Monthly Archives: June 2022

Yarra City Council Climate Emergency banner at Fitzroy Town Hall

Climate Emergency banners: Where are they?

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A stroll through the websites of the 109 Australian local councils that have passed a Climate Emergency Declaration (CED) reveals a number of good things that other councils might emulate, but where are the Climate Emergency banners?

In 2019 Yarra City Council displayed physical Climate Emergency banners on all three of the Town Halls in its jurisdiction. This was a wonderful initiative, but what I hoped to find was a council website with an emergency banner across the top of its Home page, much like the COVID emergency banners that were displayed on many if not all council websites.

Not one of the CED councils in Australia has a Climate Emergency banner on its website.

Of course a CED should result in urgent tangible action, not just words, but a council doesn’t need to declare a Climate Emergency in order to take climate action. Declarations play an important public signal role, and at their best will engage an entire community in taking action.

CED councils are generally pretty good at reducing the carbon footprint of their own operations. 74 (68%) have signed on to Cities Power Partnerships (CPP) with pledges that tend to focus on council’s own operations, and 18 (16.5%) have joined the Cities Race to Zero.

At least 10 Australian CED councils (Adelaide, Bayside, Fremantle, Maribyrnong, Melbourne, Moreland, Surf Coast Shire, Sydney, Woollahra, and Yarra) have already achieved carbon neutrality for their own operations, in some cases prior to declaring a Climate Emergency. But a council’s own emissions are generally only about 1-2% of community-wide carbon emissions. Carbon neutrality for the entire jurisdiction is both necessary and significantly harder to achieve.

Making council CEDs visible

A lot of the point of declaring a Climate Emergency is its value as a public signal – a signal that informs the public of the need to act and that says what the entire community can and should do to deal with the emergency. But public messages need to be seen to be effective – ideally on the Home page of a council’s website.

How visible are those 109 CEDs on council websites?

53 council websites (48.6%) have a website page dedicated to Climate Emergency information. However often the page title is something ‘softer’ and more generic, like ‘climate change’ or ‘sustainability’, and the user needs to click through several menu layers to find it. 46 (42%) have environment, sustainability, or similar in their main menu, but none have ‘Climate Emergency’ as a Home page main menu item.

Just one council, Melville City Council, has a link to its CED information visible on its Home page, in this case as a popular search item labelled Climate Change Declaration. This links to a dedicated CED page entitled Climate Change Action. Huge kudos to Melville (but I can’t help wondering where the word ’emergency’ has gone).

Climate Emergency community outreach

Searches within council websites revealed quite a few good things CED councils are doing to inform and engage their communities, and which other councils could beneficially emulate. Search results were quite effective for finding Climate Emergency information at 56 (51%) of council websites, with half of those searches producing a significant number of hits. Searches at another 33 (30%) websites did lead to something relevant, such as the minutes of a meeting, but not much. (Local residents could be forgiven for thinking the emergency is not real if they need to use the search function to find information about it.)

Some councils quite explicitly ask their local communities to be part of Climate Emergency action, for example the action and advocacy page linked to from the Yarra City Council Take Climate Action webpage.

Altogether 56 (51%) of CED council websites contain a reasonably significant amount of information about how local residents and businesses can reduce their carbon emissions, but around half of those present it as climate/environment/sustainability action rather than explicitly framing it as being ways local people can help tackle the Climate Emergency.

Standouts are two councils (maybe more but I wasn’t specifically looking for this) who have set up dedicated Climate Emergency websites: the Zero Carbon Moreland website, and the Surf Coast Shire’s separate Climate Emergency website with its inspired Local Stories page.

Climate Emergency visibilityNumber of councils%
CED banner on Home page00%
CED mention on Home page11%
CED in main menu00%
Environment in main menu4642%
Dedicated CED page5349%
‘Climate Emergency’ search results 8982%
Climate Emergency community outreach3532%
Sustainability community outreach2119%

Strategies for engaging and empowering local communities

Tackling the Climate Emergency requires everyone doing their bit. Ideally the entire community will:

  • SEE that their local council is acting like it is an emergency
  • LEARN what they can do to help tackle the Climate Emergency
  • KNOW that lots of other residents, businesses, etc., are also doing what they can (normalising Climate Emergency behaviour)

The recent PitchFest run by Surf Coast Shire Council invited residents to vote for which local projects should win two Climate Emergency Grants. That gave a clear public signal that Council expected and wanted to facilitate Climate Emergency action within the community, but not only that. Holding a public PitchFest added extra visibility for the grants themselves and, importantly, showed off some of the climate initiatives undertaken within the local community.

