GM LEP board member and Mayor of Greater Manchester were among representatives from the city-region at The Decarbonisation Summit 2022.
Held this year in Manchester’s Science and Industry Museum, the Decarbonisation Summit is an annual two-day event which brings together business leaders, politicians and climate activists. The event propels a vision for a decarbonised future, providing a space to share ideas, visions and challenges in the race to Net-Zero.
This year’s event held discussions covering a range of topics including food production, sustainable transport, heat innovation, retrofitting and the future of green skills. Panels also debated how to empower SMEs to become net-zero and what is needed to create sustainable city-regions going forward.
Major themes across the conference were the devolution of powers to city regions and collaboration between the public and private sector in the race to net-zero. There was an overwhelming sense that these crucial goals and targets will require a collective approach if we are to succeed and create a more sustainable future. The collaboration will allow us to think smarter and act more quickly when solving global challenges.
In a session called Green Investment in Sustainable Cities, Councillor Tracey Rawlins, Manchester City Council’s Executive Committee Member for Environment joined a panel examining how smart money can empower decarbonisation in cities. The panel considered housing, transport and how local authorities can excite and inform people within their region about the transition to net-zero.
Councillor Tracey Rawlins stated,
“We need to think about how we work together so we don’t do things city by city. We need to use our collective buying power, our collective experience, and our collective influence to make bigger and better changes. We need to be bold. Change is always difficult; it’s going to come and it’s going to hurt but we have to face that pain. This is a necessity.”
Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham joined the Mayors Leadership Group to talk about how city mayors can accelerate net-zero ambitions within their city regions. The other panellists included Tracy Brabin, Mayor of West Yorkshire and Steve Rotherham the Metro Mayor of Liverpool City Region. In the panel, the mayors discussed carbon neutral targets, investments in sustainable transport and green skills requirements but most crucially, how city-regions can work together and the powers needed to achieve their net-zero ambitions.
Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham said,
“Decarbonisation could mean a solution to the cost-of-living crisis. A net-zero country will be driven from the bottom up, not from the top down. You have to win hearts and minds to get people to change their homes or how they move, and city-regions are the ones that can do that.
“Transport is an example of how the North of England can lead the change the rest of the country wants to see. We have to integrate public transport across the north and decarbonise. Greater Manchester our trams already run-on renewable energy, but within a decade our whole system can run on green energy. It’s a realistic vision if we’re backed to do it.”
You can watch the streams of different panel discussions at the Decarbonisation Summit 2022 here.
To learn more about the Decarbonisation Summit, visit their website.
Decarbonisation Summit 2022