UK council Climate Emergency banners

Posted on July 17, 2022July 17, 2022

Following on from my recent hunt for Climate Emergency Declaration (CED) banners on the websites of Australian local councils who have declared a Climate Emergency, I knuckled down to search the homepage of all 543 CED local councils in the UK. Maybe there are better ways to spend a wet and wintry week, but once I reached the ‘W’ part of the alphabetical list here, I found the wonderful CED banner above just under the main header on the Wandsworth Borough Council homepage.

The Wandsworth banner takes the prize for excellent CED visibility. Any local residents visiting the website to check their bin collection dates cannot fail to see this banner stating that the council has declared a Climate Emergency. Not only that, the ‘Wandsworth together’ slogan gives a clear message that everyone can (and is expected to) help tackle the emergency, and there is a link to find out how to do that.

Local government in the UK consists of a single tier in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, but in England there are three tiers: regional authorities (11), local authorities (333), and the lowest tier consisting of town and parish councils (10,475).

Middle-tier local authorities – borough, county, district, and city councils

The other standout amongst middle-tier websites is the following Climate Emergency call to action in a rotating banner near the top of the Lancaster City Council homepage.

Climate Emergency banner on Lancaster City Council homepage

In general, councils seem to include items that are currently important to them in rotating banners, but the downside of that is that a rotating Climate Emergency item might not be displayed at the time anyone who is just looking for bin collection days scrolls down the page. However, the Lancaster banner rotates fairly quickly and only has two items rotating, so it is unlikely to be missed. It might even be more eye-catching than a static image as the movement tends to attract the eye.

Such excellent CED visibility on the Lancaster website was not a surprise to me. The Deputy Leader of Lancaster City Council, Cllr Kevin Frea, is the brains behind the excellent Climate Emergency UK website, an extremely comprehensive record of UK declarations, Climate Emergency Action Plans by UK local councils, and even a council climate plan scorecard mechanism.

Middle-tier councils in the UK have quite a wide range of functions, so their websites tend to show their numerous main menu items as blocks of icons or images. It is rare for their CED to rate inclusion in these main menu blocks. In too many cases the CED information can only be found by clicking on something more generic, like ‘Environment’, but there are some good examples of giving their CED equal prominence with other main menu items. For example, in the following main menu icons on the South Cambridgeshire District Council homepage:

Menu icons on South Cambridgeshire District Council home page

Or this section of the Somerset County Council main menu:

Screenshot of Somerset County Council main menu

Or the following image panel for featured menu items on the Eastleigh Borough Council homepage:

Climate Emergency as a featured item on Eastleigh Borough Council home page

Or the following Rother District Council main menu using panels of images rather than icons:

Image panel of main menu items on Rother District Council home page

Hopefully the above examples, or these screenshots showing good CED visibility by middle-tier UK councils, will inspire local councils globally to make their CEDs equally visible.

Small town and parish councils

Town and parish councils have a quite limited range of responsibility and power, and therefore less contention for space on a council’s homepage. This might explain why this is the only tier of local government where I found examples of the Climate Emergency being included in the top main menu. For example, on the Bishopsteignton Parish Council website:

Climate Emergency in Bishpsteignton top main menu

And the Chagford Parish Council website:

Climate Emergency in Chagford Parish Council top main menu

Or this link to their CED right at the top of the Dawlish Town Council homepage:

Climate Emergency Declaration link at top of Dawlish Town Council home page

And some parish and town councils give visibility to their CEDs in the body of their homepage, for example this Climate Emergency panel on the homepage of the Glastonbury Town Council website:

Climate Emergency panel on Glastonbury TOwn Council home page

More examples of good CED visibility on homepages can be seen at UK parish council homepages and at UK town council homepages.

The numbers

Of the 544 local councils in the UK with known Climate Emergency Declarations (CEDs), 65 (11.9%) have made their declaration clearly visible on the homepage of their website. While this figure is disappointingly low, it is significantly better than what was found for CED councils in Australia.

Chart showing the number of UK councils with Climate Emergency on their Home page — * The devolved governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have all also made country-level CEDs
** Almost definitely there are more town/parish councils that have passed CEDs but these are less well reported in media

The small town and parish councils have the highest percentage of CED visibility, with 38 (18.7%) featuring their CED on their homepage. None of the huge regional combined authorities do so even though 9 of the 11 regional authorities have declared a Climate Emergency.

The near misses

In addition to the above, 20 UK councils have either an eye-catching homepage rotating banner, static image panel, or popup that links to comprehensive information about their declarations, action plans, and information for engaging the local community. The only downside is the lack of the ’emergency’ word. For example, the popup announcing climate action investment (more on that in a future blog post!) below on the Telford and Wrekin Council website homepage:

Or the following rotating climate action banner near the top of the homepage of the West Sussex County Council website:

Rotating climate action banner near top of West Sussex County Council home page

Or the following zero carbon banner on the homepage of the Gateshead Council website:

Zero carbon banner on the Gateshead Council home page

Despite not using the term ‘climate emergency’, the above are highly visible to anyone visiting those websites, and they do indicate that the councils are placing a high priority on climate action.

There are another 149 (27.4%) of the UK CED councils that also publish quite comprehensive information on their declarations and action plans, and in most cases also material designed to engage the entire community. However, website visitors will only see that information if they go out of their way to look for it. In about half of those cases website visitors can look for ‘climate’ in a long list of menu items. However, in other cases website visitors need to first click an ‘environment’, ‘sustainability’, or similar menu item, then click down through submenu layers to find links to the Climate Emergency content.

In conclusion

I don’t think my week was wasted. A large part of the point of declaring a Climate Emergency is to make the local community sit up and take notice. For that a council’s declaration needs to be clearly visible…to everyone, not just to those who are already engaged in climate action and actively seeking information on what their own local council is doing.

I’d like to think some other CED councils will be inspired by the good examples above. Please tell us all in the comments below if your council decides to add a Climate Emergency banner or something equally visible on the homepage of their website!

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Climate Emergency banners: Where are they?

Posted on June 28, 2022June 28, 2022

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 visibility	Number of councils	%
CED banner on Home page	0	0%
CED mention on Home page	1	1%
CED in main menu	0	0%
Environment in main menu	46	42%
Dedicated CED page	53	49%
‘Climate Emergency’ search results	89	82%
Climate Emergency community outreach	35	32%
Sustainability community outreach	21	19%

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 strategy	Number of councils	%
Climate Emergency grants / awards	19	17%
Council loans / subsidies	13	12%
Bulk Buys	7	6%
State government loans / subsidies	23	21%

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!

Engaging community with climate action grants

Posted on May 29, 2022June 19, 2022

Local councils who have declared a Climate Emergency generally know exactly where to start with actions to reduce carbon emissions from their own operations. But those emissions make up only a tiny percentage of the overall emissions from their community. The bigger challenge is devising ways to engage their entire community to achieve the big climate gains that come from inspiring community-wide action.

Surf Coast Shire Council (Victoria, Australia) have adopted a mission of engaging their entire community in Climate Emergency action. As one strategy, they are offering small grants towards local projects which reduce emissions and encourage community involvement in climate action.

At their PitchFest on 5 June 2022, schools, groups and individuals will pitch their idea for climate action to the community. The community will then vote for their favourite project, with the top two projects walking away with $5,000 each.

What a great idea! Holding a public PitchFest, rather than just offering grants, is a great way of showing off the ideas being pitched and encouraging residents to think up an even wider range of community action projects.

You can see some of the novel solutions being adopted by other local councils here.