Coventry & Warwickshire Green Business Programme podcast episode 7 (listen below) includes interviews with three members of Coventry’s Climate Change Board. John Bates discusses with them the Board’s purpose and objectives.

Margot James

She is Chair of Coventry Climate Change Board, a former Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries and is currently Executive Chair for the Warwickshire Manufacturing Group (WMG) at the University of Warwick. She said that most of her work at the University of Warwick involves helping industry achieve net zero by 2050. She said that Coventry is further along the road to net zero than most councils. She justified this by saying that Coventry had already reached its 2020 target for carbon emissions in 2014, but was apparently unaware that the city has made no effort to increase its targets since 2012, still has not produced a Climate Change Strategy for 2020 and Coventry City Council scored zero on Climate Council Scorecards.

She acknowledged that the city council needs to embrace “partner organisations” which includes the private sector, public utilities, the public sector and (importantly) residents and citizens. Her aim is to help the city council achieve this “embrace” but did not explain how the Board would do that with Coventry citizens.

She outlined the types of organisations that are members of the Board, which are either businesses or environmental organisations. She claimed that the latter are “important ways of reaching the wider public” because they have thousands of members. But it is not clear how the Board plans to reach the hundreds of thousands of other people of Coventry. The only member of the Board who might do this appears to be Grapevine Coventry and Warwickshire whose CEO, Clare Wightman, is Pathway Lead, Equitable and People-centred Development working group.

Ms James said that communication and public engagement are very important and adaptation will involve behavioural change. “Old habits die hard and sometimes there is an upfront cost, such as switching to an electric vehicle.” She claimed that once WMG has produced the very light rail and it had been constructed there will be “less and less excuse to use your private car to undertake private journeys”. So in two or three years there will be “an important challenge to us all to encourage people to use these options”. In the meantime, it seems, nothing needs to be done to change people’s behaviour.

Suzanne Ward

She is Area Environment Manager, Environment Agency and Pathway Lead of Coventry Climate Change Board working group Resilient Development.

She said that society needs to learn to live with the changes that are already happening due to global warming including the flooding early in 2022 and a summer with the lowest rainfall in the UK and drought in many places. “We can start to make some practical adaptations and cultural changes because we have to change the way we think about things.”

Councillor Jim O’Boyle

Cabinet Member for Jobs, Regeneration and Climate Change at Coventry City Council. Vice Chair Coventry Climate Change Board. He said the aim of the board was to bring forward recommendations for projects that would reduce our carbon footprint “as a city, not just as a council”. The council is just a small proportion of the people and businesses that live and work in our city and cannot resolve climate change issues on its own. He wants the experts on the Board to produce solutions for all of Coventry.

He claimed the board included the “public sector” and was not leaving anyone out. But no climate activist groups are represented.

Climate Strategy will be 3 years late

He said the Climate Change Strategy, which should have been published in 2020, “will be ready for publication in March 2023 after Cabinet approves the recommendations. There’s a public consultation early in 2023. The Strategy will become operational in the new financial year from April 2023 and it will go through to 2030. He said the “Coventry & Warwickshire Green Business Network” will run events to consult on circular economies and sustainability. “We will run a series of consultation events from December 2022 to February 2023 which we will hold in neighbourhoods around the city including online events to reach as wide an audience as possible, public and private sectors and residents of the city. It’s important we engage with them because it’s about our city and we want people to take part.”

Net Zero targets are completely unachievable

He said that net zero by 2050 is “completely unachievable based on the pathway the government are on”. Also he said the West Midlands Combined Authority plan for net zero by 2041 is “not achievable” because there is not the finance to make it happen. To upgrade all properties in Coventry to make them comply with requirements would cost £15 billion. The Council’s annual budget is about £1 billion. People and the government have to “get real”.

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