37: Decarbonising infrastructure
Cutting carbon from future infrastructure projects is a massive and costly long-term challenge. It is also a critical part of the path to net zero. So how can bridges, roads, hospitals, power stations, railway networks, and all the big-ticket items we rely on for the proper functioning of our society and economy be decarbonised? Becky and Matt are joined by:
Alan Hendry, Director of Sustainability at Mott MacDonald
Sarah Thiam, Chief Executive of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry.
Kit England, Green Economy Manager at Glasgow City Council
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Sarah: Unless your business or organisation is here to solve some kind of a problem or a challenge, actually, you really need to think carefully about your purpose and how purpose and mission-driven you are.
Alan: It’s the ability to link up and create networks which are where you’re going to bring added benefit but the leadership thing is key.
Kit: The other really interesting place to be is in community energy. Full disclosure: I did that in my local community and it was both really stressful and really great at the same time.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Hello and welcome to Local Zero with Matt and Becky. In today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about low-carbon infrastructure.
Rebecca: When we’re talking about infrastructure, it’s actually much more than you might initially think. It’s the bridges, roads, docks, hospitals, railways, water supply, telephone networks and power stations. It’s all of these things that deliver the services that we rely on for our economy and our society to function properly.
Matt: Transforming and decarbonising our critical infrastructure won’t be easy and neither will it be cheap or without major disruption. It will entail costly and long-term projects which can’t simply happen overnight. So how do we make sure it’s low and not high-carbon infrastructure that’s in the pipeline?
Rebecca: Today, we talk with Alan Hendry, Director of Sustainability at Mott MacDonald to discuss their latest report commissioned by the Institute of Civil Engineers and titled Accelerating the Decarbonisation of Scottish Infrastructure. It looks at the challenge ahead, what’s holding us back and what we can do to decarbonise our infrastructure.
Matt: We’re also joined by Sarah Thiam, Chief Executive of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry as well as Kit England, Green Economy Manager at Glasgow City Council.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: As always, please do reach out to us on our dedicated Twitter handle. If you haven’t already, go find and follow us @LocalZeroPod and get involved in the discussions there or if you’re like me and can’t constrain your thoughts to just a few characters in a tweet, do email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share those longer thoughts.
[Music flourish]
So before we get into our discussion today, Matt, we’ve got the good, the bad and the weird, except, there’s no bad news today. That’s the rule?
Matt: Yeah, quite right. We’ve banned bad news. Why? Because we’ve reached saturation point. I can’t digest any more and so yeah, it’s just sort of banned for a few minutes on bad news.
Rebecca: So what’s been making you smile over the last couple of weeks, Matt?
Matt: Okay, so this week, I’ve been looking into a company called Ripple Energy. I’ve been aware of Ripple Energy for a little while now but how are these guys any different from the energy suppliers that we’re all familiar with and that have been making the news of late?
Rebecca: Well, firstly, they’ve got a great name.
Matt: They’ve got a great name. Okay, and that’s it... no, that isn’t it [laughter] because they have a great business model in my view. They basically give the opportunity of buying a share in a wind farm. Recently, they broke ground on building an eight wind turbine wind farm in Kirk Hill in Scotland and it’s enough to power 20,000 homes. That isn’t massively innovative I guess because community energy does that. The way this is different is it ties this to your energy bill. They’ve got a select number of chosen suppliers that you can partner with.
It works like this: you make an investment and for me, they calculate it to be about £2,000 to account for 100% of my electricity needs. I am buying power directly through this supplier from this wind farm instead of at the volatile market price of power and the difference between that baseline and that cost price from the wind farm and the crazy, crazy gas-inflated market price of power are savings on my energy bill. Now if I invested £2,000, roughly, into this at the moment, I would get – wait for it, Becky - £520 a year saving on my electricity bill.
Rebecca: Wow!
Matt: I would pay back my investment within four years and after that, for the next 21 years, I’d be enjoying £520 saving on my electricity bill.
Rebecca: So the wind is only blowing some of the time and so does this mean that you can only use electricity when that wind farm is generating or can you use electricity in your home at any time and some sort of magic happens behind the scenes, and I realise it’s not magic but it feels like magic to me, to account for all of that?
Matt: I guess that’s factored into it. Obviously, I can’t buy power from this wind farm when the wind isn’t blowing; hence, why they’re coupling you with an energy supplier. I’m assuming it averages out over the year and sometimes, my portion of that wind farm would be generating more than 100% of my needs but sometimes, it would be under 100% of my needs and it would balance out over the year but that’s a question for Ripple. I’d love to get them on to talk more about this.
I should say the payback of four years is at current prices. If prices drop to where they originally were before things got weird and the crisis really started to bite, they were looking at much more like a 13-year payback. I just think it’s a different way of thinking about it. Buy a bit of a share in a wind farm, buy the power from that, enjoy the savings from that and those savings pay back your investment. After you’ve paid your investment off, you’ve got a long-term saving. I appreciate that not everybody would be able to afford this but some people will and some people might find that interesting.
Yeah, it’s a very different way of thinking about it and a very different way, Becky, than, say, putting solar on your roof. Why not buy a share in a wind farm? It doesn’t necessarily have to be a community organisation doing it. It can be something much more akin to Ripple which is a different way of approaching this.
