Welcome to the 8 Questions, where we ask senior figures in the sector the questions every business leader and ambitious professional wants answered. In this edition, Peter Cole Principal Environmental and Sustainability officer at Transport for the North is asked what is essential to delivering climate action strategies, what skills are needed for projects to succeed and much more. Peter Cole led on the Transport for the North Transport Decarbonisation Strategy project.
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Data!
If you don't know your starting position, carbon reduction targets are pretty much meaningless.
In a world where there are understandable constraints on both public and private spending, it's really important we focus those limited resources in the areas that can give us the most 'bang for our buck'. We can use data to understand the measures that will realise the most carbon reductions, as well as the varied challenges facing our different places and socio-economic groups. So data can help us focus our resources on activities and measures that will produce the most carbon reductions, and for public bodies in particular, it allows us to focus on supporting those geographical places and sections of our communities who face the biggest challenges to decarbonise (such as public residential charging and rural public transport).
The biggest challenge in drafting our Decarbonisation Strategy was the target setting. Transportation doesn't respect administrative boundaries, so the impetus for a regional Transport Decarbonisation Strategy was clear, but gaining consensus around a Decarbonisation Trajectory and near zero date, amongst our 20 Local Authorities and other stakeholders including LEPs and environmental groups, was a real challenge.
All our places face different realities and starting positions when it comes to transport decarbonisation, but we created multiple opportunities for both 1-2-1 sessions and group engagement, as well as a comprehensive public consultation process - and through those we were able to arrive at a position everyone could buy into. The North is an ambitious place and it was pretty clear that we needed to move faster than current government policy, but the key was to couch those aspirations in robust data and to keep it realistic.
Not to get caught up in targets!
Especially those targets relating to things like 'net-zero end dates'. It's what we do on the way to that end date that really counts as we need to limit our cumulative emissions.
Besides, it's clear that we all just have to knuckle down and work as hard and as fast as we possibly can to reduce emissions regardless of end target dates in 10, 20 or even 30 years from now.
Two things really... Firstly, it's important that climate change and decarbonisation strategies transcend aspirations and high level announcements. The time for talking about this stuff was yesterday, and strategies need to have robust action plans attached to them, including near-term 'firm and funded' activities. Then you need to combine that with regular updates to your strategy, and provide a chance to adjust and strengthen your actions. A decarbonisation strategy can't be a one-off document to sit on a shelf for the next decade, they need to be live and evolving documents that travel with us all the way to near-zero. To have any legacy at all, the strategies need to be set in a monitoring and evaluation framework which allows them to adapt the the changing challenge of reducing emissions, but also the changing world world we will find ourselves in.
Pragmatism and statesmanship to set out ambitious and realistic objectives and gain consensus for them from a really wide range of stakeholders.
We also need motivated project managers to drive strategies into action, and help us prioritise and programme what we could and should do, in a world where so much needs doing. We can't afford any failure in delivery - the deadlines and critical success factors we're working to are the most important that have ever been (sorry to be melodramatic!).
And also a shout out to those who are likely to be the unsung heroes of transport decarbonisation - the marketeers and communication specialists. Behaviour change is an essential ingredient and how we communicate the risks, consequences and also the opportunities associated with decarbonisation and clean mobility, without alienating the public - is critical.
Decarbonisation won't happen 'to' people, it has to happen 'with' people. Even with technology focussed approaches, we'll still likely be asking people to change the way they do things (electric vehicles are a case in point where we're asking people to switch to destination/origin charging, and away from en-route refuelling).
We need to provide people with objective evidence as to why change is needed and then empower them to agree a framework by which to achieve that level of change.
Our Decarbonisation Strategy tries to do a bit of both; setting out the scale of the challenge in the North and suggesting a series of pathways which demonstrate the scale of the commitment needed to achieve close to zero.
We then socialised this out to stakeholders through a series of bespoke roundtables (for example, one focussed on our businesses and another for environmental groups), ahead of a public consultation which was very much asking people what they felt was important and how they would prioritise.
It's early days as the Strategy was adopted and published in December 2021, but I think a measure of success in the short term is demonstrating how fast we can swing from strategy to action - and we've cracked on with a number of activities prioritised by our partners and stakeholders, including amongst other things: the development of an interactive online EV charging infrastructure forecasting tool; contributing to research on hydrogen refuelling strategies for heavy duty transport and commencing the development of our Clean Mobility Visions which will develop a number of evidence based policy packages which can help different places achieve the best mix of emissions reductions alongside the wider benefits that can be accrued from vehicle mileage reduction.
Ultimately we have a bespoke framework of indicators by which to measure the success of the Strategy and these are linked into our Strategic Transport Plan and TfN's organisational Monitoring and Evaluation Framework, so we'll be able to measure the success of specific measures and actions within the Strategy, but also understand the North's progress in terms of the carbon reductions from surface transport (and benchmark this against our trajectory). If we're achieving our trajectory, and all other things remain equal - that's ultimately where we need to be.
Perhaps stating the obvious, but decarbonisation and climate change aren't topics to talk around any more. It's no longer an 'optional' or 'bolt on' in our processes - it's a fundamental part of them. Climate change is an existential threat and needs to be seen as a driver for what we do, on an equal footing with economic growth and social connectivity.
We used to have transport projects that had to think about their carbon impact....now we have projects that are designed for the purpose of reducing carbon...
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the CIHT or its members. Neither the CIHT nor any person acting on their behalf may be held responsible for the use which may be made of the information contained therein.
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