question about the effect of Climate Emergency declarations on the local community

Community impact of Climate Emergency Declarations

Last week Whitehorse City Council in Victoria became the 115th jurisdiction in Australia to declare a Climate Emergency. That prompted the following question from a journalism student living in that area:

What is the effect within the local general community when their local council declares a Climate Emergency?

That raises another question – what percentage of the local population actually hear about the declaration?

I had to confess that I have no data on either point, and I can’t think of an efficient way of trying to collect that data either!

Do any readers have any data on reactions from the general public, or on how many people have heard (or not heard) about their local declaration? If so, please get in touch or leave a comment below this blog post. It will be valuable input even if it is just random anecdotal evidence, or the effect on you personally, rather than hard data.

What we do know

One theory of change driving the early Climate Emergency Declaration campaign was that a declaration by one local council would have influence in multiple directions. Not only would it have an effect on their own local community, it would also act sideways (to and from other local councils), upwards to higher levels of government, and inwards to their own staff.

  • Sideways: this has been working extremely well, as evidenced by the rapid spread of local government declarations. In addition, there are many examples of neighbouring councils sharing expertise and collaborating on initiatives, such as the power purchase agreement organised by the Victorian Energy Collaboration (VECO), resulting in 46 Australian councils now buying renewable energy for their own operations. At Queenscliffe Borough Council, for example, that helped achieve a whopping 73% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from council’s own operations in just one year.
  • Upwards: in some regions there has been a direct regional influence. The Quebec state government declared a Climate Emergency after 403 of their local councils had done so, and the South Australian state government did so after 16 local councils covering 45% of the population in SA had issued declarations. In other cases the influence has been general rather than regional, but it is unlikely any of the 18 national and 41 subnational government declarations would have occurred were it not for the precedents set globally by numerous local councils.
  • Inwards: anecdotal evidence suggests that at some councils, their declaration and subsequent climate action focus has built engagement and enthusiasm for increased climate action amongst council’s own staff and Councillors, but I have not seen any publicly available data. What we do know is that some councils have included an internal climate-related education component in their action plans, and quite a few have hired external consultants to help staff learn more about what they can do.
  • Outwards: as stated above, we have no data on the effect of their Climate Emergency Declaration within a council’s own local community. However, in a more general global sense there clearly has been a broad diffuse outwards effect which goes beyond what was anticipated by the sideways-upwards-inwards-outwards concept. The term ‘climate emergency’ is now used very widely and was heralded as being the word of the year in 2019. By December 2020 it had reached the UN, with Antonio Guterres urging all countries to declare a Climate Emergency. In addition, numerous non-government entities – universities, schools, businesses, churches, and association bodies (eg. Architects Declare) – have declared a Climate Emergency. (You can see some of them in a sadly incomplete list here.)

So, if we did have the data, what might success look like in terms of the effect on the local community when its own council declares a Climate Emergency?

Scenario 1: Sounding the alarm

A key reason for an official trusted body to declare any sort of emergency is so that everyone knows about the danger and knows what to do (and not do) to increase their own safety. Importantly, an emergency declaration also brings out the best in people, leading to abandoning business-as-usual and going ‘above and beyond’ for the sake of the common good.

Similarly, I’d like to think that when their local council declares a Climate Emergency, everyone in the local community firstly knows there has been a declaration, and secondly, those who have been complacent about climate will:

  • pay more attention to climate information
  • change their behaviour
  • start helping others around them to respond to the emergency

But does that actually happen? Have any local residents been jolted out of climate complacency and into taking climate-positive actions in response to their local council declaring a Climate Emergency?

Scenario 2: Giving visibility to collective community effort

We all know we can’t do it alone. Climate-aware people might be discouraged from taking action and prone to pushing climate issues to the back of their minds if they think nobody else is doing anything. Many local councils were already taking at least some climate action, and some were doing a very large amount, but were their local communities aware of that before they declared a Climate Emergency?

I’d like to think that local council declarations and public commitments to climate action make everyone aware that collectively everyone’s actions can make a difference because:

  • their own council is treating climate like an emergency and is taking action accordingly
  • they are actively encouraging everyone in the community to take action, and reporting back on what members of the community are doing
  • and plenty of other local councils and communities globally are also joining in to help

Of course we still need to convince higher levels of government to pull the big climate levers, but a rising tide of engagement and action at the community level should make that easier to achieve.

Scenario 3: Sowing the seeds

Even if some of the local community initially fail to hear that their council has declared a Climate Emergency, I’d like to think that it will be brought to their attention later via projects that effectively engage a wide range of residents. I’m thinking, for example, of this charming scheme by Leeds City Council in the UK:

Leeds City Council is once again encouraging residents to get involved in an annual seed collection to help with the ambitious target of planting 5.8m trees over 25 years across the city.