Rebecca: Yeah, but it’s supporting that collective action. It’s supporting the economies of scale and, of course, if you move, presumably, you can carry the deal with you; whereas, you can’t take your solar panels off your roof with you.
Matt: No, you can’t carry your roof with you.
[Music flourish]
Well now, Becky, we’re on to a little bit of trivia; something entirely different. Another good news story but the question to you is what proportion of sales of fast food and coffee (McDonald’s, Burger King and also coffee shops like Starbucks and Costa) was through drive-through sites in the year up to March 2021?
Rebecca: Covid would have been rife for a lot of that where we wouldn’t even have been able to go inside, so I’m guessing numbers will be a bit inflated compared to, perhaps, usual years. I mean maybe 40%.
Matt: Much lower at 12% but in the years between 2015 and 2022, our sales increased by 40%.
Rebecca: Wow!
Matt: Now I just want to say that versus the US, what share of sales of fast food and coffee do you think, roughly, was from a drive-through? So if it’s 12% in the UK, what is it in the US?
Rebecca: So I reckon, in the US, it would be a bit higher and so 18%.
Matt: 70%.
Rebecca: Oh! No!
Matt: 70%, yeah. I mean that’s according to the source I’ve got in front of me and I tried to fact-check this earlier. 70% is insane, right? The number of drive-throughs in the UK is going up and up just at the time when we’re trying to drive carbon emissions down and down. In Glasgow alone, there are currently 48 drive-through restaurants.
Rebecca: Wow!
Matt: We’re getting to the good news, don’t worry [laughter]. The good news article is that the Green Party in Glasgow City Council tabled a motion to basically ban new drive-throughs...
Rebecca: Wow!
Matt: ...and it looks like this is starting to gain traction and the motion was carried. So whilst it remains to be seen how this will filter through into actual rules and regulations, it looks like drive-throughs could be a thing of the past. I have to say the responses on Twitter were pretty divided. As you can imagine in this day and age, there wasn’t really much centre ground around this [laughter]. It was either this is the best thing that’s ever happened or the worst but either way, it’s an important development.
Rebecca: But you do spend a lot of time idling in your car.
Matt: That’s it and idling is bad because of air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Apparently, it’s really bad for your engine as well. There’s an interesting article from The Conversation on this exact issue which we’ll try and link to on the website. Anyway, that’s my good news article. Hopefully, that will then pressure the council and government to look at other ways of accessing our food outlets other than climbing into your car.
Rebecca: I’ll share my good news. I was toying about whether it fits as a good news story or as weird and I think it kind of fits as both. Regular listeners to the pod will have heard me talk before about the Octopus Energy trial in the UK that’s going on that I’m taking part in. The last time we talked about this, I outlined that I had not been successful in reducing my demand. I got an email from Octopus Energy asking me to reduce my demand by 40% between 4.30-6.30 pm.
Matt: Can I have a guess at how far you got? So you tried to do it by 40% between what hours?
Rebecca: 4.30-6.30 pm. The first time, I was unsuccessful. The target was 40% and actually, I should say it wasn’t energy. It was electricity only and it wasn’t monitoring our gas use.
Matt: So between 4.30-6.30 pm and the target was 40%. I’m going to go for 50%.
Rebecca: We reduced our power by 83%.
Matt: My goodness! What did you do? [Laughter] Did you just not have dinner? [Laughter]
Rebecca: I don’t know why it worked so well that week [laughter].
Matt: You just went to bed [laughter].
Rebecca: Honestly, I cooked my kids’ dinner. We still all ate and I didn’t send them hungry to bed I promise. I promise they did not go hungry to bed. However, I got an email congratulating me for doing that and as part of that email, I was also told how much money I had saved and would be credited. How much do you reckon it was?
Matt: I don’t know the exact number but I’ve seen some folk put this up on Twitter and I want to say it’s fairly small, arguably a paltry amount but I’m going to say 25 pence.
Rebecca: 20 pence.
Matt: 20 pence [laughter].
Rebecca: It was so bizarre, Matt, because I saw the email and I’m scrolling down and I see the 80%. In my mind, I’m thinking, ‘Yes, we did it! This is amazing.’
Matt: £20 reward easy.
Rebecca: I then read the monetary value and I started thinking, ‘Was that worth it?’ We went to quite a lot of trouble. Will I even bother next time? I was actually talking about this with one of my colleagues, who is based in the US and runs a behavioural science research institute there, and she told me that this is a well-known psychological theory. One of our mutual friends and colleague, Hale Forster, has written about this and it’s called ‘decision modes.’
What had happened was that I had been in this kind of way of thinking of trying to do something for the greater good. It was a challenge. It was very internally motivating and driven by thinking, ‘Can I contribute to this programme?’ The very mention of the monetary saving put me into a completely different decision mode. It starts to flip the way in which you think about things and make decisions.
Matt: I have a question. If they hadn’t mentioned the money, do you think you’d have felt better about it? If they’d have kept the 20 pence, would you have even questioned it? It would have just been a challenge, right?
Rebecca: I would have been so excited that we’d succeeded and contributed towards this programme that’s trying to reduce the amount of power that’s used when the grid is dirtiest. The minute that that money was mentioned, it got me questioning why I was participating [laughter].
Matt: What you’re saying is it was an offensive amount of reward basically.
