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