Abstract
© 2018 WIT Press. The issues surrounding successful public engagement with climate change mitigation policy and decision-making have been extensively researched and identified as barriers to long-term civic and civil engagement. The challenge of transforming our urban spaces to mitigate and adapt to climate change was a key theme of the Bristol Urban ID project, which explored the “business as usual” approaches in policy, practice and engagement that limit truly transformational actions. As part of the project, a Carbon Neutral Bristol 2050 roundtable was held with civic leaders and stakeholders. Discussions focussed on defining carbon neutrality targets, “scopes” and boundaries for Bristol, exploring the opportunity for Bristol to be a carbon neutral city leader, how to build political, business and citizen space for engagement with carbon neutrality, and the role of Bristol Green Capital Partnership (BGCP), a cross-sector network of over 800 organisation working for a sustainable city, as an enabler and facilitator of change. The findings demonstrate a need for organisations working on interconnected environmental, social and wellbeing, and economic issues in cities, such as carbon neutrality and air pollution, to communicate and collaborate. Partnership working is essential to improving city-wide engagement in carbon and air quality management decision making, and to developing integrated city sustainability management strategies that recognise co-benefits and trade-offs. A set of guidelines highlight the need to create political space for people and organisations to talk about carbon and air pollution to develop city plans.
Highlights
Increasing urbanisation over the three decades means that cities are seen as key fora for solving the challenge of mitigating climate change; over two thirds of the world’s population are expected to live in cities by 2050 [1]
Discussions focussed on defining carbon neutrality targets, “scopes” and boundaries for Bristol, exploring the opportunity for Bristol to be a carbon neutral city leader, how to build political, business and citizen space for engagement with carbon neutrality, and the role of Bristol Green Capital Partnership (BGCP), a cross-sector network of over 800 organisation working for a sustainable city, as an enabler and facilitator of change
This paper presents the outcomes form the Carbon Neutral roundtable, focussing in particular on the role of cross-sector partnerships like BGCP in setting strategies, and helping cities to create the space for stakeholder dialogues and problem-solving around the topic of carbon neutrality
Summary
Increasing urbanisation over the three decades means that cities are seen as key fora for solving the challenge of mitigating climate change; over two thirds of the world’s population are expected to live in cities by 2050 [1]. City Leap – “a soft market testing exercise for potential partners in a city-scale low carbon, smart energy infrastructure programme” [3] is aiming to bring in funding for innovation in a series of energy and infrastructure projects to support the city’s transformation to carbon neutrality. The project presents a set of diagnostic tools to help Bristol and other cities to understand the barriers to solving key challenges to sustainable development in the area. The issues around successful public-engagement with climate change mitigation policy and decision-making have been extensively researched, in large part, due to the recognised failure of public policy to truly bring citizens and organisations on board with the urgency and scale of the transformative action that is required. There are similar issues with communicating air quality information to the public where there is a need for better contextualising to allow people to make sense of data in relation to the real world [5]
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