Rebecca: The very notion of the monetary equivalent changes you from this sort of thinking about how you’re contributing to some bigger cause to put you in a mindset of what you can save and how those financial aspects are traded off. Yeah, it’s counterintuitive but I think I would have been more excited and I would be feeling more positive about engaging again if there had been no mention of money whatsoever.
Matt: Now I think you said before you shared that story that that was your good news story but it sounded like it was your weird news story, so a bit of both.
Rebecca: That’s it! It’s good because I’m excited that we managed to do it and good for me that I contributed but that’s why I think there’s a weird element too.
Matt: It segues nicely into the final story I think we have and a bit of a weird one I have which is with the demand reduction, you managed to achieve 83% in those evenings. One of the big focuses in tackling what’s happening in Ukraine with the Russian invasion and the implications this is having for gas and oil prices is energy demand management or energy demand reduction. Akin to what happened in Japan, post-Fukushima, where many of their nuclear reactors were out and they had to dramatically reduce their energy demand almost overnight, we’re going to have to do something similar in the UK and, more broadly, across Europe.
The weird bit for me here is that a lot of the commentary I’ve been hearing about this is whether what’s happening in Ukraine, which is appalling in a humanitarian sense and obviously, this show isn’t going to cover that but just to note what’s happening there... the implications of that are appalling and it could also be appalling in terms of access to energy, the cost of energy and the macroeconomic impacts. What does this do for net zero? Much of the commentary I’m hearing is, ‘Well, we need to drill, drill, drill, baby.’ It’s more oil and gas and that kind of delaying net zero.
On the other hand, the emphasis is that fossil fuels are the problem in the first place and we need to move away from oil and gas. Gas is a bridging or transitional fuel and those days are over. So the weird bit here is is it going to mean that we doubled down on net zero or delay net zero? I don’t have the answer yet.
Rebecca: Of course, what I’m not seeing as much of is a conversation around what’s happening on our demand side and looking at activities that are independent of the supply. So if we can make our buildings more energy efficient and we can rely on more efficient and effective forms of heating and transport, these are ways that we can overcome some of our reliance on this.
If you’ve got renewables, it goes hand-in-hand with doubling down but you could be doing that without doubling down on the renewables as well but I just don’t see anywhere near the sorts of conversation around actually investing in our infrastructure that’s going to drive this low-carbon future.
Matt: That is the point at which we really should bring our guests in who are going to give us some of the answers, so bring them in.
Alan: Hi, I’m Alan Hendry and I lead on sustainability for Mott MacDonald in Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Sarah: Hi, my name is Sarah Thiam and I’m the Chief Exec at SCDI (Scottish Council for Development and Industry).
Kit: Hi there, I’m Kit England. I’m the Green Economy Manager for Glasgow City Council where I look at the needs and opportunities for the net-zero transition from an economic perspective.
[Music flourish]
Matt: The topic of discussion is all about low-carbon infrastructure and how we ensure that we deliver a low-carbon infrastructure in a timely and cost-effective manner. So the first question I think to our guests is what on earth do you define as infrastructure and what do you include within that basket? Most importantly, what is low-carbon infrastructure? It’s an open question.
Maybe we can begin with Alan because Mott MacDonald, which you represent, was commissioned by the Institute of Civil Engineers to undertake the report Accelerating the Decarbonisation of Scottish Infrastructure. You’ve done some heavy thinking on this and so maybe if you can tackle it first, then we’ll hand over to Sarah and Kit.
Alan: Sure. Thanks, Matt. I guess I’d classify infrastructure as the stuff that gets us around like transport infrastructure. There’s energy infrastructure which heats our homes. There’s water infrastructure. There’s digital infrastructure. It’s across a whole gamut of types and it’s the things that make our lives function. Those are, I guess, the bits of kit but we also looked at issues around training, how you procure infrastructure, how you run infrastructure and how you decommission infrastructure. It wasn’t just the types of kit; it was the story around them about how you get them developed and how they’re managed.
In terms of low-carbon infrastructure, I would say it’s the stuff that is designed to reduce the carbon intensity to help meet Scotland’s 2045 net-zero ambitions.
Matt: So my reading of what you’ve said and also of the report is that low-carbon infrastructure falls into two categories. One is that it’s delivered in a low-carbon fashion but also it enables and facilitates low-carbon behaviours, activities and the like. Is that crude definition fairly accurate?
Alan: I would say that was fair. If you look at some of the infrastructure that’s going now into support energy, particularly with ScotWind coming up and all the offshore wind, I would say that was low-carbon infrastructure in terms of what it will deliver but how it’s actually constructed can also be low-carbon, depending on how you do it.
Matt: I’ll maybe turn to Sarah before Kit then. Have you got a different take on what infrastructure is, what it does and what constitutes low carbon?
Sarah: I think Alan is absolutely spot on. I mean the thing about infrastructure is that it’s a real enabler, isn’t it? It’s about our quality of life. From the minute you get up in the morning and you turn on the tap and brush your teeth to how you get to work, or school, or how you get around and visit your family, it’s everything. It’s water, transport, energy and waste but also digital increasingly and, gosh, we really couldn’t have done without that this last couple of years.
I suppose the first observation I would make is that this is about making the most of our existing assets. Scotland has very ambitious targets to get to net zero by 2045 but it’s really worth making the observation that most of that infrastructure is already built. So a lot of what we need to do is look after what we’ve got, extend its life and ensure that it’s fit for the future.