Each Autumn people of all ages collect acorns, beech nuts, sweet chestnuts, and conkers which are then delivered to a specialist nursery to grow into seedlings. They are then planted in local parks and green spaces. What an engaging, enjoyable, visible, and empowering community activity! I can imagine a scenario that goes something like this:

  • Mummy, why are all those people picking up acorns?
  • I don’t know. Let’s ask them.
  • Council’s Climate Emergency declaration…planting millions of trees…everyone helping…
  • Mummy can we help find acorns too?

Please let us all know about any particularly effective schemes your council might have found for engaging their entire community.


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.

Weather map showing record temperatures in the UK and CASBE zero carbon plans

From Climate Emergency to Climate Catastrophe and CED action

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed a change in the language used in media articles. ‘Climate catastrophe’ is nudging out ‘climate emergency’ in reports of climate impacts. But also, and this is not new, there have been numerous articles about actions being taken by climate emergency declaration (CED) councils.

Climate catastrophe

The devastating and continuing flooding in Pakistan is causing death and destruction on an almost unimaginable scale. The UK recently reached record high temperatures not expected till 2050 (top image) and is currently experiencing an early ‘false autumn‘. Many parts of the world are experiencing either massive fires, flooding, heatwaves, and/or water shortages and famine caused by droughts. Many of the great rivers of the world are starting to dry up.

Flood evacuees living in tents in Pakistan
Flooding in Pakistan

Impacts are becoming horrendously obvious. For everyone and all levels of government, doing anything less than ‘as much as possible as soon as possible’ is inexcusable. Even if ‘as much as possible’ is genuinely very little, it is still worth doing.

Meanwhile, back in May, the World Meteorological Organisation predicted there is a 50:50 chance of global temperature temporarily reaching the 1.5°C threshold within the next five years. But 1.5°C is sounding increasingly arbitrary given the catastrophic impacts that are occurring already at about 1.1°C.

Council climate emergency actions

The examples of local government climate actions below are just from very recent news articles, making them a fairly random sample. They’re not necessarily the ‘best’ actions, or ‘enough’, and these are not the first or only local governments already taking these actions. Hopefully any that are not will start to think they can (and should) emulate these examples, or work out the most cost-effective measures for their own local circumstances. It is crucial that local councils leverage the maximum climate benefit from their limited resources as quickly as possible. You can see other examples of climate emergency actions by local councils here.

Knox City Council, Victoria – from ‘acknowledgement’ to ‘climate emergency declaration’

Knox City Council passed a resolution acknowledging the climate emergency back in September 2021. They upgraded this to a ‘declaration’ in late July to indicate a higher level of climate ambition, as discussed in our July blog post, but this week it received media attention again, with a focus on budget implications – $30 million over 10 years – and planned actions.

The actions include advocating for zero carbon developments, replacing street lights with LEDs and powering them via a wind energy power purchase agreement, installing solar panels and EV chargers, hosting educational webinars for local businesses and residents, developing a Biodiversity Resilience Plan, including tree canopy analysis and a habitat corridor plan, and tackling ‘heat islands’. These are all fairly typical climate emergency actions that any council can emulate. No rocket science required – just a heightened resolve to get on with the job.

Wellfleet Town Council, USA – Climate Emergency public workshop series

Screenshot showing Climate Emergency workshop series by Wellfleet Town Council

This small town of 2,750 in Massachusetts declared a Climate Emergency in September 2020. Now it is holding a series of three public workshops entitled It’s a Climate Emergency! What we can do!

The first session was Household Electrification and Energy Conservation, the second next week is Electrifying Transportation, and the final one will be Solar Photovoltaic Arrays.

Queenscliffe Borough Council, Victoria – 73% reduction in emissions in one year

Queenscliffe Council adopted its Climate Emergency Response Plan in May 2021, containing 49 actions designed to reduce the entire Borough’s carbon output to zero by 2031. Since then they have managed to reduce the emissions from council’s own operations by a whopping 73% in just one year.

Again no rocket science. The bulk of that reduction was achieved by deciding to purchase 100% renewable electricity for all of its operations, including council buildings, tourist parks, street lights and public facilities. They also started kerbside food waste collection.

Plans to achieve further reductions include swapping its vehicle fleet for electric vehicles, disconnecting remaining gas services, and investing in more sustainable building and construction methods. Mayor Ebbel hopes council’s achievements will inspire residents to “take the next step on our journey to becoming a more climate-friendly community.”

Derwent Valley Council, Tasmania – engaging entire community in climate action and advocacy

Derwent Valley Council declared a Climate Emergency just recently, in July 2022, and they have now added a new Get Active On Climate page to their website.

Screenshot of Get Active on Climate webpage by Derwent Valley Council

They clearly recognise that engagement of the entire community is key, and are refreshingly up-front about expecting everyone to do their part.

Jersey, UK – subsidised commercial energy auditor training and audits

Jersey has a population of just over 100,000 so is similar in size to a large local council despite being a subnational government. Their subsidised auditor training is an intriguing precedent for tackling community-wide emissions and one which local councils might consider modifying to suit their own communities.

