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An Equal & Just Transition - Cardiff Uni - 2023

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An Equal & Just Transition - Cardiff Uni - 2023

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T O N E T Z E R O

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Climate Adaptation Strategy - Wales (2024)

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Climate Adaptation Strategy - Wales (2024)

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Progress in Adaptation - Climate Change Committee (UK - England)

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Progress in Adaptation - Climate Change Committee (UK - England)

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Progress in adapting to climate change: 2025 report to Parliament - Climate Change Committee

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Footnotes have been removed from the HTML version of this report. For the footnoted version of this report,…

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Our summers are getting dangerously hot. 2022 saw new records: the Met Office issued its first-ever red warning for extreme heat, and 7 places across the UK recorded temperatures of 40°C or higher. Meanwhile 2025 had the third-warmest June globally.

Yet with extreme heat only set to increase, the UK is unprepared to deal with it - and that's according to the government's own climate advisors. This is a threat to us all, particularly those most at risk from heat like the elderly, young children and hospital patients.

That's why we've identified the areas in England most exposed to extreme heat. Within these, we've also counted the number of care homes, nurseries and hospitals. Use our map to see if your area is dangerously hot. And find out how we can beat the heat together.

This map is interactive, but we're aware that it's not perfect on mobile. We recommend opening the map on another device or visiting Mapstack.

Who's most at risk?

4,715 neighbourhoods in England are most exposed to extreme heat. Together, these neighbourhoods cover a third of the country's area.

1,920 of these neighbourhoods are of particular concern due to various factors (more on these below). People of colour are over-represented in areas of concern at twice the national average, and almost 3 million disabled people live in these neighbourhoods.

10,064 nurseries are in neighbourhoods most exposed to extreme heat. Under-5s are particularly at risk from warmer temperatures because their bodies are less able to regulate heat.

What makes people more at risk from extreme heat?

Of the 4,715 neighbourhoods most exposed to extreme heat, 1,920 are most at risk due to:

Exposed housing. Flats, caravans and poorly insulated homes are more likely to overheat. Renters and those with low incomes are also less able to adapt their homes for extreme heat.

Demographics. Over-75s and under-5s are particularly at risk from heat. People living in neighbourhoods with low life expectancies are more likely to have poor health, and many physical and mental health conditions can worsen due to extreme heat.

Lack of cooling. It's harder for those with low incomes to travel somewhere cooler or access facilities with air conditioning. Areas lacking green spaces like parks or blue spaces like rivers and fountains don't benefit from their natural cooling effects.

Lack of access. People who live further away from hospitals are more at risk. And areas where many people don't speak English as a first language may miss out on heat warnings or advice.

How can we beat the heat?

The UK urgently needs to adapt to climate impacts. And the areas and services we've identified here must be a priority. The UK also needs to cut emissions faster, as they're fuelling the climate crisis which is causing more extreme weather. Our government should:

Produce a new national adaptation plan to protect people, especially those most at risk, from climate impacts like extreme heat.

Invest £1 billion a year in heat adaptation, particularly for care homes, nurseries and hospitals.

Fund building retrofits that improve insulation and ventilation.

Increase green space and water bodies.

Create networks of cool spaces - like community halls - freely open to the public during heatwaves.

Train staff in care homes, nurseries and hospitals on cooling measures.

Read our full research and policy recommendations.

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Do you live in an extreme heat hotspot? | Friends of the Earth

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We've identified who's most at risk from extreme heat. Find out if your area is dangerously hot and how we can beat the heat together.

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TUC Cymru Briefing - Net Zero Plans in Local Government (2022)

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TUC Cymru Briefing - Net Zero Plans in Local Government (2022)

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Identified as the most detailed by Wales TUC

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Action plan 2025-30 mgConvert2PDF.aspx

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Action plan

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Includes strategy and action plans

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Our vision for a carbon neutral city by 2030

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Action Plan https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/898807/response/2139396/attach/4/DECARB%20ACTION%20PLAN.docx?cookie_passthrough=1

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Planetary Solvency - Institute and Faculty of Actuaries 2025

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Planetary Solvency - Institute and Faculty of Actuaries 2025

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Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature | Institute and Faculty of Actuaries

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Current climate policies risk catastrophic societal and economic impacts.

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Fossil Fuel Subsidies

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Why do we care about fossil fuel subsidies?

Subsidies are intended to protect consumers by keeping prices low, but they come at a substantial cost. Subsidies have sizable fiscal consequences (leading to higher taxes/borrowing or lower spending), promote inefficient allocation of an economy's resources (hindering growth), encourage pollution (contributing to climate change and premature deaths from local air pollution), and are not well targeted at the poor (mostly benefiting higher income households). Removing subsidies and using the revenue gain for better targeted social spending, reductions in inefficient taxes, and productive investments can promote sustainable and equitable outcomes. Fossil fuel subsidy removal would also reduce energy security concerns related to volatile fossil fuel supplies.

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Measuring Fossil Fuel Subsidies

Subsidies are decomposed into explicit and implicit subsidies. Explicit subsidies occur when the retail price is below a fuel's supply cost. For a non-tradable product (e.g., electricity), the supply cost is the domestic production cost, inclusive of any costs to deliver the energy to the consumer, such as distribution costs and margins. In contrast, for an internationally tradable product (e.g., oil), the supply cost is the opportunity cost of consuming the product domestically rather than selling it abroad plus any costs to deliver the energy to the consumer. Explicit subsidies also include direct support to producers, such as accelerated depreciation, but these are relatively small.

Implicit subsidies occur when the retail price fails to include external costs, inclusive of the standard consumption tax. External costs include contributions to climate change through greenhouse gas emissions, local health damages (primarily pre-mature deaths) through the release of harmful local pollutants like fine particulates, and traffic congestion and accident externalities associated with the use of road fuels. Getting energy prices right involves reflecting these adverse effects on society in prices and applying general consumption taxes when fuels are consumed by household.

In the example below, the retail price for gasoline is $0.30 per liter, while the supply cost is $0.50 per liter (inclusive of VAT), total external costs are $0.60 per liter, and the value-added tax (VAT) rate on gasoline is equal to the standard rate of 14 percent. Thus, the explicit subsidy is $0.20 per liter and the implicit subsidy is $0.75 per liter ($0.60 in undercharging for external costs and $0.15 per liter due to the VAT base including all social costs). If national consumption of gasoline is 100 million liters, then the total subsidy is ~$475 million ($100 and ~$375 million from explicit and implicit, respectively).

The below figure shows estimates of current and efficient fuel prices of major fuels for all the Group of Twenty (G20) countries and selected other countries in 2021-22. Retail prices generally cover the supply costs but rarely environmental costs, with the largest price gaps generally for coal, followed by diesel, diesel, and gasoline. Coal has the largest external costs due to significant emissions of greenhouse gas and harmful local air pollutants, while road fuel use results in large congestion and accident costs. Natural gas is relatively less polluting, but also rarely taxed.

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Size of Fossil Fuel Subsidies

Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion or 7.1 percent of GDP in 2022, reflecting a $2 trillion increase since 2020 due to government support from surging energy prices. Subsidies are expected to decline in the near-term as energy price support policies is unwound and international prices fall, but then rise to $8.2 trillion by 2030 as the share of fuel consumption in emerging markets (where price gaps are generally larger) continues to climb. 18 percent of the 2022 subsidy reflects undercharging for supply costs (explicit subsidies) and 82 percent for undercharging for environmental costs and forgone consumption taxes (implicit subsidies), with the share of explicit falling to 8 percent by 2030.

Underpricing for local air pollution costs and climate damages are the largest contributor to global fossil fuel subsidies, accounting for about 30 percent each, followed by explicit subsidies (18 percent), broader road transport externalities such as congestion and road accidents (17 percent), and forgone consumption tax revenue (5 percent). Explicit subsidies are broadly found in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Europe, Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and East Asia and Pacific (EAP) while total (explicit plus implicit) subsidies are predominately in the EAP. Relative to regional GDP however, total subsidies for Europe and North American are smallest at about 3 percent, while subsidies are 23 percent of regional GDP in CIS and 19, 10, and 10 percent respectively in MENA, South Asia and EAP. From 2020 to 2022, subsidies increased substantially in all regions except North America.

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Impacts of Subsidy Reform

Raising fuel prices to their fully efficient levels reduces projected global fossil fuel CO2 emissions 43 percent below baseline levels in 2030-or 34 percent below 2019 emissions. This reduction is in line with the 25-50 percent reduction in global GHGs below 2019 levels needed by 2030 to be on track with containing global warming to the Paris goal of 1.5-2C. Globally, around 60 percent of the CO2 reduction comes from reduced use of coal, while 30 and 10 percent respectively are from reductions in consumption of petroleum and natural gas. Removing only explicit subsidies reduces emissions to 5 percent below the baseline, while a partial price reform of halving the gap between current and efficient prices reduces emissions 31 percent.

Full price reform raises revenues of $4.4 trillion, 3.6 percent of global GDP, in 2030 (relative to baseline levels and accounting for revenue losses due to erosion of pre-existing fuel tax bases). Revenue gains vary substantially across regions, largely mirroring the distribution of (explicit and implicit) subsidies. The revenues generated by full price reform in 121 EME and developing countries in 2030 would amount to $3 trillion, which is broadly in line with their additional spending needs for Sustainable Development Goals. A partial price reform results in about two-thirds of the revenue gain.

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Reform Efforts

In 2009, the Group of 20 advanced and emerging market economies called for a phase out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies in all countries and reaffirmed this again in 2012. At COP26 and 27 in 2021 and 2022, countries agreed to accelerate efforts to phase-out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.

Several countries have succeeded in removing explicit subsidies and/or phasing in taxes and other pricing measures to cover external costs. A few examples include the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, which forces power plants and industrial sources to pay for carbon emissions and had prices slightly above a warming target-consistent carbon price in 2022; India, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Ukraine that have phased-out explicit subsidies and, in some cases, introduced taxes; and the numerous countries that tax road transportation use (over 160 globally).

Still, many countries have had difficulty reforming subsidies despite the potential gains. When reforms are made, prices increase, and this can lead to social unrest. The absence of public support for subsidy reform is in part due to a lack of confidence in government's ability to compensate the poor and middle class for the higher energy prices they face. Governments are also often concerned that higher energy prices will contribute to a higher rate of inflation and adversely affect their competitiveness. Subsidy reform can also be complex when it includes efforts to reduce inefficiencies and production costs, as is often the case for the electricity sector.

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A Plan for Reform

While there is no single recipe for successful subsidy reform, country experiences suggest that the following ingredients are needed:

A comprehensive energy sector reform plan with clear long-term objectives with an analysis of the impact of reforms;

Transparent and extensive communication and consultation with stakeholders, including information on the size of subsidies and how they affect the government's budget;

Price increases that are phased-in;

Improving the efficiency in state-owned enterprises to reduce producer subsidies;

Measures to protect the poor through targeted cash or near-cash transfers or, if this option is not feasible, a focus on existing targeted programs that can be expanded quickly; and

Institutional reforms that depoliticize energy pricing, such as the introduction of automatic pricing mechanisms.

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Subsidies are intended to protect consumers by keeping prices low, but they come at a high cost. Subsidies have sizable fiscal costs (leading to higher taxes/borrowing or lower spending), promote inefficient allocation of an economy's resources (hindering growth), encourage pollution (contributing to climate change and premature deaths from local air pollution), and are not well targeted at the poor (mostly benefiting higher income households).