Some councils (I didn’t count how many) invite residents to sign up to receive their Climate Emergency e-news featuring actions taken by the council itself and also by the wider community. Another excellent strategy is to include Climate Emergency action stories submitted by residents on the council website.

19 (17%) of CED councils offer some sort of climate grants or awards. 13 (12%) offer some sort of financial help for climate beneficial actions, such as the Solar Savers scheme originally initiated by Darebin City Council and now emulated by other councils, and 7 (6%) offer bulk buy schemes. 23 (21%) provide links to state government schemes giving no- or low-interest loans and/or subsidies for measures that reduce emissions.

Engagement strategyNumber of councils%
Climate Emergency grants / awards1917%
Council loans / subsidies1312%
Bulk Buys76%
State government loans / subsidies2321%

Simply showing links to state government schemes that help finance emissions reduction measures might seem like a rather low bar, but it is something even councils with tight budgets and over-worked staff can do. To be effective it should be on the website Home page, not hidden way down in sub-menus.

To be really effective, links to state government schemes can be framed as ‘help for residents to take Climate Emergency action’. Simply framing it that way flags the expectation that everyone can and should help. The information at the links educates about the types of actions that reduce emissions, and the financial help makes it easier for everyone to do so.

What is the most effective Climate Emergency community engagement strategy by a local council that you have seen? Please tell us all in the comments box below. And do let us know if YOUR council adds a Climate Emergency banner to your website!

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SA Parliament House, with Susan Close MP holding 10,000+ petition signatures

South Australia declared a Climate Emergency

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On 31 May 2022, South Australia became the first Australian state to declare a Climate Emergency, although the Australian Capital Territory did set a precedent for a sub-national region to do so back in 2019. The SA declaration was passed by both Houses of Parliament. The Liberal opposition proposed amendments, which were rejected, with the original motion then passing unanimously in the Lower House. The Liberal opposition voted against the motion in the Upper House but it passed with Labor and cross bench support.

The motion stated:

That this house —
(a) notes the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report confirms that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and current plans to address climate change are not ambitious enough to limit warming to 1.5° Celsius above pre-industrial level — a threshold scientists believe is necessary to avoid more catastrophic impacts;

(b) notes that around the world, climate change impacts are already causing loss of life and destroying vital ecosystems;

(c) declares that we are facing a climate emergency; and

(d) commits to restoring a safe climate by transforming the economy to zero net emissions.

Background

In September 2019, Mark Parnell MLC (Greens) moved a Climate Emergency Declaration (CED) motion in the Upper House. At that time, the ACT had already done so in May 2019, and around 45 local councils around Australia had too. The SA upper house CED motion passed with support from Labor and most of the cross bench, but was opposed by the Liberals. It was not debated in the Lower House at that time.

Soon after new legislation was passed in SA such that formal on-paper citizen petitions with over 10,000 signatures would be ‘taken seriously’ due to the effort require to achieve that – would be tabled in parliament, entered in Hansard, and be guaranteed a ministerial response (either in support of or rejecting the petition). Accordingly 3 ‘ordinary citizens’ started such a petition, and a wide range of grassroots helpers (individuals and members of climate groups) put many hours into collecting signatures. You can see the petition text here.

Helpers could download the petition sheet online and print it themselves, or collect printed sheets from a centrally located petition box at the Conservation SA premises. Signed sheets were returned either through a slot in the petition box or sent to a PO Box set up specifically for that purpose.

By Jan 2020 the team had already collected around 6,000 signatures, so we sounded out Labor MP Susan Close (opposition party at the time) about tabling the petition when we reached 10,000 signatures. She jumped at the chance to do that and indicated willingness to also propose a CED motion alongside tabling it. But then Covid struck and made signature collection really hard, so it ended up taking until mid-2021 to reach 10,000 signatures.

In August 2021, Susan Close tabled our petition and proposed a CED motion, with a large show of support from people on parliament house steps on the day she did that. Her motion was eventually allowed to be put on the debate agenda, but ultimately there was not sufficient time for it to be debated before the state election.

The 2022 state election saw Labor back in power, so the CED motion was put on the agenda again as a first order of business. In speaking to the motion Susan Close, now Deputy Premier, positioned the motion as being in response to clear community demand for urgent climate action. She also announced two initial climate policies for putting words into action: a green hydrogen project and removal of an EV tax.

You can see a global list of jurisdictions that have declared a Climate Emergency here, or click on the pins in this map.

If you’d like to receive future cedamia blog articles about new CEDs and council post-CED actions (one or two a month) directly to your inbox, click the Follow button below and set how you prefer to receive them.