Driving Climate Action at a City Level
climate change
is arguably the biggest economic social
and environmental challenge
facing every city in the world and no
more so
than here in belfast in northern ireland
as commissioner for resilience my job is
to make sure that the city understands
the risks ahead
understands how it’s going to affect the
whole city its communities and its
people
and of course i’m not doing that by
myself and i shouldn’t do it by myself
so over the course of the next few
minutes i want to talk about the actions
that i’m taking with partners
in five areas to ensure that we’re
future-proofed
that we’re fit for the future and ready
to tackle the effects of climate change
in all of those forms across the city
now the map in front of you
shows using the best available data to
us
just what belfast may look like in 2050
and that’s because of our proximity to
water
the way in which the city has developed
over time and it shows in really stark
terms how our lives may change look at
the social assets the economic assets
and look at the number of people who
live
in that area in the red map part of the
map
that’s critically important to us and
everything we do right now
is about planning to to mitigate the
effects of climate change
and doing that at a city-wide level so
here’s the five areas and the five
approaches that we’ve taken to ensure
that belfast
is taking urgent action on climate
change the first thing
is get the right people in the room
belfast size and our scale means that we
can bring everyone together
virtually and in person when possible to
start to plan for the long term
we’ve set up two structures the first is
the belfast climate commission
and that’s a think tank made up of
academics planners
and statisticians people who have access
to data but know what to do with it and
know how to use it to predict the future
and to give us advice about the actions
we need to take
and the second structure is our
resilience and sustainability board
that’s made up of delivery agencies in
the city our housing executive
our water organization our transport
authority working together
in an integrated way to find solutions
so we now have
two structures and the right people in
the room but we need data
and we need to know the problems that
we’re trying to solve and to prioritize
them
so we commissioned a midi stern that’s
an economic analysis of decarbonization
it’s a carbon roadmap
it tells us where the biggest sources of
greenhouse gases are
and where our major emissions are coming
from so that’s the second approach
make sure we have the data because that
will inform where we need to put our
energy
and our activity and on to the third
area of focus for us
now that we have the people in the room
now that we know what the data is
telling us
we need to prioritize the mini stern
told us absolutely clearly
that our focus needs to be on buildings
and it needs to be on transport
and that’s what we’ve been doing
undertaking readiness assessments to
make our buildings as
energy efficient as possible and those
new buildings as they come forward
to ensure that they are low emissions
low carbon and eventually zero carbon
in their nature and also our transport
infrastructure
being as ambitious as possible as
possible both in terms of our bus
transport
our public transport across the city but
also our freight
and everything all people goods and
services that we move around the city
in this decade we need a plan for making
them zero carbon
onto the fourth approach and that’s
making sure that everything that we do
happens locally and at the most local
opportunity that we possibly can
so our climate commission is pulling
together a core work stream
on community climate action making sure
that communities take the decisions
themselves on the activities
that they want to take and that makes
belfast unique
and in terms of making sure that we have
a participative and a ground-up approach
to climate mitigation to climate
resilience
and to developing a local and a green
economy
but of course we’re a city within a
global network and a global ecosystem
so we also want to play our part in
working with other cities to learn from
them
and where we can to give them our advice
on what we’ve learned
so our last and our final approach is
ensuring that we’re playing an
active role in global networks we’re a
member of the global resilient cities
network so we work alongside other
cities like us university cities port
cities
to learn and work with them to find
solutions uh
to climate change and and making sure
that we’re taking the right action
and we also work alongside cities in the
uk through the place-based climate
action network
so we’re partnering with edinburgh and
with leeds to ensure that
as we develop our buildings and
transport we’re doing it in the right
way and building the right
infrastructure
often climate change and the challenges
that it brings to us can overwhelm us
and sometimes that means people look
away because it’s too difficult to find
solutions
but not in belfast we have a group of
partners who are
optimistic who know what they want to
achieve but are also really focused
on where the solutions are we’re
achieving clarity through action
and at a city level and at a local level
i think that puts us in a really strong
position
to be as prepared as possible for the
effects of climate change