally 'inefficient’ services for the sake of their effects on whole system behaviour (for example continuing to run late buses which are scantily used where their existence reassures commuters they won’t be stranded if they are delayed, and can therefore use the peak time service rather than driving.)
8:10. It is beyond the scope of this paper to say in detail how this can be done - it is, after all, one of the main challenges for pilot LSBs - but we offer some pointers.
8:11. Whole-system outcome objectives and performance measures Adoption of some high level outcome objectives / indicators to be used in all decision taking and appraisal. The carbon intensity of quality of life - that is, how much carbon people need to release in the course of leading the kinds of lives they want - should be one high level performance measure for all LSBs.
8:12. A crucial factor for moving towards carbon neutrality will be how easily and painlessly people can adopt lower carbon life patterns. It would be therefore be very helpful to develop indicators which attempt to capture this. The kinds of questions it would be useful to probe include:
8:13. A particularly important area will be the incentives / disincentives to sustainable choices people face at the point they consider major life changes. For example how far do concerns about school places or other public services, or uncertainties about how long a new job is going to last, make people opt to commute long distances to new jobs rather than move house?
8:14. The Beecham emphasis on standards - making sure all public service providers are good, so that as many users as possible can get what they want locally - is thus much more consistent with and helpful for carbon reduction than the continuing Whitehall emphasis on choice - encouraging the more picky, assertive and resourceful 'customers’ to escape bad provision by choosing, and travelling to, more distant alternatives.
Overcoming lock-in: local integrated energy
8:15. A new major public building (or major refit of an existing one), eg a school, hospital or leisure centre, could provide an opportunity for a combined heat and power plant which could act as the 'seed’ for developing a Danish-style integrated neighbourhood heat and energy system, if it is located and designed to make additions and enhancements relatively practicable. Supportive characteristics might include:
Biomass and/or waste are used as the fuel (for example a co-fired woodchip / pelletised packaging waste boiler, and/or an anaerobic digester);
The plant is synchronised with collection, possibly on a pilot basis, of appropriate wastes, eg kitchen, garden and catering wastes for a digester
The 'seed’ location is near new housing development which could have heat distribution pipes installed from the start (much cheaper and easier than retrofit.)
8:16 This would require the public body responsible for the new building, the waste authority and the planning authority all to be willing to coordinate their own inputs, and to accept extra complications, and probably costs, in order to achieve the overall benefit. These may all be parts of the same local authority, or they may be different organisations. The LSB could coordinate the various inputs needed.
8:17. The problems of coordinated delivery of the necessary elements will still be formidable. But policy is likely to support such projects increasingly in future, so an early commitment could reap first mover advantages.
Overcoming lock-in: sustainable community
8:18. It would in principle be possible to design a new community on the lines of Vauban in Germany, with the 'carrots’ of excellent local services and public transport making politically possible the 'sticks’ of strong discouragement of car use - which in turn would ensure the viability of the 'carrots’ by minimising the extent to which individual decisions to drive elsewhere erode the customer base on which the quality of the on-site services depend. This would require LSBs to be able to set requirements and conditions which have hitherto not been available to planners. These would include:
A mandatory requirement for all new construction to be carbon neutral over its whole life (through whatever combination of efficiency measures, on-site and off-site renewables the developer chooses);
Requirements for high quality amenities and services to be provided within the 'pedshed’ as part of the development package, minimising the need to travel;
Cycling, walking and good public transport integral to the development;
Strong incentives to join car clubs rather than owning cars.
8:19. The St Athan defence college has been suggested as an opportunity to pilot this in Wales, although it is a moot point whether a massive military college developed by a private consortium led by armaments companies can really be an exemplar sustainable community (see http://www.cynefinywerin.org.uk/index.php?docid=249.)
8:20. Major regeneration initiatives could seek to move in the same direction. It would also be possible to offer the same 'deal’ to an existing neighbourhood where there was either a strong enough streak of community idealism and ambition to support it, or sufficient dissatisfaction with a current 'vicious circle of poor local amenities and high transport intensity to make residents willing to contemplate a radical alternative. The 'Transition Towns’ are places which are 'self organising for an energy-lean future’ http://www.transitiontowns.org. So far no Welsh towns have formally signed up.
8:21. The idea could also be piloted on a transport corridors on which a 'step change’ to low carbon could be demonstrated though co-ordinated application of both carrots (excellent, frequent, cheap public transport, decentralised amenities reducing the need for journeys) and sticks (road tolls, higher parking charges and removal of parking). It might be interesting to explore whether the massive funding it would take to build a duplicate M4 could, if spent differently, obviate the need for it.
Revolving funds, financed by offsets
8:22. The major strategic decarbonisation initiatives just described require heavy investment up front to produce benefits in the future. This is also a characteristic of many smaller scale carbon reduction projects (and indeed sustainable development projects more generally.) Revolving funds, which invest in projects, are paid back out of energy or other environmental cost savings, and then reinvest in further projects, have proved a valuable mechanism for getting over this investment hump. With appropriate criteria and safeguards a fund could provide a valid basis for carbon offsetting that would meet the conditions outlined in section 3 above. Whether the fund - or funds - would operate best at the level of an individual local authority or LSB, regionally or across Wales is a question we have suggested should