To add to Alan’s points about infrastructure, we’re facing a twin crisis, aren’t we? Yes, we have to get to net zero but it’s also about biodiversity and nature, a crisis as well. That is something that we also need to be considering in all of this. In terms of low-carbon infrastructure, sometimes, it’s taking out hard engineering and it’s restoring our rivers and putting in natural flood prevention. You can actually take that hard engineering out if you like.
Matt: I like that. The absence of infrastructure could be the lowest carbon... now I can see Kit is...
Sarah: It turns out Mother Nature is quite good at this kind of stuff on its own.
Matt: As Green Economy Manager, Kit, you’re desperate to come in here.
Kit: Yeah, there are two things. I don’t know if any of you listen to Pod Save America which is this kind of American politics podcast but they were talking about when Biden was putting through his Infrastructure Bill and in the US, there was a debate about how broad you go with the definition of infrastructure. It was like, ‘Are we infrastructure?’ [Laughter] It’s a bit crazy.
I think there are two things. One is that I would echo everything that Alan and Sarah have said. I will build on it though and say that we also need to think about green infrastructure. Nature-based solutions both for mitigation and for adaptation I think are important. I think we also need to probably draw out a separate category of infrastructure around climate resilience as well which are things like flood risk management infrastructure and those kinds of things too. I absolutely agree with that kind of definition that we’ve started with.
Rebecca: Kit, I’m just going to pick you up on that. You said green infrastructure and in my mind, I’m thinking the colour green and I know that’s not what you’re talking about but possibly other people do [laughter].
Kit: That’s kind of a bit what I’m talking about though, Becky. I’m talking about things like green roofs, green walls, sustainable urban drainage systems, swails and all those kinds of things that Sarah was getting at as well I think. I’m definitely thinking about that. It’s a bit confusing in this space because some people talk about green infrastructure in the same way they talk about low-carbon infrastructure as well, so green as in it is low-environmental impact. I was really talking about, in other parts of the world, things like mangroves and that kind of stuff.
Alan: This is a great conversation and I think one of the things we did within the report was to highlight some good practices, given what Sarah said about making sure existing assets are used well and given what Kit said about green infrastructure. One of the projects we highlighted is a really good example of both systems thinking and a place-based approach was the Smart Canal in Glasgow which is obviously a fairly historic asset. The project, originally, was to look at how you use the canal to receive water from intensive rainfall periods and so, again, it’s the resilience thing.
That project has grown arms and legs. It’s now about biodiversity. They’ve done it in a way that is low carbon and they’ve created a whole range of habitats, walking routes and cycling routes. So it’s infrastructure that tackles a need around drainage but it’s done it in a way that has provided jobs and opportunities for local communities. To me, that’s how it should be done. It’s not rocket science but it’s not done often enough.
Sarah: It’s simultaneously addressing a range of different priorities and opportunities. Actually, there’s the piece there about regenerating an area as well and involving the local community, making it easier for them to make the right choices, enabling them to walk and cycle and creating that really nice amenity and quality of life for people.
Rebecca: I definitely want to dig into this a little bit further because that sounds like a very exciting opportunity. First of all, I’m wondering if you can just break that down for me as to why that is an example of low-carbon infrastructure. What is it that isn’t low carbon? What is high carbon? Do we have a lot of high-carbon infrastructure that we just need to use in different ways?
Sarah, you said that we need to make the best use of the assets we already have. Is that still true if they’re high-carbon assets and what is the scale of the challenge that we’re trying to address?
Matt: Becky, if I can just append onto that discussion that we had in the kick-around prior to this? We were talking about drive-throughs. Is that high-carbon infrastructure because it encourages a high-carbon behaviour?
Kit: Who wants to go first on this? [Laughter] I would just say that I think the Smart Canal in North Glasgow is a really great project because the legacy of that was a high-carbon infrastructure. Where we are now, Becky, is it’s an existing asset and it’s being repurposed rather than spending money on the embodied carbon of new infrastructure for flooding management which is achieving the same outcome.
As Sarah said, it’s a great project because it realises multiple economic outcomes and social outcomes. It connects people to the city centre and makes it easier to do low-carbon transport and all those kinds of things. The outcomes are low carbon and the delivery of it is low carbon as well. That’s the key thing. I mean there have been bits of kit going in to monitor the water flows, to do all of the automatic drainage management and all that kind of stuff but the core of, it in terms of you haven’t had to dig out a massive chunk of groundworks and lay a load of pipes and all of the embodied carbon that goes with that... that, for me, is at the core of that.
Alan: What I love about it is it delivers multiple benefits and I think infrastructure should always be challenged to deliver multiple benefits. I guess, Becky, going back to your question of what high-carbon infrastructure is, maybe the obvious thing to say would probably be roads. There’s then an argument that if we do get the transition to electric vehicles and hydrogen trucks, then, to a certain extent, that is ameliorated but that’s maybe the other end of that spectrum and there are obviously opportunities for decarbonisation there, depending on how they’re used.
Rebecca: I like that example of roads because it’s something that everyone can relate to. For sure, I can completely understand now why they’re high carbon, especially if you’ve ever sat in a traffic jam and you feel those fumes coming in the car. Equally, if we end up with a lifestyle that is far more based on public and active transport, I see what you’re saying in that it’s not about replacing those roads; it’s about using them in a different way to deliver different sorts of outcomes. Just stepping back to the Smart Canal, why do you think it is that this project was able to deliver so many benefits and to be done in a way that supported these multiple different goals? What was different about this project compared to other projects?