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Per Espen Stoknes: How to transform apocalypse fatigue into action on global warming

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The biggest obstacle to dealing with climate disruptions lies between your ears, says psychologist and economist Per Espen Stoknes. He's spent years studying the defenses we use to avoid thinking about the demise of our planet -- and figuring out a new way of talking about global warming that keeps us from shutting down.

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Reducing Eco-Anxiety Through Nature Connection: The Healing Power of the Natural World — An Darach Forest Therapy

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In an era of escalating environmental challenges, an increasing number of people are experiencing ‘eco-anxiety’. As the effects of climate change become increasingly evident, many individuals find themselves overwhelmed, hopeless, and filled with a sense of impending doom. However, amidst this turm

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Eight ways to stay sane in the climate crisis - Positive News

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‘Eco-anxiety’ is a growing challenge, so what can you do to manage it? For World Mental Health Day, here are some tips for building resilience

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Climate & Just Transition Session Slides Summer 2024

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Climate & Just Transition Session Slides Summer 2024

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Climate and Just Transition Awareness Bilingual Summer 2024

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Joint Union Heatwave Protocol  in Schools

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Joint Union Heatwave Protocol  in Schools

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Within the UK over the past few years, we have seen changes in our typical weather patterns, including hotter temperatures in the summer months.

In July 2022, the UK recorded it hottest every day with the temperature reaching 40.3°C in England, many of the devolved nations also recorded their own new highest temperatures.

In response, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) together with the Met office have produce a new Adverse Weather and Health Plan 'Protecting health from weather related harm'.

In line with other weather warning systems in operation within the UK, an updated Heat-Health Alert (HHA) colour warning system will operate from the 1 June to 15 September each year.

Green (preparedness): No alert will be issued as the conditions are likely to have minimal impact and health; business as usual and summer/winter planning and preparedness activities.

Yellow (response): These alerts cover a range of situations. Yellow alerts may be issued during periods of heat/cold which would be unlikely to impact most people, but could impact those who are particularly vulnerable.

Amber (enhanced response): An amber alert indicates that weather impacts are likely to be felt across the whole health service, with potential for the whole population to be at risk. Non-health sectors may also start to observe impacts and amore significant coordinated response may be required.

Red (emergency response): A red alert indicates significant risk to life for even the healthy population.

(Reproduced from UKHSA User guide-New impact-based Weather-Health Alerting System)

These alerts are intended to provide information to those delivering health and social care services, as well as other businesses and the public. This is to ensure preparations and changes to business operations can be planned and implemented.

So your employer should be monitoring these alerts and discussing the potential health and safety impacts to workers that may arise with health and safety reps.

This is because our bodies work hard to try and keep us comfortable because it can only take a few degrees change in our core temperature for us to become unwell.

Children under 4 years old, those with underlying health conditions, people who are pregnant and the elderly are more at risk of health issues from becoming too hot or too cold.

As the weather and temperatures vary across the UK, as with other weather warnings, alerts may be based on a regional rather than a national forecast. So different regions may have different alert levels.

The Met office may also issue National Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS) alerts for extreme heat in areas where temperatures are predicted to reach the thresholds shown below.

Reproduction of Figure 3.2: Local threshold temperatures within the Heatwave Plan for England: Protecting health and reducing harm from hot weather

Devolved nations have their own threshold action levels, members living or working in those location should refer to the advice issued by the devolved administrations.
Cymru /Wales Northern Ireland
What additional risk does extremely hot weather present?

Three of the biggest risks to health during extremely hot conditions are
Heat Exhaustion Dehydration Ultraviolet (UV) Rays
What should my employer be doing if Yellow, Amber or Red warnings for extreme heat are issued in the area I live or work?

Health and Safety law requires employers to ensure that so far as reasonably practicable they do all they can to protect the health, safety and welfare of their staff. This includes protecting them from the risks of excessive heat and cold.

All employers are required to undertake risk assessments in relation to both the work being done and the environment in which that work is being carried out. Then put in place measures to reduce the risk of harm to their employees. If something changes, for example a risk of extreme temperatures, they need to review those risk assessments and if necessary, take further steps to reduce possible harm.

Employers also need to take into account and act to protect staff who could be particularly vulnerable to the heat, at it would be appropriate for individual risk assessments to be undertaken in the event of any alert.

As UNISON members work delivering services in both the public and private sector across the whole of the UK, some areas may have different levels of weather warnings in place. Therefore, local authorities may issue guidance relating to their local circumstances and demands on local health services.

Below is some general advice on what we would expect employers to be doing and considering.

Do you need to be in the workplace?

Employers should be considering allowing employees to work from home wherever possible. This is because their responsibilities don't start and stop at their front door. People commuting in Amber and Red warning areas are at significant risk of experiencing travel problem, with delays on roads and road closures, delays and cancellations to rail and air travel, which could cause people to suffer from heat exhaustion.

Where working from home is not possible, Employers should be carrying out a risk assessment which should considered the points below

Review the type of work being carried out

Employers should consider wherever possible avoiding work which requires strenuously activity, and where this is not possible, reducing the period of time it is done for, insuring plenty of breaks and opportunities for to drink plenty of fresh cool water.

Workplace ventilation and thermal comfort

Ensuring good ventilation remains vital to help to reduce the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 the virus which causes Covid 19, with cases number on the increase employers still need to be thinking about protecting workers from this.

Oscillating fans can help with airflow, however where room temperatures are over 30 o C, they may not help with cooling to prevent heat-related illness and may in fact worsen dehydration. The use and positioning of fans should also consider the transmission risk mentioned above.

Whilst there is currently no maximum workplace temperature, the law does state that;
"During working hours, the temperature in all workplaces inside buildings shall be reasonable"
So employers need to take all reasonable steps to achieve a temperature which is as close as possible to comfortable

UNISON supports the TUC's call for a specific legal maximum temperature for indoor work of 30°C; or 27°C where the work is strenuous.

However, this proposed maximum would be intended to be the absolute maximum, so regular indoor work at or just below 30°C (or 27°C as applicable) would not be acceptable, and that employers should attempt to reduce temperatures if they went above 24°C or workers felt uncomfortable. The World Health Organisation recommends 24°C as the maximum temperature for working in comfort.

It is important to remember that room temperature alone is not an indicator of thermal comfort as we are all individuals, therefore one size (or temperature) does not fit all.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have summed this up in the following way...
"Thermal comfort is not measured by room temperature, but by the number of employees complaining of thermal discomfort" (*)
(*) https://www.hse.gov.uk/temperature/thermal/

Personal protective equipment (PPE)

The need for personal protective equipment (PPE) will have followed a risk assessment and identified that all other means of reducing the risks to the individual have been eliminated but a level of risk still remains, so PPE is the last (not first) resort to protecting an individual.

The use of some types of PPE in hot outdoor / indoor environments (such as overalls, mask, respirators, aprons, hoods etc) increases the risk of the body not being able to cool itself and maintaining a healthy temperature (heat stress). This can cause heat exhaustion and if action is not taken lead to heat stroke.

If your work requires the use of PPE, we would expect employers to have review the risk assessment for the activity that requires PPE and consider avoiding this type of work in areas where is not possible to ensure a cool working environment.

Where the work needs to continue, and PPE is required we would be expecting employers to operate in the following way

Reducing the amount of time spent undertaking tasks in PPE by rotating staff out if the work / task needs to continue

Providing more frequent breaks in between the use of PPE

Trying to use single use PPE which is changed regularly to prevent sweat saturation and ensuring access to more changes of workwear

Make staff aware of the signs of heat exhaustion and dehydration

Operating a buddying system where staff regularly check on one another for signs of heat stress like confusion, changes in completion or looking clammy, increased rates of breathing (whilst at rest or not undertaking vigorous activity)

Outdoor workers

Those working outdoors need extra measures to protect them, both from UV radiation and heat stress. Therefore employers need to review their risk assessment and make employees aware of changes
(In Amber warning areas)
Work activities should be reduced and planned to take place at cooler times of the day (before 11 am and after 3pm), sun cream with a high UV factor should be provided free of charge, increased breaks out of the sun and free access to fresh cool water.
(In Red warning areas)
Only activities which are absolutely critical should be undertaken, [following that advice for Amber areas] but significantly limiting any work during 11am-3pm, employers might consider asking employees to undertake temporary duties out of the sun, provided they have received the appropriate training to be able to do that work safely.

Workers who are pregnant

Employers are already required by law to undertake individual risk assessments once an employee has informed them they are pregnant. We would expect employers to review this risk assessment in light of the Amber and Red warning for extreme heat.

The review should take account of the fact that workers who are pregnant are more at risk of experiencing heat exhaustion and at lower temperatures. Therefore, additional steps should be considered to reduce the risks and could include

Working from home where possible

Reducing shift length, start and finish times so you are not travelling in the hottest parts of the day

Staying well hydrated and having increased rest breaks

Temporary change of working duties

If you have any none medically urgent questions about the impact of the heat on your pregnancy you should discuss this with your midwife, contact your GP or call NHS 111

Those with existing health conditions

Where employers are aware someone has an existing health condition, once an alert has been issued, managers should be discussing with those employees how the extreme heat might affect either their condition or medication used. We would encourage an individual risk assessment to be carried out, and for employers to consider what additional reasonable adjustment(s) could be provided.

If you feel you are being put at risk it is crucial to get advice and discuss the situation with your UNISON representative. Contact your branch and if needed you can seek advice from our regional office or legal team.

UKHSA and Met Office Service

The Heath-health Alert Service forewarns of periods of high temperatures, which may affect the health of the public.
Heat-health Alert service sign up link Heat-health Alert dashboard
UKHSA advice for public services

The UKHSA has produced guidance to assist professionals in protecting vulnerable people from the health impacts of severe heat in England. (devolved nations may issue their own of reference these)
Social care managers, staff, and carers Healthcare professionals Supporting people who are homeless and sleeping rough Looking after children and those in early years settings during heatwaves: for teachers and professionals
The signs of heat exhaustion include:

a headache

dizziness and confusion

loss of appetite and feeling sick

excessive sweating and pale, clammy skin

cramps in the arms, legs and stomach

fast breathing or pulse

a high temperature of 38C or above

being very thirsty

The symptoms are often the same in adults and children, although children may become floppy and sleepy.

If someone is showing signs of heat exhaustion, they need to be cooled down.

Call 999 if:

You or someone else have signs of heatstroke including:

fast breathing or shortness of breath

a fit (seizure)

loss of consciousness

not responsive

Heatstroke can be very serious if not treated quickly.

Put the person in the recovery position if they lose consciousness while you're waiting for help.

Symptoms of dehydration in adults and children include:

feeling thirsty

dark yellow and strong-smelling pee

feeling dizzy or lightheaded

feeling tired

a dry mouth, lips and eyes

peeing little, and fewer than 4 times a day

Call 999 or go to A&E if:

you're feeling unusually tired

you're confused and disorientated

any dizziness when you stand up does not go away

you have not peed all day

your pulse is weak or rapid

you have fits (seizures)

These can be signs of serious dehydration that need urgent treatment.

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Health and Weather warnings for extreme heat | Health and safety: key issues | UNISON National

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Following the UKHSA and Met Office issuing a new warnings system for health impacts due to extreme heat, the following information has been update to help provide members with an additional understand of how this relates to their work.

