Beyond Climate Action Planning
A Just Transition Plan for London Borough of Newham
The London Borough of Newham is one of over 300 of the UK’s total 382 local authorities to have declared a climate emergency since 2019. Following these declarations, many local authorities have adopted the Climate Action Plan as a format for translating recognition of risk into action and transformation. From June to October 2023, our team from Dark Matter Labs and colleagues at Arup collaborated with the London Borough of Newham to consider how a new generation of Climate Action Plans might increase the scale and pace of impact, in the face of the climate emergency.
Newham’s Just Transition Plan, the first outcome of our collaboration, explores innovative approaches to the document’s foundational principles, format, and scope. This article will present the Just Transition Plan as a model for future innovation around local authority climate action, and share what we found in working closely with those seeking to drive systemic change in Newham.
Centring justice in Newham’s climate transition
Newham, in East London, faces a unique intersection of climate and socioeconomic risks for a UK local authority area. Newham residents currently have the highest rate of death attributable to air pollution in London, and is among the six London boroughs most exposed to flood and overheating risks as temperatures rise. From March to May of 2020, Newham’s Covid-19 mortality rate was more than double England’s average. Today, about one quarter of Newham residents are paid below the London living wage, and one in two children live in poverty, with under-16s making up more than 20% of the population. More than half of residents were born outside of the UK (as of the 2021 census), and Newham is the UK’s most ethnically diverse borough. Newham also has the highest number of households in temporary and non-secure housing in the UK; average rent represents about 65% of wages, compared to the UK average of around 30%. These risks and vulnerabilities situate Newham’s 350,000 residents at the forefront of present and future needs across climate mitigation and adaptation. On the other hand is the sense of opportunity in the borough, on the basis of the youth and diversity of its population. The expansive thinking and leadership within Newham Council enabled a tangible understanding of how the climate emergency is already affecting residents.
Since 2021, London as a whole and Newham in particular have witnessed increasing evidence of the entanglement of climate risks. Everyday but profound stressors like growing heating bills, and extreme weather such as the July 2021 floods and 2022 heat waves, which resulted in over 3,000 deaths across the UK, have made plain the urgency of systemic action. When we began this work in June 2023, the prospect of another dangerously hot summer was hanging over our work. In each of these scenarios, the intersectionality of the lived experience of climate change was unmissable: people of colour in the UK are four times as likely to live in areas at high risk of extreme heat. The council’s existing Climate Action Plan, as with many others, focuses on a list of strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This, however, does not address the reality of Newham residents’ present critical needs and their likely, iminent intensification. A plan for a Just Transition would need to target intersectionality to increase equity in the borough through every single recommendation, while also reducing emissions.
Recalibrating our focus in the local authority context
With our colleagues in Newham Council, Dark Matter Labs and Arup adopted a cross-disciplinary lens driven by a particular focus on governance and urban climate risks. Early interviews with officers in the council, local leaders and experts from within our organisations outlined one of the defining tensions of this piece of work: local authorities have high and well-informed ambitions, but are working within an extremely challenging context, with limited resources. This dynamic makes system-scale innovation, sustained investment in transition causes, and transformative leadership by councils profoundly difficult. Recent research from Arup outlines an alternative framing: while less than 5% of a borough’s emissions are typically directly attributable to council activities, it can influence as much as 70% of emissions through procurement, policy, jobs, place-shaping, partnerships and community engagement. Local authorities must act, but also influence and convene to affect emissions reduction, and so too the other elements of a Just Transition. In designing the plan, we highlighted ways Newham Council could further grow their influence and work with the borough’s committed community members and other stakeholders.
A few other shifts in focus were crucial to our efforts. Concepts such as emissions scopes are a poor fit for the scale and interconnectivity of urban boroughs, and can result in a blame game of emissions sources. A reliance on difficult-to-attain emissions data can undermine the ability of local authorities to pinpoint effective levers and enact meaningful climate action. We worked with Newham Council to understand their emissions holistically while they are compiling a nuanced borough-wide picture.
Estimates suggest that less than 10% of global climate investments go toward adaptation (source: Climate Policy Initiative), but the case for adaptive measures is stronger than ever. We know that actions which integrate mitigation and adaptation create value, reduce risk and future costs, encourage future investment, and improve quality of living. In Newham, increasing the capacity for adaptation could be incorporated into the more expansive idea of future-readiness: where institutions, infrastructure and individuals are prepared for the volatile futures expected from a world that has warmed on average by 2°C or more. We similarly identified the need for longer-term, recurring, blended and strategic investment to enable whole-place transformation and reduce financial risk for the Council.
Ultimately, the plan needed to affirm and support Newham’s officers and politicians. We worked with the Council’s Climate Action Working Group and consulted findings from citizens’ meetings to ensure the plan helped to articulate and advocate for their everyday experience and existing programmes, rather than just another thing to do. As a result, we targeted the idea of a next-generation document committing to climate action in Newham: one which was ambitious and informed, reflective of the urgency of this moment, and oriented toward the potential of collective action.
The 3–6–5 plan
Our plan was structured into three parts, each framed by a set of questions:
3 Principles
How can a local authority address the entangled targets of a Just Transition: to increase equity, to build future-readiness, and to meaningfully reduce emissions?
6 Futures
What specific risks does Newham face, and what levers will enable these to be addressed in order to bring about a Just Transition? What defines the positive place futures we want to bring to fruition?
5 Enablers
How can this be accomplished? What action would enable the council and the borough to reach climate targets, support the work that’s already taking place, and maintain momentum in the Transition? How would we need to work differently and collaboratively to make this happen?
These three components give structure to our more detailed recommendations for Newham, each functioning differently within the context of the plan. While the principles emerged early in our research and guided the formation of the rest of the plan, the futures and enablers were the result of sustained engagement with council data and expertise.
The 6 Futures, which direct council departments toward visions of the transition in play, takes on some challenging areas, such as Newham’s property and social housing portfolio, which is associated with a majority of emissions in the council’s direct control. Equally important in this section was building on areas where Newham is already a leader, such as in its pioneering work around school meals, and the recent commissioning of micro-forests across the borough. Finally we were very aware that climate action plans can easily turn into lists of hundreds of actions. We sought to focus on the main actions where there would be significant impact across the principles if focused resources were brought to bear.
Our approach to the Just Transition was to recognise that much of the space for proposition was around capacity, resources, and governance within and between the council, civic society, businesses and institutions that had an interest in the borough. The 5 Enablers give shape to possible forms of governance and finance innovation for Newham, with a view toward capturing the maximum potential of the borough’s leaders across sectors and communities.
What’s next?
Since the plan’s launch by the Council on 5 December, it is available to examine more closely here. In “You’ve Made a Climate Action Plan, what next?”, our colleagues at Arup pose the crucial question in the document’s title. For Newham, our collaboration to date represents tracks laid for the longer-term processes and effort which will be required to sustain momentum for the Just Transition. We look forward to continuing our collaboration, and developing future work to support the borough’s important work to increase equity, grow future-readiness, and reduce emissions.
Work by Emma Pfeiffer & Dan Hill, in partnership with The London Borough of Newham Council