Alan: Again, it’s throughout the report and all the examples we have produced that are good examples are down to individual leadership. It’s somebody who has wanted to just do a better job and they’ve had that breadth of understanding about what they can deliver through their projects. They’ve not got a siloed mind. They’ve got a mind that understands all the things it can deliver.
It’s almost something I’d probably challenge back to the universities; that’s something that should be taught more about those wider benefits that could be delivered because, in university, you maybe go down a silo to become a chemical engineer or something else. It’s the ability to link up and create networks is where you’re going to bring added benefit but the leadership thing is key.
Matt: We’ll take Sarah and then we’ll go to Kit if that’s okay.
Sarah: Alan is quite right. Leadership is extremely important here but I think it’s also that the project has to be rooted in need. You’re identifying a need. You’re trying to solve an existing challenge and you’re trying to resolve it in a better way. It’s what Alan is saying and thinking about it in a much more systematic and wider way rather than just in the achievement of that narrow goal. Kit touched on it earlier. Actually, the penny has really dropped for lots of organisations in the last couple of years in the private, public and third sectors that it’s about working towards those social and environmental outcomes alongside whatever else it is you’re trying to do. Maybe if you’re a business, you’re thinking about your bottom line but actually, unless your business or organisation is here to solve some kind of a problem or a challenge, you may need to think carefully about your purpose and how purpose and mission-driven you are.
It’s that systems thinking, that wider thinking and thinking about a problem much more holistically and thinking, ‘Actually, we can solve a problem here around flooding, drainage and so on but we can actually do good things for the community at the same time, create a great place, make this a better place to be and have a better quality of life for people.’ You’re tackling multiple challenges in all sorts of ways in which communities and people cannot achieve their best.
Kit: I would completely agree with that. What I would say though I think is that why you see that as leadership at the moment is because the way that we design our institutions and the way that we train people is not to think of handling that systemic thinking and that complexity very well. If you look at how public sector institutions are set up, and I’m not going to pick on individual ones because that’s not helpful, over the last 100 years or so, they’ve evolved to keep the status quo and they’ve evolved to deliver certain things repetitively over a number of years. With local authorities, you have a service set up and it does your waste collection, etcetera, and it continues to do that in the same way.
Where we’re going now is we’re actually facing multiple challenges and it’s not just the climate challenge. The Green Deal that we’re trying to put together or that we are putting together in Glasgow is not just about the climate piece. It’s about how we deliver economic prosperity for people in the 21st century. It’s how we deal with inequality and it requires you to think about those solutions that deliver those things together. What institutions tend to do is say the economic development team is over here and the climate change team is over here. Poverty, we just deal with that over there, don’t we? We accept failure demand and we have a government service which deals with benefits, payments and that kind of thing instead of thinking about those things together and training people and expecting people to work in that way.
What it means is it’s very, very different because you have to start with a blank sheet of paper almost and not have preconceptions about what the outcome might be because if you have a preconception that we’re going to deliver this piece of infrastructure and that’s the way that it’s going to be done, it leaves no space for exploring those co-benefits or bringing others into the project.
I think the Smart Canal, just coming back to ground that in the real world, took a very, very long time to get off the ground and it nearly failed at multiple points. The reason it didn’t is that the relevant officers from the city council flooding team, Scottish Water and Scottish Canals all persevered together. If we look at where we are and the trajectory of where we’ve got to go to be net zero by 2045 as a country and for Glasgow by 2030, we have to get away from that just being the exception rather than the rule. We have to get to the point where we’re hardwiring that into our institutions.
Sarah: That’s why place is such a useful lens through which to look at these types of challenges because actually, every silo or every organisation has got something positive to bring to the challenge. We’ve all got something to bring to the party here. If we’re a consumer, it’s about the choices we’re making. If you’re a public policy professional thinking about poverty, you’re not doing so in isolation in your box. I think this is why built environment and regeneration professionals and engineers understand these challenges and are better equipped to deal with them.
Matt: Following up on that point, on Kit’s point and also, Alan, in the report, this is writ large is systems thinking and place-based thinking. They’re two notions that we’re cross-sectoral, cross-vector and we’re not just looking at waste, water or energy. We’re looking at infrastructure, as Sarah said, to solve multiple problems to facilitate low-carbon choices that enrich people’s lives. How do we engrain that systems thinking and that place-based thinking in decision-making from the top? That’s industry, government, NGOs and citizens. What do we start to do because, at the moment, we are very siloed?
The examples you talk about are the exception to the rule and so what do we do to start breaking down that siloed thinking but also almost that lack of place-based thinking and that we’re just looking to replicate things from one place to the next rather than accept that sometimes, places are slightly different and we need to be aware of that?
Sarah: Well, if the last two years have taught us anything at all, it’s the value of the public, private and voluntary sectors coming together behind a shared goal and a shared mission. Look at the things that have been achieved in terms of where we are in terms of battling a pandemic. There was the introduction of the vaccination and the different types of behaviours. Everybody has come together around a shared challenge.
The organisation that I work for and the reason that I’m here is that it is an organisation that, for 90 years, has brought together those different constituent parts in the room to have grown-up conversations about where we need to get to. What’s the long-term vision, what do we all have to bring to the party and how can we make sure that we work together to make sure that we get there? It’s really that working across sectors both in terms of professional expertise but also across the public, private and third sectors and recognising that no single one has the answer. We’ve all got something to contribute there.