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BWI Factsheet on heat and Migrant workers

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Workers H&S in A Changing Climate - ILO 2024

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Workers H&S in A Changing Climate - ILO 2024

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Climate Hazards and Resilience in the Workplace

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Climate Hazards and Resilience in the Workplace

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Tool/Resource Complete

All workers whether they work indoors, outdoors, offshore or travel for a living could be increasingly vulnerable to disruption, damage, and potential injury from climate change impacts such as windstorms, flooding, and heatwaves. During 2021-22 Adaptation Scotland and the Scottish Trade Union movement w orked together to create resources to help identify the hazards that climate change could bring to a range of different workplaces and to develop adaptation solutions.

The resources are designed to address the human consequences of a changing climate and help workers have a central voice in building resilience to climate risks and championing climate change adaptation solutions which also tackle inequality and social justice.

The se tools combine the latest climate change science and the lived experience of trade union representatives from across Scotland, which suggests that climate change impacts, without adaptation, threaten health and safety. Conversely , well planned adaptation action can transform our poorest communities and present massive opportunities for Scotland's workers and industries.

The new resources comprise:

A handbook which makes the case for adaptation from a Trade Union (and broader just transition) perspective including examples of how climate impacts are already impacting schools, offices, shops, depots, warehousing, care homes, hospitals, and outdoor workplace settings.
HANDBOOK Climate Hazards and Resilience in the Workplace
A workbook which takes users on a step-by-step journey in identifying potential climate change hazards in their workplace and provides information to help union officers and reps in Scotland take action to build resilience and protect workers from the unavoidable impacts of climate change.
WORKBOOK Climate Hazards and Resilience in the Workplace

All these resources can be downloaded at the bottom of this webpage, or contact [email protected] for more details.

Webinars and training
Watch thelaunch event. On 7th July 2022, Roz Foyer, STUC General Secretary; Lilian Macer, Unison Scotland Convenor, and Anna Beswick, Adaptation Scotland programme, launched new resources to help identify climate hazards and improve resilience in Scotland's workplaces.
Practical training for trade unionists Development of the resources

There are two additional webinar recordings filmed during the development of the resources which explore in more detail the latest climate science and socially just ways of building resilience in the workplace. The first webinar which introduces the topics (approximately 30 minutes) can be viewed here and a recording of the subsequent in-depth webinar (approximately 1 hour 25 minutes) is available here.

Key feature

Learn more about the social justice implications of climate change risk and why adapting to climate change is a priority, worldwide, for the Trade Union movement

Work your way through the workbook, developed with workplace reps, to find practical adaptation solutions for making your workplace more resilient to climate extremes today and in the future

Contact

Catherine Payne, Climate Resilience Manager

Sector

Framework capability

Information

Project participants

Fiona Montgomery, UNISON Scotland

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Climate Hazards & Resilience in the Workplace

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Tool/Resource Complete All workers whether they work indoors, outdoors, offshore or travel for a living could be increasingly vulnerable to disruption, damage, and potential injury from climate change impacts such as windstorms, flooding, and heatwaves.

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During the winter half-year of 2023/2024, western Europe experienced a series of damaging storms. These storms led to disruptions and the associated precipitation caused exacerbated flood risks.

During the autumn and winter of 2023/2024, western Europe experienced a series of damaging storms. Storms of this nature are common over the European region during Autumn and Winter, being l ow atmospheric pressure systems that typically develop over the North Atlantic Ocean, then move eastwards over Europe bringing strong winds accompanied in cases by heavy rainfall. The storminess of the 2023-24 season has been primarily dictated by the position and strength of the jet stream, a band of strong westerly winds high up in the atmosphere driven by temperature differences between the equator and the poles, and tends to be strongest in winter. The position and strength of the jet stream influences how many low-pressure systems are directed towards Ireland and the UK. The strength of the jet stream, and how each individual low-pressure system interacts with it, determines whether these low-pressure systems intensify enough to become Atlantic storms. During the 2023-24 season, the jet stream was stronger than normal, which likely contributed to how strong the storms became. Impacts of individual storms can be worsened when the soils are already very wet due to preceding sustained rainfall or a succession of storms over a similar area, leading to saturation, increased run-off and risk of flooding.

The 2023/24 storm season is the ninth season since the founding of the Western Europe storm naming group. The initiative began in 2015, when the Met Office and Met Éireann, Ireland's national meteorological service, officially started to identify and name storms that have the potential to cause medium or high impacts, and expanded to include the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) in 2019.

Scientists from the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany, including scientists from each of the National Meteorological Services in the Western Europe storm naming group, collaborated to assess to what extent human induced climate change and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) influenced the average storm severity, using the wind-based Storm Severity Index (SSI) over a wide region encompassing the United Kingdom and Ireland. The study also investigated the influence of climate change on the average precipitation on stormy days from October 2023 to March 2024, which was one of wettest Oct-Mar periods on record for the UK and the third on record for Ireland, and the wettest over the region south of 54N studied. The study uses peer-reviewed methods to assess changes in storm severity, associated precipitation and precipitation accumulated over the storm season.

The 2023/24 storm season, studied here by stormy day wind severity, associated rainfall, and accumulated seasonal rainfall in October-March, has brought deaths, flooding, transport disruptions and power outages, among other impacts, to the UK and Ireland.

Successive floods have compounded impacts on the agriculture and housing sectors, leading to cascading impacts on socioeconomic and psychosocial health, and eroding people's coping capacity, particularly low-income groups. Combined with the cost-of-living crisis, the successive flood events are another layer of disruption at a time when people's financial resilience is already being tested.

The storm severity index (SSI) was used to define stormy days to study. The SSI considers both the strength of the wind and the area affected. In this analysis we looked at rainfall and wind speed on stormy days identified by the SSI.

In today's climate with 1.2C of warming, stormy days with winds as intense as in the 2023/24 season occur about every 4 years. The associated precipitation is expected to occur about once every 5 years. The seasonal precipitation of the October-March period was more extreme, expected to occur about once every 20 years.

Analyses of observations are used to determine whether a trend can be observed in these measures. To determine the role of climate change in these observed changes, we combine observations with climate models.

The average precipitation on stormy days are observed to have become approximately 30% more intense, compared to a 1.2C cooler pre-industrial climate. Models agree on the direction of change, combining observations and models indicate that average precipitation on stormy days increased by about 20% due to human induced climate change, or equivalently the 2023/24 level has become about a factor of 10 more likely.

The observed precipitation across Oct-Mar has a strong trend, with a magnitude increase of about 25%. Climate models utilised in this study broadly agree on the direction of the change, and the combination of observation and model results indicates an increase in magnitude of 6% to 25%, or equivalently the 2023/24 level has become at least a factor of 4 more likely.

Models indicate that the trends in average precipitation on stormy days and seasonal precipitation continue into the future, in a climate that is 0.8C warmer than now. Average precipitation on stormy days becomes about another factor of 1.6 times more likely, or 4% more intense, and seasonal precipitation becomes about a factor of 1.5 more likely or 2% more intense.

Looking at average SSI on storm days, while some studies using other methods suggest an increase in storminess in a future climate, our analysis has shown a decreasing trend. Our results show that average SSI indices as observed this year became about a factor of 2 less likely. The synthesis of the models also shows a negative trend and, when combined with observations, the results indicate that a stormy season as observed this year is nowadays a factor of about 1.4 less likely due to human induced climate change.

This highlights the need for ongoing research into how climate change may influence the severity and frequency of windstorms in northern Europe.

NAO is a key driver of 'storminess' and has been accounted for in this analysis. However, the Oct-Mar 2023/24 averaged NAO was almost neutral.

Comprehensive flood risk management is required in the UK and Ireland that encompasses legislative frameworks, strategic planning, and substantial funding. Major UK cities are starting to integrate nature-based solutions into their designs. In Ireland, flood relief projects have been integrating nature-based solutions alongside traditional engineering solutions for over 20 years. Both the UK Met Office and Met Éireann are continuously improving their impact-based weather forecasting mechanisms to facilitate the translation of warning into action, in partnership with other government bodies to ensure their people's safety.

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Autumn and winter storm rainfall in the UK and Ireland was made about 20% heavier by human-caused climate change

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During the winter half-year of 2023/2024, western Europe experienced a series of damaging storms. These storms led to disruptions and the associated precipitation caused exacerbated flood risks.

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Reduction Roadmap - Construction industry in Denmark

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Reduction Roadmap - Construction industry in Denmark

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Ghosts of ‘lost’ blossom and orchards haunt street and place names, study shows

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The proportion of place names linked with blossom has doubled in past century despite flowering trees disappearing across the landscape.

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Meeting Needs within Limits - NEF (2023)

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Meeting Needs within Limits - NEF (2023)

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IPA - Remembering the Worker Report (2022)

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IPA - Remembering the Worker Report (2022)

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Wales TUC Guide to bargaining for resource efficiency 2023

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Wales TUC Guide to bargaining for resource efficiency 2023

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Why do we need a zero-waste, circular economy?

A report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation demonstrates why meeting climate targets requires a transformation in the way we produce and use goods. It found that circular economy strategies could play a key role and could reduce ' global CO2 emissions from key industry materials by 40% or 3.7 billion tonnes in 2050 '.

"The circular economy tackles climate change and other global challenges, like biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution, by decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources." (Ellen McArthur foundation)

As well as helping the climate, eliminating waste will bring huge benefits for nature and wildlife. For example, eliminating plastic waste will help to reduce plastic pollution in oceans and its impact on marine animals.

The circular economy could also have much to offer in terms of new, green jobs in local supply chains. Many jobs will be needed to support reconditioning, remanufacture, servicing and repair. According to the Carbon Trust, a circular economy offers " strong job creation opportunities as the circular economic model is focused on extracting greater value from resources, so opening up new opportunities across material and product loops that do not exist in linear, waste creating models."

It is important that there is a just transition to a circular economy. Trade unions must have a voice in changes at both a national, sectoral and workplace level. Social partnership has an important role to play in ensuring that the move to a circular economy happens fairly and that new jobs that are created meet fair work standards.

Workers in the circular economy
The European Federation of Public Service Unions has produced resources which make visible the crucial role of workers in delivering the circular economy.  EPSU says " A key concern is that we need to ensure quality jobs and decent pay and conditions, high health and safety standards, fight against social dumping and develop social dialogue."

These concerns are stressed in a series of reports of EPSU on Safe Jobs in the Circular Economy and on Circular Economy in the waste management sector:
www.epsu.org/article/safe-jobs-circular-economy-new-epsu-report www.epsu.org/article/will-circular-economy-be-economy-no-workers-new-study-published

What is the current picture on workplace waste?

In many workplaces, there has been substantial progress in resource efficiency, recycling and waste reduction but there remain some significant challenges. For example, significant amounts of recyclable materials are still disposed of as a part of the residual waste stream or co-mingled with other recyclable wastes. This reduces the quality and quantity of material that can be recycled.

Natural Resources Wales most recent survey of industrial and commercial waste found that:

Welsh industrial and commercial sectors generated an estimated 2.9 million tonnes of waste

Of this:

45% was recycled

14% was prepared for re-use

11% was disposed of via landfill

8% was sent for incineration

8% was composted

7% was treated

3% was sent for land recovery

The remainder 4% - was classified as 'other'

What is the legal and policy framework on resource efficiency and waste?

Welsh Government Circular Economy strategy

The Welsh Government wants Wales to become a 'one planet', zero waste nation by 2050 by transitioning to a circular economy. It has set out plans on how it intends to achieve this in its Circular Economy strategy: www.gov.wales/beyond-recycling

Union involvement will be vital in moving Wales towards the circular economy. Workers on the ground can be one of the best sources of ideas for identifying ways to reduce unnecessary waste. They also have ideas about ways that products could be designed better to support repair and reuse. It is important that workers are involved in any new schemes so they can share ideas and help to identify issues.

