Originally published @ 10:31 pm, Wed 3rd Nov 2010
Tuesday night saw a celebration 10th anniversary of the Nottingham Declaration. This is a statement of intent that councils can sign to say they want to mitigate climate change.
Nottingham came up with the idea having adopted a Green Charter in 1989 (against which all council reports were checked) and embraced some f the radical transport thinking that Labour nationally had developed and which I first came across during debates at Notts. County Council.
Devised at a time when the national government were focussing their efforts on tacking carbon emissions through industry, it came to be something that was picked up upon and developed by the Audit Commission as part of their corporate assessment of councils.
The Audit Commission check of all authorities was making some wonder about whether the Declaration’s job had been done, especially since over three-quarters of councils had signed up to it.
It had reached about one-quarter by the time we re-launched it in 2005, with more emphasis on adaptation and more emphasis on methodology.
But unlike other measures such as EMA or ISO14001, or the Mayor’s Convention (check), the Declaration never sought to enforce statements of intent.
The next step would be to allow councils to declare further ambition in the various fields to which green politics might apply, such as energy, waste, procurement, green jobs.
Indeed, the one opportunity seems to be to encourage the full and effective use of feed-in tariffs. Snag here is that the ConDems could abandon the scheme.
One speaker ventured the idea on climate change would be to encourage the children to be the guardians of the future. Shades of 1984, and Winston Smith’s work-colleague expressing relief that his son had turned him in for disloyalty to the party. Cllr. Katrina Bull, Nottingham’s portfolio holder for tackling climate change was clear – we, the politicians, should take responsibility for the actions we can take now.
Katrina kindly let me address the conference, and I took the opportunity to point out not only how tackling and mitigating climate change can be a challenge, but that it can also provides opportunities for greatness, such as the green architecture of the tax office and the iconic tram system.