Matt: I’m going to go to Alan next. Alan, obviously, you’ve written the report here and some of the answers are in there but what are they?
Alan: One of my hobby horses is I think that people behave the way they’re marked and I think there’s a real opportunity with the National Performance Framework that the Scottish Government has set which is very akin to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. If you’re getting money to deliver something, you should be able to have a narrative around all those aspects of the National Framework. That’s the social aspects and the economic and environmental ones. I think in challenging people to basically create that story and respond to those demands, you start to get people to think a bit more in a systems way.
The place thing is very prominent now. We’re doing work with Scottish Futures Trust and they’ve brought out a piece of work around the importance of place. I think place allows you to exploit the natural benefits, whether that’s human capital or physical capital of that place to create something that is joined up. It almost implies that you have to do systems thinking if you’re basing it around a place.
Matt: Kit, you are basing this around a place. That place is Glasgow and as I understand it, it’s also Glasgow City region as well. It’s not just the city of Glasgow. What does place-based and systems thinking mean to you? How do you apply that on a day-to-day basis?
Kit: Oh, that’s a big question. I think it means different things in different contexts. I completely agree with both what Sarah and Alan have said and just building on it, what we have to do is find a way where we innovate and change the rules of the game that encourages that kind of thinking and those approaches. A good example is that yesterday, we went through the committee with our draft economic strategy for the city and in there, the economic strategy and the regional economic strategy (it should be said as well), the biggest challenges to the economy have been around productivity and inclusion but also the climate emergency.
Actually, what we’re saying in that strategy is that if we want economic prosperity, then we have to tackle mitigation and adaptation. You’re not going to get economic prosperity unless you deal with mitigation and adaptation because you won’t have a sustainable future on a planet that is on fire. Conceptually, we have to start baking that into our policies and strategies but then there’s also a point that we have to innovate in a way that our institutions and our processes work.
A good example of that is that although I’ve been involved in economic development before, my last five to ten years have been in sustainability but I’m not in the sustainability team in the council. I’m in the economic development team. They’ve taken sustainability people and put them into economic development roles. You see that in Europe and with the European Green Deal, Ursula Von der Leyen said that climate action is Europe’s new growth strategy and so you have to see those things together.
What you then have to start to do I think is things like write it into the job descriptions. We’re in the process of setting up a Green Economy Unit here in the council and we are writing things like the just transition into a job description. If it’s in your job description, then you’re going to get scrutinised on whether you are delivering. Those roles might be finance related or they might be skills and supply chain related but we’re actually coming at that to say, ‘Your performance and effectiveness will be evaluated.’ I think that’s a broader point actually which is that setting up a Green Economy Unit is recognising that there’s an economic development perspective to climate change.
The Paris Agreement is going to see, over the next two or three years and particularly driven by the UK Government and Greening Finance Roadmap, a massive reallocation of capital amongst the whole of the economy. When the sustainability disclosure regulations kick in this year and all of the private sector with over 500 companies has to report how their business models are compatible with climate change, you’re really going to see the fox amongst the chickens there. You’ll start to hear, ‘Is my company that provides my broadband compatible with Paris?’ That’s a really, really big fundamental shift. Becky wants to come in and so I’m going to stop there.
Rebecca: No, I want to just push you further because one thing that I find very interesting, and you talked about some of the different departments, is particularly looking at the local authority. In Glasgow but in many places around the UK, local authorities are certainly leading the way with a lot of Climate Emergency Action Plans and Local Area Energy Planning. They’re a really important group to look at. Do you find there are still challenges in that you still have these teams that focus on different things? It’s one thing to make sure that the people within the team bring a range of expertise and that these elements are written into their descriptions. At the same time, if you’re looking at solving an issue around broadband versus other forms of infrastructure and you mentioned fuel poverty, are you finding new ways of working that’s allowing you to bring together these different objectives across the teams because surely, that’s something that’s also got to be part and parcel of this moving forward?
Kit: Yeah, I think we’re in quite early days around what the governance for this looks like but I think one of the places that you can look for what that future looks like is the EU’s missions. The European Commission has set out these five mission-based approaches for research and innovation. It’s being advocated by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL (University College London). You set up these groups which are cross-sector, cross-actor and with citizen involvement that works together on the governance of what that transition needs to look like. That’s really important because you need those multiple sets of interests to make sure that you’ve got the focus on the long term.
In some ways, that citizen involvement in the design and delivery of large-scale change programmes is incredibly important because the transformation is so big that you’re only going to get a just transition and the social licence, to be frank, to do this scale of transition if you have citizens in the room. At the same time, you won’t get that kind of level of action without large-scale corporates and businesses in the room at the same time as the local authorities. I think there’s another point which is that the scale of the transition is so big that none of the institutions, as they currently are... if you ever decided to design a vehicle for that mission, you wouldn’t start with what you have now. You would start with something totally different. There’s a really big question for all of us to be looking at our own institutions and saying, ‘Do we have the right structures, skills and capacities to deliver this?’