Wales is already a global leader in recycling. But the strategy sets out how the move to a circular economy will see Wales move 'beyond recycling' towards a different mindset. Whilst recycling will still have an important role, in a circular economy it becomes less significant. There will be less emphasis on recycling and a greater focus on preventing waste in design. More products will be repaired and re-used, so they can be kept in use longer.

Wales zero waste targets

The Welsh Government's circular economy strategy sets out phased timeline of ambitious targets:

By 2025

26% reduction in waste

Zero waste to landfill

50% reduction in avoidable food waste

70% recycling

By 2030

33% reduction in waste

60% reduction in avoidable food waste

By 2050

One planet resource use

62% reduction in waste

Zero waste

Net zero carbon

(Note: All waste reduction targets are set against a 2006-07 baseline)
Source: Beyond Recycling

New recycling regulations in Wales

New workplace recycling regulations come in to force in Wales on 6th April 2024. These regulations, brought in under the Environment (Wales) Act 2016, require all workplaces in Wales to separate key recyclable materials (including food waste) in the way most Wales households already do.

Phase 1 of a single-use plastics ban came into force in Wales on 30th October 2023. This bans the supply of certain single-use plastic items to consumers, such as plastic plates and cutlery.

Phase 2 of the ban, covering additional types of single-use plastic is due in 2026.

The waste hierarchy

The waste hierarchy underpins the legal and regulatory framework that governs how organisations should prevent and manage waste. All organisations are required to apply the waste hierarchy throughout their operations.

Crucially, the hierarchy ranks actions in priority order. It prioritises prevention and re-use ahead of recycling, with disposal as the last resort. Guidance on applying the hierarchy of waste can be found here: gov.wales/applying-waste-hierarchy-guidance
Source: https://businesswales.gov.wales/managing-waste
The duty to follow the waste hierarchy comes from The Waste Regulations 2011 and it applies to all organisations in England in Wales. The Environment (Wales) Act 2016 introduces a number of new regulations for organisations in Wales, including the new waste separation regulations. There are also additional regulations that apply to specific types of waste, eg the Hazardous Waste Regulations 2005.

Organisations can find more information about their legal obligations to manage waste here: https://businesswales.gov.wales/topics-and-guidance/sustainability-and-social-responsibility/resource-efficiency/waste/managing-waste

Preventing pollution

The problems of waste and pollution are closely linked. In UK law, pollution is defined as contamination of land, water or air by harmful or potentially harmful substances. The 'polluter pays' principle forms the basis of the regulation of pollution.

The 'polluter pays' principle is the concept that those who produce pollution should pay the costs of managing it to prevent damage to human health or the environment. The principle was established as commonly accepted practice in many countries legal systems following its inclusion in the Rio Declaration (1992).

Organisations should be aware of their legal obligations to prevent pollution and ensure appropriate measures are in place. Guidance on preventing pollution and legal obligations for organisations in Wales can be found here: https://www.netregs.org.uk/media/1898/guidance-for-pollution-prevention-1-2022-update.pdf

Social Partnership and the Well-being of Future Generations Act (2015)

Public bodies who come under the scope of the Well-being of Future Generations Act are required to act in accordance with the 'sustainable development principle'. This is about ensuring that we can meet the needs of people in the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

This means that these public bodies should be considering the environmental and social impact of things like the organisation's resource consumption, and the waste and pollution related to its activities, when setting and delivering their wellbeing goals.

The new Social Partnership and Public Procurement Act (2023) places a statutory duty on these public bodies to seek consensus or compromise with their recognised trade unions, or where there is no recognised trade union other representatives of their staff, when setting their well-being objectives and delivering on those objectives.

These public bodies must also consider 'fair work' when setting their wellbeing objectives. The Act also includes a statutory duty on these public bodies to consider socially responsible public procurement.

Together, these two pieces of legislation provide an opportunity for unions to have a strong voice in influencing how organisations manage the use of resources in an environmentally and socially responsible way, in a manner that supports a 'just transition'.

Tools and systems to improve resource efficiency and reduce waste

EMS systems and accreditation schemes

Organisations can implement an environmental management system (EMS) to improve resource efficiency, reduce environmental impact, clarify responsibilities and ensure compliance with legislation.

More information on different EMS systems can be found in the Greener Workplaces for a Just Transition toolkit. International Standard ISO 140001, the EC's Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS) or the British Standard (BS 8555) are examples of systems available. Some organisations have developed their own in-house systems.

There are also some sector specific schemes promoting best practice in the sector such as the Courtuald Commitment in the food and drink sector.

Life cycle assessments

Life cycle assessments (LCAs) are an important tool to fight waste, climate change, nature breakdown and over consumption of resources because they take into account all stages of a products' life, including the 'end of life' stage. This shows the true cost of materials, products and services in terms of their impact on people and the planet.

Everything that is created goes through a series of 'life cycle' stages, from material extraction, manufacture, packaging and transport, through to end of life. A life cycle assessment is a tool that can be used to help assess and understand something's true environmental footprint at every stage. It considers areas such as the use of finite resources, land and water use, greenhouse gas emissions and human toxicity.

Many organisations are increasingly being asked to provide life cycle assessments for their products. Large companies and public sector organisations are increasingly including questions about life cycle assessments as part of procurement or tendering processes as part of efforts to improve environmental sustainability through supply chains.

There are a number of organisations that offer life cycle assessments. International standard ISO 14040 governs life cycle assessment practice and sets out what is considered a good assessment.

More information about life cycle assessments can be found on the European Platform on Life Cycle Assessments. The Life Cycle Initiative, a programme hosted by the UN Environment Programme, also has a useful website www.lifecycleinitiative.org.

Taking action in the workplace

Waste audits

An audit of the amounts and different types of waste and recycling is a good starting point for workplace action. It is the best way to understand where the issues are and identify areas for improvement. WRAP has a Waste Audit Guide for Businesses.

It will be important to find out who in the organisation has responsibility for waste management and ideally work together on setting up an audit. An audit will make it possible cost potential savings in waste disposal costs, making a business case for change.

Apply the waste hierarchy

See the waste hierarchy section (above). The key with this step is a focus on prevention first. A good starting point is to consider ways to reduce the amount of resources your workplace is using in the first place. This will help you to identify areas where the most effective changes can be made and identify opportunities to improve existing practice. This will particularly be the case if the audit finds that recyclable materials still being disposed of as a part of the residual waste stream or co-mingled with other recyclable wastes.

There may be further opportunities to eliminate or reduce the use of hard to recycle products and materials. Or to reduce the need to send items for recycling by introducing reusable items.

Procurement and purchasing review

Reviewing procurement is a key step in preventing waste. Does the organisation have an environmentally sustainable procurement policy?

How can the organisation work with suppliers to make improvements - eg procuring products that use less packaging and goods that can be re-used and repaired, using more recycled and recyclable materials?

Where reclaimed or recycled materials cannot be used, do any new materials used meet standards to minimise the environmental impacts eg FSC certified wood?

Ensuring information on life cycle assessments is obtained and used to inform procurement decisions is a key step. Sustainable and ethical procurement considerations (eg fair work) should be closely linked in any procurement policy.

Review the organisation's own products and processes (where applicable)

How does the organisation assess the environmental impact of its own products?

A number of issues could be considered.

Does it use life cycle assessments?

Does it utilise recycled and recyclable materials where possible?

Does it offer repair/remanufacture?

Has it considered offering alternative models such as shared ownership or service-based models?

Does labelling and information about how to recycle its products meet best practice?

Engaging with members

Share the findings of your audit, find out what the issues with systems are for staff and where they think improvements can be made.

There is often a lot of support for measures to reduce waste, but communication is key as is ensuring people understand the changes and that the right systems and support are in place to make it work in practice.

Making a plan and setting target

Use the findings of your audit and consultation with members and others to make a plan to reduce waste and improve resource management. These findings will help you to identify the highest impact actions.

There may be significant barriers to achieving zero-waste in the immediate future. But a helpful approach is focus efforts on interim targets and the highest impact actions in the short term to build momentum, with a longer-term goal to achieve zero waste.

Awareness raising

Does the employer plan to provide any training or awareness raising to support new initiatives?

Training should be provided to ensure members are aware of any new procedures and understand how to separate waste effectively and why action is needed to reduce waste.

Negotiating for change: Making the business case

Cost savings

Waste reduction produces savings at both the procurement stage and disposal stage (eg avoiding landfill tax). WRAP has a simple online calculator tool: businessofrecycling.wrap.org.uk/calculator that can help organisations get a rough estimate of how much they can save by improving waste prevention and how well they are performing against the waste hierarchy.

The true cost of waste is not simply the cost of discarded materials - it includes inefficient use of raw materials, unnecessary use of energy and water, faulty products, waste disposal of by-products, waste treatment and wasted effort. Better resource management can create savings across all of these areas.

The Aldersgate group has released a report on new business trials showing that greater resource efficiency could deliver significant economic benefits to businesses.

Competitiveness and access to new opportunities

Moving to a circular model can help open up new sources of income that are less reliant on the sale of products alone. For example, opening up service-based models associated with maximising the value of resources.

Alignment with the circular model is likely to give organisations a competitive advantage in the longer term. For example, with the Well-being of Future Generations Act public bodies are moving towards greener procurement practices and many other organisations are increasingly looking to improve procurement.

Security

The vulnerabilities of long, linear supply chains, were highlighted by many organisations experiencing disruption to supplies during the pandemic. A more localised, circular supply chain can help to reduce these vulnerabilities. Becoming part of the circular economy can also position organisations to better address emerging resource security/scarcity issues in the future.

Reputation and legal compliance

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and pollution by reducing waste is the right thing to do. It's a key contribution that organisations can make towards tackling the climate and nature emergency and securing the world's finite resources for future generations.

These issues also matter to customers and services users. So being proactive is not just about ensuring legal and regulatory compliance, it can have a positive impact on an organisation's reputation.

Advice and support is available

Employers may need support in preparing for and complying with new Welsh Government regulations on workplace recycling and single-use plastics. Or they may need advice on how to improve resource efficiency and move towards circular economy practices. Organisations such as Business Wales and WRAP Cymru can provide information and advice.

The Welsh Government is offering a circular economy funding to support organisations in transitioning to the circular economy. More details about the scheme and eligibility can be found here: businesswales.gov.wales/innovation/support-and-funding/circular-economy-funding

Resource efficiency/waste - action plan

Step 1: Research

Find out who has responsibility for resource/waste management

Gather any existing policies and data

Ask the employer to carry out a waste audit and identify potential cost savings

Check if the waste hierarchy is being applied throughout operations

Step 2: Engage

Consult with members

Encourage wider discussion. Get external advice and help if needed. Local authorities and organisations like WRAP Cymru and Business Wales can provide information and advice. See the 'further sources of information' section

Talk to others in the workplace - other workplace unions and any members of other relevant committees in your workplace

Step 3: Plan

Identify and target high impact actions - these will depend on the findings of the waste audit

Pull together the ideas for a plan - it may be helpful to focus on some quick wins, as well as longer-term goals

Step 4: Negotiate

Push for targets for waste reduction - these should be sufficiently ambitious

Make a moral case and a business case for action on resource efficiency

Focus on your plan and see the bargaining checklist above for other considerations

Step 5: Consolidate

Encouraging the employer to sign up for an EMS and accreditation can help with continuous improvement

Ensure the employer provides appropriate training and awareness raising

Set dates to review progress towards the longer-term goal to become zero-waste

Sources of further information

Welsh Local Authorities

Local authorities have a key role in resource/waste management and are an important source of advice and information
www.gov.wales/find-your-local-authority

WRAP Cymru

Business Wales

Business Wales is a free service that provides impartial, independent support and advice to people starting, running and growing a business in Wales: businesswales.gov.wales/

WG circular economy strategy

gov.wales/beyond-recycling

Circular Communities Cymru

Circularcommunities.cymru/

Wales Recycles

Ellen MacArthur Foundation

ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/

FareShare Cymru

Library of things

https://borrow.benthyg.org/

Repair cafes

https://repaircafewales.org/

Zero waste schools

circularcommunities.cymru/cy/zero-waste-schools

Community wood recycling

https:/ /www.communitywoodrecycling.org.uk/

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A trade union bargaining guide on resource efficiency

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This guide is aimed at trade union green or environmental reps and other trade union representatives who want to work with employers and members to reduce the environmental impact of their organisation through reducing waste and improving resource efficiency.

