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Climate

Supporting community climate action is crucial to achieving COP28 ambitions

With the COP climate summit over for another year, Locality members continue to take action on climate in their local communities. In our Locality manifesto we're calling for major reforms to make it easier to create community-led climate projects.

With the COP climate summit over for another year, local communities are taking it on themselves to make tangible change.

As the dust settles on COP28, debate continues about how meaningful the final commitment to "transition away" from fossil fuels really is.

Slow progress by governments on key global issues won’t come as a shock to local communities around the world and here in the UK. Yet with severe flooding and life-threatening heat, the impacts are more and more noticeable. And we know that lower income and other disadvantaged groups contribute least to causing climate change but are disproportionately paying the price to solve it.

This is why many community organisations are taking it upon themselves to sow the seeds of change. Our recent survey found that three quarters of Locality members are already taking action on climate.

Three quarters of Locality members are taking action on climate: reducing energy usage, distributing food and even creating community-owned renewable energy.

Locality survey

Many are improving their own energy efficiency, or tackling the cost of living crisis by distributing boxes of locally-grown food or giving people energy advice and draught-proofing their homes. Others are creating their own energy, by installing solar panels, or even building the largest wind turbine in Europe.

So Locality has made climate justice a key plank of Building Thriving Neighbourhoods: The Locality Manifesto, our call to action in advance of the next election.

We set out a 10 year vision for community-powered local economies that produce places and spaces for everyone. They are democratic, inclusive, regenerative, and, as a result, green.

We know that local community organisations understand best how to create a circular, sustainable, low-carbon economies in their areas, with materials and products reused, recycled and shared.

That’s why we’re calling for more powers for communities to take the decisions that affect them, including about where local economic development funding goes. By investing locally, they can unleash the potential of local people to create economic opportunities. And by keeping spending in their area, they can reduce carbon emissions from supply chains and commuting.

Communities face another barrier if they cannot access the buildings and spaces they need to create the community energy projects and green enterprises of the future. We know how community ownership allows communities to create the spaces and services they need. It enables local people to generate and retain wealth for their neighbourhoods, sustain and direct their own activities, provide an independent voice for their community, and operate at a scale where they can work collaboratively with the public sector. And it is also a key means for communities who have been minoritised and excluded to take control and build power over the long term.

So we’re calling for the government to support community energy, community retrofit and other projects, and to make changes so it is easier for communities to take ownership of valued local buildings and spaces.

Recent changes in government policy are only scratching the surface when it comes to the potential power of community ownership to build community-owned energy projects.

If every neighbourhood had a community-owned energy asset, like Ambition Lawrence Weston’s wind turbine, it could support the foundations of a sustainable community infrastructure in perpetuity.

Retrofitting community buildings to be energy efficient is also a critical part of this agenda. The current government has made £25m of grant funding available, alongside loan finance from dormant assets. This is a useful start, but insufficient to ensure community organisations have an environmentally and financially sustainable long-term future.

So the next government must ensure that community buildings are a key part of its retrofitting plans and make sufficient resource available to match the scale of the task.

Together, these reforms will help create the vision we are ultimately striving to achieve - a version of the Just Transition in which communities have power over their climate destiny.

While it is in the purview of governments to secure big ticket, international commitments to reduce the impact of the climate crisis as much as possible, it is our local communities here in the UK and around the world that will step up to keep our future bright.