Rebecca: This is a really, really good point and it makes me think that we’re moving towards a future where we have to do a much better job at talking to people that work in other departments and other sectors from other disciplines. This is a very different skill set from what we typically train people for. Typically, whether you’re looking at the university route or apprenticeship route, we’re training people to become more and more expert in a very, very siloed field. Is that something that needs to change? Looking at the Institute of Civil Engineers, does that need to change and evolve moving forward? Are you going to see a new breed of engineers coming through in the next 5, 10 or 15 years and do we need to, I guess, is more of a point?
Alan: I’m not a member of the Institute of Civil Engineers but I would say that when I look particularly at the younger cohort of colleagues at Mott MacDonald, you are getting different thinking coming through. They were part of the reason we actually won this commission from the Institute of Civil Engineers because they made a significant contribution to the report and they brought fresh thinking. They brought enthusiasm. They brought understanding and they brought zeal, dare I say?
It was really, for me, very enlightening that there was such talent but such talent with intention. They really wanted to get in and about it. It wasn’t just a job. They had a passion for it because power generation has maybe not done the best job in the world, so I hope they can do a better job than we have. I was very impressed. I think there will be fundamental change as we go forward.
Sarah: I think we’re always going to need experts and specialists, Becky. We need people that can grasp that real detail and get down to the nitty-gritty but you’re quite right in identifying that different skill set. I think, actually, it’s one that you see very often in leaders. I used to always say, when I worked at the Institute of Civil Engineers, that engineers are absolutely terrific because they’re the type of people that come into the industry because they want to solve problems. They want to make the world a better place but by their very nature, they are experts in a fairly narrow area quite often.
I used to always maintain that those engineers, who perhaps were not the very brightest and the best engineers or couldn’t do the calculations on The Shard, were actually the people that had a basic grasp of their trade but also had the ability to talk to people and to lead people. I used to always say that the ones that can talk and also build the bridge are either the business development director or they’re the boss [laughter]. So not everybody has those combined skill sets. Some of us are good at being the glue that joins people together but actually, we don’t have the skills and expertise. We don’t have the technical expertise but we know the right people to get in a room together.
Matt: Kit, you’ve got a quick response there and then we’re fast running out of time.
Kit: Just to kind of, again, build on what Alan and Sarah are saying, I think you need a diverse set of skills to make that happen. Sometimes, you see some of those skills in one person and sometimes, you need to build consortia. We did a project last year writing the Glasgow City Region Adaptation Strategy and that was done by a sustainability firm, a culture and arts firm and a finance and economics consultancy firm. It was the most interesting project I’ve ever been on because the Glasgow City Region Adaptation Strategy thinks about those broader levers of culture and finance as well as doing the detailed technical piece on adaptation and that’s why I think it’s been really successful.
I think the only other thing that I would say is that there are probably layers to this, a bit like an onion. We do need those experts in particular technical topics and we then need people who can do systems change and change management. That’s difficult and that needs facilitation skills and it needs systems thinking, etcetera. I also think we also need to be aware of where some of the more revolutionary types of thinking need to come in and that’s at the margins. If you look at some of the central tenets of economic thinking, whether that’s shareholder value and maximisation and whether that’s the discount rates in economics, those are some of the really fundamental barriers to why we can’t get a broader spectrum of low-carbon projects away.
That revolution is happening at the margins. It’s happening in Doughnut Economics. It’s happening in the Wellbeing Economy Alliance where those things are probably quite radical today but actually, in five to ten years, we’ll look back and say, ‘Thank god they were there because if we didn’t have them, we would have been in trouble.’
Matt: Kit, on that point, how do we start to bring in some of that fringe thinking around delivering low carbon versus high carbon by bringing in systems thinking and place-based approaches? Alan, in this report from Mott MacMacdonald for the Institute of Civil Engineers, there’s an interesting table which is a number of recommendations – 12 all told – and the responsibilities fall to a wide range of actors like Scottish Government, local authorities, UK Government and industry.
What I just wanted to ask each of you was if there was one key action that could be taken to really encourage low-carbon infrastructure and to bring these projects into the pipeline, what would the action be and who would be largely responsible for this? I appreciate it’s everything. It always is but if there was just one that we could pick off the shelf, what might it be?
Alan: It’s a route map because the policy has been set. As everyone says, the technologies are there but I don’t think we’ve all got a clear idea of what the route map is to get there. The development of a route map where everyone could see their role and their place I think would be a big advantage.
Matt: That’s very helpful. Sarah?
Sarah: For me, there are a couple of things there. It’s about the decisions that we are making as a country. When we’re making decisions about infrastructure investment, those decisions need to be based on the project’s contribution to net zero and biodiversity. I suppose the other thing that I would add to that is that actually, let’s think about how we regulate and how we purchase things. Big client bodies, and the government is one, have enormous power to change behaviours simply by asking for what they procure.
If you actually look at the recent offshore wind around the sea-bed leasing for offshore wind in Scotland that was done by the Crown Estate, it was very interesting the types of outcomes that they were asking potential bidders to demonstrate. They were asking those organisations interested in developing the sea bed and in developing floating wind how they were going to contribute beyond that against a broader range of outcomes and the types of things that Kit is talking about.
I think that is going to be the way forward and we’re going to see that in things like levelling up. We’re going to see that in the new CAP. If organisations are going to be in any kind of receipt of public funding, they’re going to need to be demonstrating that they’re delivering against a range of different outcomes.
Matt: Great and Kit?
