Sustainability experts from a string of UK cities – Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow and the City of London – gathered last week to share their approaches to preparing to mitigate the growing number of climate ‘events’ expected in the UK.

The NLA webinar, ‘Resilient cities’ took place as climate leaders gathered in Glasgow for COP 26 and was aimed at building on NLA’s Resilient London report launched in October with proactive measures to tackling climate change.

Dave Cheshire, sustainability director of Aecom, said making resilient but also ‘regenerative’ cities was the way to go, with cutting down on waste a key a major goal, not least for the construction industry. ‘I think where the future is actually to say, rather than trying to mitigate or reduce the impact that we’re having on the planet, use a little bit less energy, use less materials…Can we create a regenerative city and regenerative buildings that are actually giving back to the environment more than they are taking?’. 

This could include building in and restoring blue infrastructure into our cities, and making our cities more like ‘sponges’ to cope with flooding and rainfall events. The design of our buildings needs a reassessment, too, perhaps with putting shutters on the outside of our houses becoming something we should consider more. ‘We've been doing this incremental change over all this time and gradually trying to reduce our inputs improve things. I don't think that's going to work any longer. I think we've got to set out where we want to be, a vision for the future, and then work out how we're going to get there’.

Sam Evans of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, meanwhile, said that nature-based solutions are going to be particularly important in helping tackle the biodiversity emergency and climate emergency. Part of the Manchester approach is in natural capital accounting - understanding the value of the natural environment and then communicating how those assets help the city. Manchester, said Evans, receives some £1billion of benefits each year from its green spaces, rivers and streams, and £64m of mental health benefits. A project called Ignition aims to bring forward sustainable drainage systems, green roofs and walls and other measures to understand them, demonstrate demand and then scale up. ‘We know how to do it as demonstrators. But how do we actually make this happen at scale?’

Maria Dunn of Birmingham City Council talked through the city’s journey since it declared a climate emergency, along with details on its action plan and successes to date. Measures have included transport work on encouraging people to shift mode from the private car, reducing carbon emissions and building new-build housing to higher environmental standards, including a Passivhaus trial and pilot projects involving retrofit. The city is also aiming to plant trees, aiming to raise the canopy cover to 25% of all wards across the city,

And Sonia Mills, joining from Glasgow and the hubbub of COP26, took the audience through what the city is doing on its own journey to becoming net zero carbon by 2030, building on targets in its 2010 Sustainable Glasgow report. It has achieved some targets ahead of schedule, reaching a 41% reduction in carbon, although the transport sector remains at ‘stubbornly similar levels’ as it was a decade ago, with gas being the other main challenge, going forward. Glasgow too is looking at retrofitting insulation in its existing buildings, developed a web portal to map out opportunities for PV, as well as making business cases for nature-based solutions.

Finally, Gordon Roy at the City of London said the corporate plan gave a commitment to develop a climate action strategy not just to mitigate risk but also adapt the City to cope with climate change with a ‘realistic’ timetable and costs. It brought in the University of Surrey to look at its ‘massive land bank’, including in Epping Forest, Burnham Beaches and elsewhere, calculating how much it sequestrates carbon. It aimed to be net zero as a city by 2040 and be climate resilient in buildings, public spaces and infrastructure. Of £68m Glasgow has invested, £15m has been to resilience, with work on road surfaces that might melt at 32 degrees, extensive planting of trees and picking materials that can be locally sourced or porous but also can reflect heat rather than absorb it. The City is also working also with the British Geological Survey to determine what is beneath the ground and where best to target its efforts, and with King’s College to install monitoring sensors to check rainfall and temperatures. 

Roy said it is also concentrating on river defences because of melting icecaps – ‘we need to raise our river defence walls by up to a metre by 2100’, he said. When planning applications come in near the river wall, it will ask developers to increase its height. Finally, it is looking to introduce green walls, gathering information from other cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong on associated fire issues.