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for trade unionists:

a case-based

approach

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Earth Beyond 6 of 9 Planetary Boundaries, Rockstrom et al (2023)

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Earth Beyond 6 of 9 Planetary Boundaries, Rockstrom et al (2023)

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Safe and just Earth system boundaries - Rockström et al, Nature, 2023

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Safe and just Earth system boundaries - Rockström et al, Nature, 2023

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Wales TUC Active Travel Bargaining Guide

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Wales TUC Active Travel Bargaining Guide

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What are the key issues when considering the sustainability of travel?

The environment

Climate Change. In Wales, transport accounts for 15% of climate changing emissions.
Cars account for over half of those emissions. Air pollution from transport also contributes to nature loss and impacts negatively on ecosystems

Health

Trade unionists have long known that health owes much to the environment we live and work in. Trade unionists led the fight for clean air in the workplace. However, the quality of the air we breathe outside the workplace, in our towns and cities is a growing cause for concern.

According to Public Health Wales, each year around 1000 - 1,400 avoidable deaths in Wales are due to air pollution, both in the form of NO2 and particulate matter. South Wales has the UK's fourth worst levels of air pollution according to the latest figures. The primary source of both NO2, and particulate matter pollutants is vehicle emissions, especially those from diesel powered vehicles. Additionally, tyres and brakes produce harmful particles. Helping to reduce the number of car journeys will therefore have a positive impact on your members' health.

Our increasing reliance on the car as a means of getting about has also contributed to a serious rise in physical inactivity. Wales has the lowest physical activity levels in Britain, resulting in obesity and a whole range of illnesses that are estimated to cost the Welsh NHS £35 million each year to treat. Encouraging your members to switch from driving to active travel for short journeys or a combination of active travel and public transport for longer journeys can provide significant health benefits, both physical and mental.

Equalities

The car's domination of our transport system over the past seven decades has resulted in our communities being designed around the assumption that services and employment will be accessed by car. Yet nearly a fifth of households in Wales, often families on low incomes, don't have access to a car. Many young people find affording a car particularly difficult because of the high cost of insurance. Given how many workplaces can only be accessed by car, this can make starting or restarting a career even more problematic.

Women are less likely to have access to a car in Wales. A report by Chwarae Teg, Working Women's Journeys, found that whilst 80% of men aged 17 or over in Wales have a full driving licence, that figure drops to 67% for women. Economically inactive women are the group least likely to have access to a car, making it more difficult for them to gain employment.

The negative impacts of high levels of car use have a greater impact on less well-off people, even though poorer people are less likely to own a car. Statistics show that poorer people are far more likely to be injured in collisions with cars: ' Children in more deprived wards are four times more likely to be hit by a car compared with the least deprived wards '.

The air quality problems caused by road traffic also tend to be worse in poorer areas:

"On the one hand, people in the least deprived communities are more likely to have a car than those in the most deprived areas. On the other, the impact of pollution (particularly NO2) is felt more in deprived areas, which tend to be located closer to main highways, have a higher proportion of "imported" traffic (from less deprived areas), and have a higher proportion of people with chronic illness which makes them more vulnerable to air pollution exposure."

Source: Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, Moving forwards: healthy travel for all in Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan, 2017
High levels of car ownership are also a key factor in the decline of bus services; services which are disproportionately important to less well-off people.

People with disabilities will often find travel to work challenging. It is vitally important that the needs of current and future workers with disabilities are fully taken into account when designing travel facilities.

Prosperity

Our economy depends on the free flow of goods, but our roads are often clogged up by single occupancy cars. This congestion is currently estimated to cost Wales £2bn per annum.

The employer's agenda

Many employers in Wales, particularly in the public sector, are under pressure to take a more sustainable approach to travel. To ensure that union negotiators are on the front foot in any discussions with management about a transition to greener travel, it is essential that members have a clear understanding of all the issues involved and the best options for them and their workplace.

Taking Action

The type of actions that can be taken will be dependent on the location and individual circumstances of each workplace.

Introduction

Workplaces in rural areas may have little public transport and, with workers often travelling longer distances, active travel may be a less attractive option. However, even in those situations there may be members who do live close enough to the workplace to walk or cycle.

Electric bikes, which are becoming increasing popular and affordable, make cycling longer distances much easier and can even 'flatten out' hills. There may also be public transport options or even car sharing. At the very least, consideration should be given to providing charging facilities for electric cars.

It is also important to remember that even small changes can be helpful. Cycling or walking instead of driving just once or twice a week will still bring health and environmental benefits.

Engagement is key

Use the model travel survey (related documents) to find out how your members currently travel and what needs to change for them to be prepared to try an alternative mode. Encourage discussion about the issues in this guide and how they affect your members and their families. It will be much easier to make a case to management if you have a good understanding of your members views and know the types of changes they will support.

If you are successful in making changes let your members know about them. Make sure that any new facilities for sustainable travel such as bike stands, showers and lockers are prominently advertised so that people are encouraged to use them.

Try to have information on sustainable travel to work included in induction materials and welcome packs. It is often easier to change people's mode of travel when the journey itself changes, such as when starting at a new workplace.

Workplace travel plans

The workplace travel plan should incorporate all the measures being put in place to encourage more sustainable travel choices. Successful travel plans need wide support to succeed. They need to be seen to be fair, be backed by concrete support for change from the company, and be clearly communicated, including listening and responding to concerns.

Introduction

A useful guide on how to write a travel plan is available on the TravelKnowHow Scotland website. The first step should be setting up a working party or steering group to make sure the travel plan gets the right input and support across the organisation. This could be a Joint Environment Committee or a standalone committee, but either way it would need to involve the facilities manager, personnel manager, union rep, fleet manager, communications manager and managers of any departments whose work generates business mileage.

Gathering the right data is vital to support this, such as:

site audit

staff discussion group

local transport information

relevant resources, such as car sharing databases

staff travel survey

business travel data

mapping where staff live

Travel plans - bargaining checklist

1. Do your research (see the 'Resources' section further down the page) to make sure you're not outmanoeuvred and can take the initiative on negotiations if necessary.

2. Raise awareness among members about the more beneficial kinds of Staff Travel Plan packages that can be achieved and the reasons why reducing car use is important.

3. Where there is a proposed change to one aspect of travel-related terms and conditions (for example, car parking fees), this is an opportunity to argue for a coherent, well-developed travel plan, rather than piecemeal measures introduced under the guise of 'green' policy.

4. Where employers are initiating a travel plan, seek to be closely involved throughout its development.

5. Make sure you get clear agreement on terms of reference at the start of travel plan negotiations, which assure staff that the aim is to produce a travel plan with benefits to workers as well as to employers and the environment.

6. Ensure equality impacts are considered. Consideration should be given to different protected characteristics alongside other equality and fairness considerations (eg impacts on lower-paid workers and people with caring responsibilities). Adjustments should be made where necessary.

7. Ensure employers understand that if they want to have a real impact on car use, the most effective measures will include financial incentives.

8. Make sure you get to see anonymous data resulting from management's staff travel surveys.

9. Remember that this is a great opportunity to raise the union's profile.

Key Dates for Sustainable Travel

Linking in with national events, when the media will be talking about travel, is a great way to raise the profile of your work. These are some of the most important dates:

Promoting and enabling walking and cycling to work

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A trade union bargaining guide for greener, healthier and fairer travel

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Exploring why sustainable travel is an important issue for trade unionists and looks at what action can be taken in the workplace

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Could climate grief be a catalyst for collective action? - ABC Religion & Ethics

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Gone is the age of natural disasters.

The climate disasters of today are of a profoundly unnatural character. They are the product of pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide, methane, and a litany of other greenhouse gases. The dire wildfires, droughts, and flash flooding we have seen in the past few years are only a taste of things to come.

When confronted with the sobering reality of climate breakdown, it is tempting to give in to one of two impulses. On the one hand, there is the allure of wishful thinking, naïve optimism, and New Age (toxic) positivity. This calls for us to imagine only best-case scenarios. Perhaps, contrary to current trends, those climate models that predict less bad effects will eventually be vindicated. Or perhaps technological innovation will deliver us a panacea that reverses most of the harm of climate breakdown. Or perhaps Just Stop Oil will triumph completely, worldwide, within the next three years. (Yeah, right.)

On the other hand, there is the temptation to embrace doomerism and abandon all hope that we will, or even can, meaningfully turn to address the climate crisis. Perhaps political and economic forces are too firmly entrenched to be moved at all by popular will and protest. Or perhaps human psychology is too stubbornly hardwired to focus on the immediate future at the expense of the long-term thinking required to meet the challenges of the climate crisis. Perhaps people just aren't any good. Perhaps all the incredible social innovation we've undertaken, all the altruism and self-sacrifice, all the beautiful acts and achievements of our species, including those undertaken under severe stress such as in war or disasters, are an illusion. (Yeah, right.)

These two perspectives could not be more diametrically opposed in their treatment of the seriousness of climate breakdown. Nevertheless, they are often rooted in the same profound grief that we feel - if we are awake at all - at what is being done to our planet and our future. This grief can lull us into a distorted view of reality, where either everything is broadly fine or everything is completely irredeemable. Either path leads to the disavowal of our own agency to meaningfully act in midst of climate breakdown.

The uncomfortable truth lies somewhere in between these two positions. And while it is certainly too late to avoid disasters, it is not yet too late to avoid the very worst-case scenarios that climate breakdown threatens. It is not too late to make things less bad. Facing up to climate reality means accepting that things will get worse - and working to build a more resilient society.

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As I have argued in my book Why Climate Breakdown Matters, what we need to do is meet reality in all its fullness - and all its uncertainty. Our best hope by far of turning around the current desperate trajectory of our civilisation is to look it in eye, without giving up. Only if we appraise our situation accurately can we act on it adequately; but only if we remain determined to act is there any point in appraising our situation at all. I contend that the "solution" to our predicament is found in staying with the trouble. That the remedy - as Rousseau said - is in the evil. That where the danger is, there too the very saving power lies, as Hölderlin held. That we place ourselves in the best position to cope with adversity if we go through it - and then we can manifest the truth spoken by Gandhi, when he remarked that adversity is the mother of progress.

That's why I focus on the "negative" emotions we feel when confronted with climate reality - and yet I argue that these emotions may yet be the making of us.

Love is at the root of all aversive emotions. We feel eco-anxiety because we love life. We feel fear for the fate of those who we love. We feel rage at the state of things because of our passion for those weaker or more powerless than ourselves are unnecessarily being put in jeopardy. And we feel heartbreak and grief for what is "lost" and what more will be lost.

