Climate change strategy

Delivering the strategy

Building on our first strategy in 2015, the Council has taken a different approach to developing this strategy, with a wider focus to support all of us across the district to contribute toward its objectives.

Purpose of Strategy

  • To make Council activities carbon neutral as far as practical by 2030.
  • To support partners, residents, and local businesses to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
  • To build resilient communities that adapt to the impacts of climate change.

The Braintree District Council Climate Change Working Group and Essex Climate Action Commission are bringing partners together to provide collective leadership on climate change.

Conditions for Change

The following conditions for change have been highlighted throughout our strategy and will need to be developed to ensure successful delivery of our objectives.

Engagement

  • We need to support our communities to engage, feel empowered and to have the tools and opportunity to contribute to the climate change objectives.
  • Development of a communication and engagement plan with buy-in from all delivery partners will be essential.
  • We will work with all partners who have declared or want to declare, a climate emergency to help support them to develop plans.

Infrastructure

  • Investment in new or updated infrastructure, in terms of heat, electricity and transport, to meet our strategic goals.
  • Infrastructure to protect homes and businesses from flooding. This includes grey infrastructure, such as flood walls and rain water storage, but also where natural solutions such as leaky dams and reinstated flood plains could be implemented to support flood protection while providing urban cooling, environmental and health and wellbeing benefits.
  • We will support UK Power Networks UKPN to understand future local demand for electricity and to develop a clear plan for investing in upgrades required to the electricity distribution grid.
  • We will continue engagement with ECC and Environment Agency on flood defence projects.

Working together

  • We need to work together to deliver our own actions, whilst engaging at a local level with residents, businesses, community groups and others to ensure that they feel empowered to be able to play their part.
  • We need to influence others at a local and national level to create the right laws, policies and programmes that support this. 

Funding

  • Substantial investment will be needed at an international, national and local level, in relation to long term programmes such as the move away from fossil and fuel heating systems and investment in sustainable transport solutions. 
  • Expenditure in carbon reduction can often deliver savings, which will help to demonstrate effective business cases for change. 
  • We can seek out and identify innovative and collaborative ways to finance climate change programmes.
  • People and businesses across the district can influence funding through personal spending choices and collectively there will be a need to engage nationally with government and business to support wide scale investment into the green economy.

Data

  • Evidence and validation will be required to develop our action plans, ensuring that we invest in the most effective actions to achieve carbon neutrality and climate resilience. 
  • We need to make sure we have the right data and information to support the decisions that will support action. We also need to know more about regional climate scenarios so that we can plan using the most up to date climate projections.
  • A key priority to support the delivery of this strategy will be development of an impact assessment tool to identify, capture, monitor and report the impacts of climate change in our District.

Skills

  • We need to transform the way in which our decisions are made, empowering everyone with the skills, knowledge and capacity to support the implementation of climate friendly initiatives.
  • We need to enable effective ways of connecting our skilled workforce with those with a demand for skills. To do this we will seek out and support innovation and share best practice with wider networks, emphasising the importance of investment.
  • We need to integrate training and the requirements for carbon neutral and climate resilient related knowledge into Further Education, apprenticeships and job roles across all of our priority areas.
  • There will be a need for ongoing carbon literacy training for local authority officers and staff in other organisations to ensure that those delivering services have the most up to date knowledge on the climate impact.