Jersey already had a Home Energy Audit scheme whereby home owners can apply for very generous subsidies to cover most of the cost of the audit. They are now starting to offer subsidised training for commercial energy auditors. Soon they will also be offering subsidies to help cover the cost of commercial audits.

For home owners and businesses, key barriers to energy efficiency upgrades are the unknowns. They probably realise an audit and energy efficiency measures will ‘pay for themselves’ and would happily pay for the up-front costs themselves, but who can they trust to perform a reliable audit? Do they need and can they afford efficiency improvements, and if so who can they hire to do a reliable job on the improvement work?

A carefully implemented scheme that overcomes those barriers with some sort of reliability and quality guarantee may well be sufficient with only small, if any, financial incentives from local government. But it seems prudent to make sure any recipients of audit subsidies follow through by taking at least some of the recommended actions. Possibly a council could offer reimbursement of the cost of the audit after a specified amount of efficiency upgrade work has been completed?

Leicester City Council, UK – mapping and costing of 2030 carbon neutral pathway

Leicester City Council hired experts to map out a 2030 carbon neutral pathway for the entire community and analyse the up-front implementation costs – from £900milllion to £5billion over the next eight years. This could create an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 local jobs.

The pathway focuses on three main areas: buildings (35%), active transport and electric vehicles (14%), and energy. The buildings component includes retrofitting energy efficiency measures to around 65,000 properties and around 100,000 homes swapping their gas boilers for heat pumps.

Council already had a Climate Emergency Action Plan and has already achieved significant reductions in community-wide emissions, but this new report makes it clear that even more ambitious action is necessary and will inform development of their second action plan to cover 2023 to 2030.

Yarra City Council, Victoria – zero carbon developments

Yarra City Council is a member council of the Climate Alliance for a Sustainable Built Environment (CASBE) involving 31 Victorian councils. They are pursuing a planning scheme amendment that builds on existing local Environmentally Sustainable Development (ESD) Policies. The project aims to deliver revised and elevated ESD targets, including targets for zero carbon developments.

Sefton Council, UK – drop-in sessions to inform community engagement strategy

Sefton Council already has a Climate Emergency Action Plan and a 2030 target to make its own operations carbon neutral, but now it has launched a public consultation to collect views on how the entire community can tackle climate change together.

Feedback from the consultation will be used to produce a Climate Change Community Engagement Plan for the next phase of their climate action plan.

Sydney City Council, NSW – net-zero policy for new developments beginning 2023

The City of Sydney has just unanimously endorsed energy controls that require applications for new office buildings, hotels and shopping centres, and major redevelopments to comply with minimum energy ratings from January 2023. This is part of council’s plan to achieve city-wide net-zero emissions by 2035, recognising that 68% of the city’s total emissions is from hotels, apartment complexes, and commercial office space.

The new controls focus on increased energy efficiency, on-site renewable energy production and offsite renewable energy procurement.

Shipley Town Council, UK – Citizens’ Jury

Town councils in the UK are the lowest tier of local government and don’t have a lot of resources, but Shipley Town Council (population 15,483) is using some grant money from the National Lottery to cover the costs of holding a citizens’ jury.

Every household in Shipley has been sent a letter inviting them to become a member of the 25-person jury to ensure a cross-section of residents can have their say on the question: How can we work together in Shipley to limit climate change and its impacts while protecting our environment and health?

Quite apart from whatever solutions the jury might come up with, even just the invitation letter sent to all households will ensure everyone knows about council’s climate emergency declaration and could inspire new enthusiasm to take action.

3 UK councils – grants to low-income households for efficiency upgrades

Three UK councils, Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol, and North Somerset, jointly secured £2.7m in government funding to enable them to give energy efficiency grants to low-income households. Householders can apply for Home Upgrade Grants of up to £25,000 to install efficiency measures such as loft, underfloor, and wall insulation, air source heat pump central heating systems, and solar panels.

To be eligible a house must currently have a low energy performance rating and use oil or coal for heating. This reflects a point made in this article by Alan Pears, namely that the best bang for buck in terms of climate action comes from improving the energy efficiency of buildings with very low star ratings rather than from making further efficiency improvements to buildings that are already relatively efficient.

Only one of these examples is unique!

Over the last couple of years I’ve seen many media articles reporting similar actions by other local councils that have declared a Climate Emergency.

The one action that I’d not seen before was the Jersey scheme offering subsidised training for performing energy efficiency audits. A carefully planned scheme combining auditor training with something that removes the barriers for the entire community to improve the efficiency of their buildings could be ground-breaking. It might provide an inspiring example of how a council could leverage relatively small financial contributions from their limited budgets in order to achieve widespread investment by the entire community in tackling the Climate Emergency.

Please leave a comment if you know of other ways local councils can leverage their limited resources to achieve big community-wide achievements!


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.