Denial is the not altogether unreasonable resistance to devastating loss. It is the motivated rebellion against it. After all, it is not entirely believable what we have lost, and what we are in the process of still losing. It's hard to credit. It is simply too awful to be believed. But there is another, more authentic form of rebellion than denial. And that is motivated rebellion to stand up for people and planet by protecting what is still protectable and mourning what is lost.

The intimate connection between grief and love reveals just how the process of grief can catalyse us into a state of action. For without love for the planet and its inhabitants, our grief could not tempt us into either the naïve optimism or the doomerist perspectives that cloud our vision of what remains possible. Both are forms of (soft) denial.

But the upshot of all this is that it reveals that the gap between such climate denials and climate action is often less than that between indifference and action. This may in itself be a cause for some non-naïve optimism. After all, if grief - the grief that is hidden by optimism, and that is converted into inaction by a depression that leaves us reassured that at least there's nothing we can do - is often at the root of both denial and action, then shifting people from the former to the latter is surely an easier task than moving someone from sheer indifference to action.

Why then does grief provoke such radically different responses in people? Well, part of the reason stems from the extent to which grief has become individualised rather than shared. Our society obstructs the collective mourning of what has been "lost" - which is to say, extirpated, destroyed, actively damaged - in our ecology and climate. This makes it harder to understand that the unbelievable nature of the crisis is, in fact, a deeply shameful truth.

By individuating grief in the way we have tended to hitherto, we encourage the fantasies of naïve optimism, doomerism, and outright denial. There is a reason communities come together and grieve when a person passes away. Collective mourning helps us better understand and process the loss. Yet, we do not do the same with the rending of climate and nature. This needs to change if we are to going to catalyse those in the early stages of grief into activists helping to create a better world. We've seen the first great signs of such change, such collective grieving, in upsurges like the Extinction Rebellion.

These are dire times. The climate is spinning out of control and our ecosystems are collapsing under the strain of increasingly unnatural disasters. This is not a time for denying our emotions or embracing fantasies of powerlessness. Instead, we need to feel our emotions, share them, recognise the power that courses through them and through our veins, and through our deeper-than-deep connections with each other - and change the world. For good.
Rupert Read is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia in the UK. He is a former spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion collective, an environmental activist, and a former Green Party councillor. He is the author of Why Climate Breakdown Matters and Wittgenstein's Liberatory Philosophy: Thinking Through His Philosophical Investigations.

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Could climate grief be a catalyst for collective action? - ABC Religion & Ethics

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When confronted with the sobering reality of climate breakdown, it is tempting to give in to either naïve optimism or deep despair. Both responses should be avoided, in favour of understanding the power of shared grief over what is being lost.

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Tipping Point - The Limits of Growth podcast series

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Tipping Point - The Limits of Growth podcast series

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Tipping Point: The True Story of "The Limits to Growth"

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The true story of “The Limits to Growth”: the backlash, its legacy.

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This is just how unfair climate change is

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Black Mountains College - Ecological education

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Black Mountains College - Ecological education

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Study at Black Mountains College - Black Mountains College

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Join our mission to promote ecological action and adaptation. Choose from full time further education courses and short courses. The BMC Degree is in development.

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Climate change and the welfare state - Prof Ian Gough

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Climate change and the welfare state - Prof Ian Gough

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UNISON Gridlock report (June 2023) - research into energy transition & our members lives

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UNISON Gridlock report (June 2023) - research into energy transition & our members lives

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UNISON Gridlock report (June 2023) - research into energy transition & our members lives

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UNISON Gridlock report (June 2023) - research into energy transition & our members lives

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‎Decent Jobs on a Living Planet: Working Together on Apple Podcasts

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We're back for a brand new season! In season 2 we're diving into the relationships between the climate movement and trade unions. Over the next episodes we'll be learning more about trade unions, exploring their place in the struggle for climate justice, and hearing from people working to build power within our movements.

In Episode 2.1: Working Together we're joined by Lucas from Young Friends of the Earth Scotland and Abi from the Scottish Trade Union Congress youth committee to tell us all about the work they did last year bringing together young climate activists and trade unionists to explore climate justice and workers rights, how we work together and what we can learn from each other.

The views, information and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily represent Friends of the Earth Scotland or its employees.

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‎Decent Jobs on a Living Planet: Working Together on Apple Podcasts

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We're back for a brand new season! In season 2 we're diving into the relationships between the climate movement and trade unions. Over the next episodes we'll be learning more about trade unions, exploring their place in the struggle for climate justice, and hearing from people working to build powe...

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Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier

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Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier

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Frontiers of Commoning, with David Bollier

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A monthly conversation with creative activists pioneering new forms of commoning.

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Welcome to the Wales Net Zero 2035 Group

News - We have launched our first challenge: How could Wales feed itself by 2035?

What we do

The world is experiencing the disastrous impacts of the climate crisis and is currently off track to avert further impacts. Leading scientists recently issued what they called "our final warning". The Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru have jointly invited an independent group to explore how the country can speed up its transition to net zero, and how amending its target to 2035 from 2050 could be made possible.

The 'Group', led by former Environment Minister Jane Davidson, is tasked with:

finding the best examples of transformative change from Wales and around the world and bringing them to Wales;

challenging the Welsh government and Senedd (Welsh Parliament) to go further and faster;

imagining what a fairer, more sustainable future looks like for the Welsh nation.

Who we are

The Group is made up of 25 independent, unpaid members and includes representatives from the Welsh Youth Parliament. The Group is supported by a Secretariat, alongside the Wales Centre for Public Policy who have also been asked by the Welsh Government to support the work of the Group as an independent institution.

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Welcome to the Wales Net Zero 2035 Group The world is experiencing the disastrous impacts of the climate crisis and is currently off track to avert further impacts. Leading scientists recently issued what they called "our final warning".

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One of the most important podcasts around.

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The podcast for a world in crisis. We face a global energy crisis, economic crisis, ecological crisis and political crisis. These crises are symptoms of a failing system, a system which has produced a climate crisis, putting billions around the world into mortal danger. This is a critical time fo…

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Humankind by Timothy Morton review - no more leftist defeatism, everything is connected

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n 2015, Cecil the lion was shot with an arrow by a big-game hunting American called Walter Palmer. Facebook and Twitter erupted in outrage against the insouciant dentist, UN resolutions were passed, Palmer was stalked and his extradition to face charges in Zimbabwe demanded.

Timothy Morton takes Palmer's flash-mob shaming as a hopeful sign. We may be living in dark times - the epoch he and other radical thinkers call the Anthropocene, in which our species has committed ecological devastation, presided over the sixth mass extinction event (animal populations across the planet have decreased by as much as 80% since 1900) and got our degraded kicks by offing lovely lions. But, in a dialectical twist, humans are becoming so aware of what we've done that we are now capable of bringing about change.

Morton sets out a political programme of liberating humans from the "patriarchal, hierarchical, heteronormative possibility space" that has constrained our species ever since our ancestors started farming in Mesopotamia 400 generations ago. It was then, he asserts, that humans started hubristically carving up the biosphere. Ever since, he contends, our very thinking has become rapaciously binary. Consider the Platonic distinction between body and soul. Consider Descartes' implicit suggestion that other animals are furry robots. Consider what Dostoevsky saw when he visited Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace: he found in it a metaphor for western civilisation, an immune system that brought the world's most diverting flora, fauna and industrial products under one roof, while whatever remained outside (war, genocide, slavery, unpleasant tropical diseases, human waste, expendable life forms) dwindled into irrelevance.

We have airbrushed out the historical disaster Morton calls "the Severing", a name that gives his argument a voguish Game of Thrones-like vibe. "The Severing," he explains, "is a catastrophe: an event that does not take place 'at' a certain 'point' in linear time, but a wave that ripples out in many dimensions, and in whose wake we are caught." The severing resembles the central trauma of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials novels. In that imagined world, children each have their daemons - until, that is, organised religion (evil Nicole Kidman in the film adaptation The Golden Compass) brutally severs the symbiotic pair in order to subjugate humanity. For Morton, our task is to become haunted beings again, possessed by a spectral sense of our connectedness to everything on this planet.

Cecil the lion in Hwange national park, Zimbabwe. Photograph: Reuters

How might we do that? Morton here attempts to retool Marxism to accommodate oppressed non-humans. Tough gig: Marx's thought is, you'd think, hopelessly anthropocentric, a philosophical artefact of the Severing. Morton demurs. His book is about adding "modes of anarchist thought back into Marxism, like the new medical therapy that consists of injecting fecal matter into another's ailing guts".

His fecal shock therapy sometimes seems like a quack cure, but one disarming aspect of Morton is his hopefulness. He loathes the smug leftist defeatism of his academic colleagues - their sense that capitalism won, that Earth is done, and all that remains is for self-serving professors to ringfence their critiques of neoliberalism and ecological ruination inside intellectual cordons sanitaires. In the Anthropocene, he realises, everyone is implicated. Even theory professors don't have clean hands.

Against defeatism, he pits hope. The size and scope of the outrage over Cecil's killing was, he argues, very different from, say, the Save the Whale protests of the 1970s. "The year 2015 was when a very large number of humans figured out they had more in common with a lion than a dentist," he claims.

Without wishing to sound pre-fecally defeatist, though, I'm doubtful. I don't think the reaction to Cecil's killing suggests we have anything significant in common with lions. Rather, the flash-mob shaming might well be thought of as projected self-loathing premised on realising that Palmer is the barbarous flipside to what we call human civilisation.

In his earlier book Dark Ecology Morton was on to something like this. He reflected that in Ridley Scott's dystopian thriller Blade Runner, the protagonist Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) comes to suspect he might be the enemy he has been ordered to hunt down. Humanity in the Anthropocene is like Deckard: we realise with - ideally, revolution-catalysing - horror that we are the problem.

There's another possibility Morton too quickly dismisses. Zambia's tourism minister Jean Kapata had a point when she suggested the reaction to Cecil's slaying showed westerners care more about African animals than African humans. No matter. We should, Morton argues in this exasperating, beguiling, intellectually reckless and restless book, have solidarity with non-humans - not just with charismatic megafauna such as Cecil, but algae, cutlery, rocks. This follows from his adherence to object-oriented ontology, the argument that nothing has privileged status and philosophers exist equally with Xboxes and excrement.

That's right - excrement. Even the stuff we throw away demands our solidarity. "The waste products in Earth's crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense," Morton writes. "One's garbage doesn't go 'away' - it just goes somewhere else." Good point, though I'd like him to argue that point in front of those living through the second month of Birmingham's refuse collectors' strike this summer.

Morton's garbage is like Freud's return of the repressed, in that it comes back to bite us in the philosophical ass: what we excrete remains part of us, as do the plastic bottles on landfill sites we thought we'd got rid of. Even more chasteningly, he insists that humans are not just composed of stardust (as Joni Mitchell once suggested), but of viruses, rubbish and bacteria. One-third of baby milk, for instance, is not digestible by the baby; rather it feeds the bacteria that coats the intestines with "immunity-bestowing film".

But how can we have solidarity with non-humans? One way, Morton suggests, is to abandon the anthropocentric idea that thinking is the leading communication mode. "Brushing against, licking or irradiating are ask access modes as valid (or as invalid ) as thinking," he writes. If he really wants solidarity with Cecil and algae, he should publish - somehow! - an edition of Humankind that can be accessed by licking, floating through, brushing against.