Kit: Sorry, I hit the mute button there. Typical, isn’t it? Somebody has always got to do it on a podcast [laughter]. I would pick something about ambition and framing. Where we are, we see lots of really good projects coming forward but there’s not enough of them coming forward at the speed that they need to come forward at to meet that pathway to 2045. The decarbonisation of the transport sector and the built environment are the two biggest challenges that we’re going to face in a generation and the policy framework is not quite there. The targets are definitely there, so the direction is set but we’re not at the place where the projects are there at the right pace and scale.
In the city region, we’ve started to look at what it would look like to retrofit 400,000 homes to EPC Grade C over the next decade and we all understand how big that challenge is but we’ve still got a massive piece of work to do to get from A to B and say, ‘That’s what needs to be done, so how do we make that happen?’ It’s challenging. It’s a bit like Ukraine. Actually, what we’re seeing is people having to face a challenge that hasn’t really had to be faced in a generation. How do we respond to this?
There are multiple pathways to it. You can either take the quite myopic view of doing incremental change and we’ll keep pushing ahead or you can take the slightly more systems thinking approach. If you look at the EU’s plan that they published around REPowerEU, it’s saying that to deal with the very short-term challenges, we take a longer-term view. We set the pathway for net zero and in doing so, we achieve things like energy security, reducing foreign influence and all these other kinds of things. For me, it’s about really anchoring what we have to do in that ambition and then translating that through into the project delivery.
Rebecca: It’s a really hard nut to crack and I think, particularly with this topic, a lot of the conversation focuses on what those large organisations or what our government, be it national or local government, might be doing. Our podcast is Local Zero and it’s very much focused on local climate action and what people can do moving forward in their lives to help address some of these big challenges. We try and ground our conversation in that as we move to the end of the show. There’s a broad range of things, I guess, that we could be talking about here because we could be acting as consumers and we have purchasing power. We could be acting as citizens and holding up civic responsibilities or we could be acting as communities. There’s a whole different range of ways in which we could act but I guess what I’d like to close our discussion around is thinking that in this grand scale of shifting towards low-carbon infrastructure, what is it that people could be doing to support this transition? How could people get involved today, tomorrow or in the next year?
Sarah: I mean there are so many things that we, as individuals, can do and we largely know what they are. It’s about our choices in terms of how we consume for those of us that are able to make those kinds of choices. That’s another issue that we really do need to flag up. The focus on the energy crisis in the last couple of days will have a heck of a lot of people thinking. Those who can will suddenly be now thinking, ‘Oh, that air-source heat pump project that we were thinking about that didn’t look like it stacked up, it might be looking a wee bit more like it stacks up now given the energy price hike.’ That’s where those who are committed and have the capital... those are the better off amongst us that can make those... they almost feel like luxury choices. Not driving a four-by-four to Waitrose and buying produce that’s air-freighted halfway across the world like your Nicaraguan frozen prawns.
These are the kinds of differences that we can make as a consumer but actually, the people who have the biggest carbon footprint are actually the ones that are able to make the most changes if they so choose but we need to somehow exert a bit more pressure on them and a heck of a lot more support for those people who are not contributing to the problem because they simply can’t afford to have a car. They simply can’t afford to think about retrofitting their housing. So we really have to help people that are dealing with fuel poverty.
Matt: Kit, what can the average person or the average community do to try and encourage low-carbon infrastructure?
Kit: Sarah talked quite nicely about the role of the individual as a consumer. I think there’s a really big spectrum though. The other really interesting place to be is in community energy where it’s much better on the other end of the spectrum. Community groups and individuals are coming together to actually buy and build infrastructure themselves. Full disclosure: I did that in my local community and it was both really stressful and really great at the same time. The hairline has receded a little bit more than it used to [laughter] and I attribute that to putting some solar on our local school. I think there’s a bit of that.
I think the other point though around facilitating consumer power around low-carbon infrastructure – or not consumer power but citizen power – is about telling us that you want it. We forget how powerful direct action is. Ukraine, as I’ve been watching it for the last few days, reminds us of that where you’ve had citizens literally out in front of tanks saying, ‘No, we don’t want this.’ It reminds you that people have the power to demand a huge amount of change. I think the last point I would say is it’s commensurate on us, as local but large organisations, to facilitate better ways of getting citizens involved.
If you look at Barcelona, Barcelona has done this amazing project where they’ve set up a stakeholder platform where citizens can suggest policy changes and the council will involve them in that, evaluate those ideas and come back. We did something similar as a council with the COP26 Citizens Assembly where we hosted, over a number of weekends, citizens around the table and we talked to them about some of the key issues facing the city and the decarbonisation that we have to go on. They developed recommendations and it was taken on board by the city council and now we either have responses in place or we’re developing those responses. We have to do much more of that as well because I think people want to do this because justice is also about participation. We want a just and equitable transition and the people who are going to be affected the most have to be given a voice in that journey as well. It’s on us as well to open that process up to people.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Thank you, Kit. Thank you, Alan. Thank you, Sarah. A fascinating discussion. We’ve learnt a lot there. I think we’ll wrap up there. We’re out of time. To our listeners, you’ve been listening to Local Zero and if you haven’t already, please do subscribe to the pod and follow us. You’ll find us at all the usual places where you might get your podcasts. Just search for Local Zero. You can also listen directly on our website at LocalZeroPod.com. Finally, you can find us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod. If you want to share some longer thoughts or feelings, do reach out to us via email at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com but until next time, thank you for listening and goodbye.
[Music flourish]