'Like Harrison Ford's Deckard in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner we realise with horror that we are the problem.' Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

Morton, wonderfully, doesn't balk at the nutty repercussions of his interdependence thesis (what he calls "implosive holism"). He asks at the outset: "Am I simply a vehicle for numerous bacteria that inhabit my microbiome? Or are they hosting me?" In what he calls the symbiotic real, it's not clear who is host and who parasite. All this recalls how Montaigne thought himself out of anthropocentrism with his remark: "When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?"

Morton, British-born professor of English at Rice University in Texas, is a fashionable thinker, the Montaigne of the Anthropocene - so much so that he was recently honoured with an appearance in Private Eye's Pseuds Corner. True, he's anathematised by philosophy departments for the wild thinking that makes him attractive to artworld hipsters such as Björk, Olafur Eliasson, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno. And yes, he may be a hypocrite (he racked up 350,000 air miles last year while hectoring us non-non-humans on our ecological crimes). But his developing anarchic communism is bracing. Here he heretically argues that consumerism, far from marking humanity's spiritual ruination (that default critique of our fate under late capitalism beloved of Frankfurt School miseryboots), might help promote ecological awareness, since it involves allowing ourselves to be haunted by things so that we can become the spectral humans he yearns us to be.

Morton's wild thinking has attracted Björk, Olafur Eliasson, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno

Here too he suggests we scrap the concept of "nature" and reclaim the upper scales of ecological coexistence, rather than - as the blurb deliriously has it - let agrochemical company "Monsanto and cryogenically suspended billionaires define them and own them". You don't have to holiday at Center Parcs to realise that "nature" is a hyperreal simulation devised to blind us to the "agrilogistic" rape of the Earth, but it might help you get inside Morton's mindset.

He is hardly the only philosopher to attempt to overcome anthropocentrism. Jeremy Bentham once devised an empathy test: "The question is not Can they reason?, nor Can they talk?, but Can they suffer?" Can rocks suffer? Frankly I don't know. Maybe I should ask my bowel bacteria. What I do know is that for Morton that kind of test is anathema in his quest for solidarity with non-humans, since such utilitarianism is too mired in agrilogistic liberal economics to serve as revolutionary ally.

Instead, he borrows from Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin the idea of "mutual aid" to flesh out of what he calls towards the end of the book "kindness". Kropotkin detected kinship between how ants and beetles bury their dead and how working-class Russians co-operated. All act not out of empathy, but from something more basic which Morton describes as "the zero-degree cheapest coexistence mode, something you rely on when all else fails". If this is kindness, Tim, it's not kindness as I've hitherto known it.

Morton's kindness is to do with being permeated by other beings, in recognising there is no inside-outside binary. The new human he yearns for passively allows him or herself to be infected by the healing solidarity of non-humans.

I struggle, too, with his theory of passivity with which he ends the book. He calls it "rocking", and it derives from his reflections on Buddhism. "This theory of action has to do with a highly necessary queering of the theistic categories of active versus passive." Rocking involves a quivering awareness of the interconnectedness of everything. We may think - in our heteronormative, hierarchical way - that rocks are inert, but really if we allowed ourselves to, we might realise that even rocks, well, rock. Morton isn't talking about mindfulness - which he, I think rightly, takes as a lie to keep willing subjects working at being calm and thus keeping capitalism's foot on our collective throat - but about a pleasantly mystic sensual communion with all that is.

How does passive rocking help bring about communism? Should we throw rocks at our oppressors or refrain from doing so because it would hurt their (the rocks') feelings? I don't know. I'm doubtful too whether Morton's ardent book is sufficient to the moment in which any communism is outsmarted (maybe that should be outstupided) by Trump's neoliberalism. But that's probably because I'm hobbled by the very mindset Morton here excoriates, namely "retweeting the agricultural age religion that is gumming up our ways of imagining a different future". Sorry for doing that, professor.

Humankind is published by Verso. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99

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Humankind by Timothy Morton review - no more leftist defeatism, everything is connected

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n 2015, Cecil the lion was shot with an arrow by a big-game hunting American called Walter Palmer. Facebook and Twitter erupted in outrage against the insouciant dentist, UN resolutions were passed, Palmer was stalked and his extradition to face charges in Zimbabwe demanded. Timothy Morton takes Palmer's flash-mob shaming as a hopeful sign.

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‎Planet: Critical: An Alternative India | Ashish Kothari on Apple Podcasts

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‎Planet: Critical: An Alternative India | Ashish Kothari on Apple Podcasts

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‎Show Planet: Critical, Ep An Alternative India | Ashish Kothari - 21 Jun 2023

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Grantham Research Institute on climate change and the environment

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To date, efforts to deliver a just transition to a net zero economy have focused on the energy system. However, the imperative of decent work and social inclusion applies equally to sectors that affect and are affected by nature.

This report defines a 'just nature transition' as a shift to a net zero and climate-resilient economy that delivers decent work, social inclusion and the eradication of poverty while simultaneously delivering biodiversity goals.

The authors explore how the financial sector can support positive outcomes for the just transition, focusing on four priority areas: delivering sustainable agriculture and food systems; ending deforestation; scaling up nature-based solutions; and restoring ocean ecosystems (see figure below). Examples of early-stage financial practice in these areas are provided throughout, such as from Climate Action 100+, the Investor Initiative for Sustainable Forests, Rabobank and the UNEP Sustainable Blue Economy Finance Initiative.
The just nature transition and the role of finance:

Main messages

The just transition to a net zero economy is increasingly understood as being critical to delivering ambitious climate action, but the focus must be expanded to consider the transformations needed in sectors that are integral to climate and biodiversity.

Progress in the just nature transition requires an unprecedented increase in investment this decade. Support from financial institutions is therefore crucial.

The just nature transition remains a new, complex area for policy and practice. While there are opportunities for delivering environmental progress through decent work and social inclusion, there are also a number of challenges to overcome.

Recommendations for the financial sector

Three summary principles to guide action in support of the just nature transition are:

1. Integrate human rights and labour standards across climate and biodiversity action.

2. Anticipate, analyse and address the social risks and opportunities of the transition to sustainability across sectors for workers, suppliers, communities and consumers.

3. Ensure meaningful participation and partnership through social dialogue with workers as well as wider engagement with other affected stakeholders. This will often involve empowering groups excluded from decision-making, whether by income, gender or race.

More specific recommendations for financial institutions include:

Include just transition principles in their own plans for net zero, nature and biodiversity. The just transition also needs to be incorporated into collective finance initiatives such as those aiming to promote sustainable agriculture, end deforestation, expand nature-based solutions and restore the oceans.

Set just transition expectations of the businesses they lend to and invest in, based on international standards, and ensure these are included in the net zero and biodiversity plans of nature-exposed companies.

Channel finance to companies committed to and making progress to support a just nature transition for workers, suppliers, communities and consumers. This includes the development of innovative financial solutions to attract capital towards activities that benefit nature and people.

Engage with policymakers to reform agricultural, forestry and nature policies so that they support a just transition and provide the incentives, rules and catalytic public finance that is needed to scale up private investment.

Work to ensure that social and just transition factors are effectively included in key frameworks for reporting and transparency, such as the Task Force for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). Financial institutions themselves should publicly disclose strategies, policies and performance on social issues in the transition to sustainability beyond the energy sector.

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Just Nature: How finance can support a just transition at the interface of action on climate and biodiversity - Grantham Research Institute on climate change and the environment

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This report explores how to achieve a just transition to a net zero and climate-resilient economy in nature-based sectors.

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Envisioning environmental equity: climate change, health, and racial justice

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Available online 29 May 2023

Author links open overlay panel a b , , Prof Jason Hickel PhD c d , , , , , a h , , , , , , Prof Delan Devakumar PhD a

Show more

Summary

Climate change has a broad range of health impacts and tackling climate change could be the greatest opportunity for improving global health this century. Yet conversations on climate change and health are often incomplete, giving little attention to structural discrimination and the need for racial justice. Racism kills, and climate change kills. Together, racism and climate change interact and have disproportionate effects on the lives of minoritised people both within countries and between the Global North and the Global South. This paper has three main aims. First, to survey the literature on the unequal health impacts of climate change due to racism, xenophobia, and discrimination through a scoping review. We found that racially minoritised groups, migrants, and Indigenous communities face a disproportionate burden of illness and mortality due to climate change in different contexts. Second, this paper aims to highlight inequalities in responsibility for climate change and the effects thereof. A geographical visualisation of responsibility for climate change and projected mortality and disease risk attributable to climate change per 100 000 people in 2050 was conducted. These maps visualise the disproportionate burden of illness and mortality due to climate change faced by the Global South. Our third aim is to highlight the pathways through which climate change, discrimination, and health interact in most affected areas. Case studies, testimony, and policy analysis drawn from multidisciplinary perspectives are presented throughout the paper to elucidate these pathways. The health community must urgently examine and repair the structural discrimination that drives the unequal impacts of climate change to achieve rapid and equitable action.

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Envisioning environmental equity: climate change, health, and racial justice

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Climate change has a broad range of health impacts and tackling climate change could be the greatest opportunity for improving global health this cent...

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Doughnut Economics - Dr Kate Raworth - 12 Jun 2023 · 56 minutes

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Doughnut Economics - Dr Kate Raworth - 12 Jun 2023 · 56 minutes

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Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, hosts of Britain's biggest podcast (The Rest Is Politics), have joined forces once again for their new interview podcast, 'Leading'.Every Monday, Rory and Alastair interrogate, converse with, and interview some of the world's biggest names - from both inside and outside of politics - about life, leadership, or leading the way in their chosen field.Whether they're sports stars, thought-leaders, presidents or internationally-recognised religious figures, Alastair and Rory lift the lid on the motivation, philosophy and secrets behind their career.Tune in to 'Leading' now to hear essential conversation from some of the world's most enthralling individuals.

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Welcome to the Wales Net Zero 2035 Group

News - We have launched our first challenge: How could Wales feed itself by 2035?

What we do

The world is experiencing the disastrous impacts of the climate crisis and is currently off track to avert further impacts. Leading scientists recently issued what they called "our final warning". The Welsh Government and Plaid Cymru have jointly invited an independent group to explore how the country can speed up its transition to net zero, and how amending its target to 2035 from 2050 could be made possible.

The 'Group', led by former Environment Minister Jane Davidson, is tasked with:

finding the best examples of transformative change from Wales and around the world and bringing them to Wales;

challenging the Welsh government and Senedd (Welsh Parliament) to go further and faster;

imagining what a fairer, more sustainable future looks like for the Welsh nation.

Who we are

The Group is made up of 25 independent, unpaid members and includes representatives from the Welsh Youth Parliament. The Group is supported by a Secretariat, alongside the Wales Centre for Public Policy who have also been asked by the Welsh Government to support the work of the Group as an independent institution.

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Welcome to the Wales Net Zero 2035 Group The world is experiencing the disastrous impacts of the climate crisis and is currently off track to avert further impacts. Leading scientists recently issued what they called "our final warning".

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Three online courses for trade unionists;

A Trade Union Guide to Just Transition

Social justice must be at the heart of the development of a net-zero carbon economy.

Climate Change Awareness

This short introductory course is aimed at trade unionists and anyone wishing to develop their understanding of the issues around climate change.

Air Quality – a trade union issue

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This short introductory course is aimed at trade unionists and anyone wishing to develop their understanding of the issues around climate change.

The course is divided into 4 modules. The modules contain background information, short videos, graphs and illustrations.

At the end of each section, there are references and links to additional materials if you want to go further. There are no formal tests and you can work through the materials at your own pace but there are optional quizzes to check your understanding at the end of modules 1, 2 and 3.

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This short introductory course is aimed at trade unionists and anyone wishing to develop their understanding of the issues around climate change. The course is divided into 4 modules. The modules contain background information, short videos, graphs and illustrations. At the end of each section, there are references and links to additional materials if you want to go further.

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The "grassroots" backlash to a traffic reduction scheme in Oxfordshire is being boosted by an international network of established climate and Covid science deniers and amplified by right-wing media, DeSmog can report.

The group 'Not Our Future' made headlines last month by putting leaflets through Oxfordshire residents' letterboxes calling them "guinea pigs" in the UK's first "climate lockdown". This was a reference to a conspiracy theory about a government plan to curb people's freedoms.

False claims about the Oxfordshire County Council scheme to cut traffic and pollution went viral online, with one tweet by climate sceptic author Jordan Peterson being viewed 7.5 million times. The claims, which have seen local councillors receive death threats, have been fact-checked and debunked as misleading, and the council has described them as "harmful to public debate".

Not Our Future's director David Fleming, an anti-Covid lockdown and vaccine activist, presents his campaign as a people-powered movement opposed to a coming "authoritarian future" imposed by what he calls "The Blob".

However, DeSmog can report that the group was conceived by Fleming years before the pandemic or the Oxfordshire scheme, and is backed by a network of high-profile climate deniers and conspiracy theorists based in the UK, Canada, the United States and Australia.

It is also the latest sign of a growing alliance between opponents of climate action and anti-Covid vaccine conspiracy theorists. Not Our Future's founding signatories include Kathy Gyngell, a trustee of Tufton Street think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the UK's main climate science denial group.

Gyngell's website TCW hosted an anti-vaccine event in London last week with climate denial author James Delingpole, anti-vax MP Andrew Bridgen, and 90s pop group Right Said Fred, the public face of Not Our Future.

Experts say fears generated by the Covid pandemic are being exploited to oppose green policies.

"Until 2020, fear-mongering about so-called 'green tyranny' had little to point towards, and often felt like an abstract, even lame Boogeyman," said Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) think tank.

"The pandemic was a moment of genuine trauma for millions of people," she said. "That trauma has been weaponised by the anti-climate lobby, who now condemn any public policy as an 'infringement on civil liberties' and draw direct comparisons with Covid."

Trouble in Oxford

Oxfordshire County Council is trialling a traffic filter scheme which requires permits on six roads for cars - but not buses, vans, taxis, heavy goods vehicles or motorbikes - to cut traffic and pollution. Parts of Oxford already have a low traffic neighbourhood (LTN) scheme in place.

In December, posts on social media falsely conflated the proposed traffic filter with a separate scheme for 15-minute cities - the idea that people should be able to reach amenities close to their homes - and labelled it a "climate lockdown".

The subject was raised in parliament for the first time last week by Conservative MP Nick Fletcher, who called 15-minute cities an "international socialist concept". There was also a segment on the topic on last night's episode of BBC Newsnight.

Not Our Future

The backlash spilled out into the real world with Not Our Future's leaflet campaign in Oxford in January. The group was registered as a limited company in August 2022 by Fleming, who has a background in marketing for Formula One racing.

In 2020, Fleming founded Covid-19 Assembly, a Covid denial group which was dissolved as a limited company in April 2022, without having published any accounts, according to openDemocracy.

While Fleming is best known for his Covid activism, DeSmog can reveal that he claims his first motivation for setting up the campaign was his opposition to the UK's climate policies.

In an interview last month, Fleming said: "I first came up with this idea three, four years ago because of climate. Theresa May had signed us up to Net Zero, and the public just didn't know anything. I didn't know how to start it then, whereas Covid gave me that opportunity to step up."

He said the purpose of the campaign was to promote " the great reset", a right-wing conspiracy theory about a global plot by sinister forces to impose their will on the world. It distorts a real sustainability initiative launched by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2020 in response to the Covid pandemic.

However, Not Our Future conceals this agenda. "We're not talking about 'the great reset', that kind of thing, you know, up front", Fleming said in the interview. "We just want people to say, 'Yeah, we want a better future. We don't want that thing that's coming towards us, that's been foisted on us'. It's basically a common ground that anyone can identify with and go from there."

In the interview, Fleming also promoted the bogus Climategate scandal of 2009, which he said showed climate scientists were "colluding and manipulating data" and "creating a hoax" - a claim contradicted by multiple enquiries.

This anti-climate message permeates Not Our Future's propaganda. The group's website lists what it calls "de-industrialisation caused by the NetZero energy crisis" among the areas where "governments around the world are laying the tracks for a bleak and authoritarian future".

The website's reference to "The Blob" may refer to the so-called "green blob", an old term of abuse for environmental groups.

The group's leaflets also reject climate science, claiming the world is in an "ice age" and that "the climate is changing as it always does" in a "natural cycle", and that "achieving Net Zero by 2050 will destroy our way of life".

Fleming Responds

Not Our Future's website and social media posts say it plans to spread its message across the country, and Fleming has suggested people lobby their MPs to support its aims.

When contacted by DeSmog, Fleming rejected the notion that he was hiding his real politics. "I am not disguising anything. I'm trying to be 100 percent open and truthful about everything," he said.

Fleming said the WEF's plans were "laid out in public" and accused DeSmog of being funded by "billionaires".

He defended his views on climate change and Covid, claiming he studied "environmental science" and health.

"I understand the scientific method and have enough grounding in public health and the atmosphere to understand what scientists and doctors on both sides are saying to make my own mind up," he said.

On his foreign supporters, Fleming said "Not Our Future isn't just a UK project", and when asked about his funding, he said: "I don't have to disclose anything to you. However, 95 percent of money spent so far has come directly from me."

Tufton Street and Climate Deniers

Not Our Future's website lists its "founding signatories", many of whom have links to climate science denial or conspiracy theory politics.

Kathy Gyngell is a trustee of the GWPF, the Tufton Street think tank whose campaign arm Net Zero Watch has called for "a new fleet of coal-fired power plants" and the "complete" phaseout of wind and solar power.

Gyngell is also editor of TCW, formerly The Conservative Woman, a website which regularly publishes climate science denial and Covid misinformation.

TCW hosted an anti-vaccine event in South London on February 10 featuring Andrew Bridgen MP, who was suspended from the Conservative Party last month for likening Covid vaccines to the Holocaust.

Gyngell did not respond when contacted for comment.

Other signatories include veteran climate denier James Delingpole - who was also at the TCW panel - and actor Laurence Fox, head of the Reclaim Party, which has campaigned against low-traffic neighbourhood (LTN) schemes. Reclaim representative Lois Perry runs CAR26, a climate denial pressure group.

Another founding signatory is Vernon Coleman, author of a self-published book called A Bigger Problem than Climate Change: The End of Oil, who calls climate change a "malicious, dangerous myth" and refers on his blog to "the global warming hoax which is going to destroy us".

Signatory Robin Monotti, a filmmaker, tweeted in December that "The CO2 causing #ClimateChange narrative is a hoax", and shared the "World Climate Declaration", an open letter denying basic climate science organised by the Climate Intelligence Foundation (CLINTEL), a lobby group backed by fossil fuel interests.

Another signatory is prominent Australian climate denial tweeter Peter Clack, who praises carbon dioxide in his Twitter bio. Earlier this month he posted: "Powerful globalists like the World Economic Forum in league with the United Nations are about to seize control of the majority of the world by stealth. Climate is just a distraction."

Signatory Del Bigtree, an U.S. filmmaker and founder of the Informed Consent Action Network, an anti-vaccine group, has repeatedly promoted the idea of "climate lockdowns".

Not Our Future's website bears a statement that reads: "The Founding Signatories have no role in the running of the organisation or campaign apart from their endorsement and support."

Anti-Climate Amplifiers

The idea that Oxfordshire's traffic filter scheme is a "climate lockdown" was amplified by a familiar list of climate denial influencers.

These include Steve Milloy, a Fox News contributor and director at the Heartland Institute, which has received funding from ExxonMobil. In December Milloy tweeted: "Oxford (UK) to introduce first climate lockdown".

As mentioned above, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has become a leading spreader of climate science denial, spread the false Oxfordshire "climate lockdown" claim to his 3.8 million followers, in a tweet viewed 7.5 million times.

Peterson has promoted several well-known climate deniers through his YouTube channel in the past two months, including Judith Curry, Alex Epstein, and Richard Lindzen.

GB News Support

Several of Not Our Future's backers are linked to GB News, the climate sceptic TV channel whose owners, Dubai-based investment firm Legatum Group, run a think tank, Legatum Institute, which has received donations from the American Koch Industries oil dynasty.

The channel also has a record of broadcasting misinformation about Covid vaccines. Presenter Mark Steyn parted ways with GB News last week amid two Ofcom investigations into claims made on his show.

Not Our Future is fronted by Richard and Fred Fairbrass of the pop group Right Said Fred, who frequently appear on GB News and have expressed anti-Covid vaccine views.

A spokesperson for Right Said Fred told DeSmog that the brothers were aware of Fleming's views, and said that the TCW panel they spoke on last week was not an anti-vaccine event. When asked if they agreed with Fleming that climate change is a hoax, they said "the issue of climate change is still being debated".

Three GB News presenters - Neil Oliver, Calvin Robinson, and Laurence Fox - are founding signatories of Not Our Future. Oliver promoted the false Oxfordshire "climate lockdown" story on GB News alongside CAR26 director Lois Perry. Oliver was recently criticised by Jewish groups for promoting conspiracy theories with antisemitic roots.

Fox recently interviewed Oliver on GB News about the "government narrative" on Covid vaccines and how broadcasting regulator OfCom has "stifled debate". A tweet promoting the segment read: "We don't want 15 minute cities, we don't want net zero, we don't want digital IDs, we just want to be left alone."

Social media user turned political commentator June Slater, who has appeared on GB News to say that climate change is not an "emergency" but rather a "strategy", has also promoted the idea that Covid travel restrictions were "mission creep" designed to prepare the public for "climate lockdown".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Adam Barnett, Michaela Herrmann and Christopher Deane

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Revealed: The Science Denial Network Behind Oxford's 'Climate Lockdown' Backlash

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The "grassroots" backlash to a traffic reduction scheme in Oxfordshire is being boosted by an international network of established climate and Covid science deniers and amplified by right-wing media, DeSmog can report. The group 'Not Our Future' made headlines last month by putting leaflets through Oxfordshire residents' letterboxes calling them "guinea pigs" in the UK's [...]

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Big Oil's Real Agenda on Climate Change 2022

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Following up on InfluenceMap's 2019 edition of 'Big Oil's Real Agenda', this latest report compares and contrasts the public communications, business operations, and policy engagement of 5 'supermajor' oil companies: BP, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies. The report provides evidence of significant inconsistencies between the companies' use of 'green claims' with their investment strategies and policy engagement on climate change.

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Overheating, drafts, mould, damp, and poor air quality, are common issues in the workplace as a result of poor maintenance and lack of insulation. This can contribute to ill health including respiratory conditions & allergies.

Reduce costs and build a working relationship with your employer

The cost of heating and cooling is putting businesses under risk of closure. Improving insulation and replacing inefficient old equipment can slash a building's energy use, when done correctly. Your ideas for reducing workplace accidents and increasing energy efficiency will appeal to your employer and help build a good working relationship.

Take climate action and mobilise new members

Climate change is a great issue for recruitment and organising, in particular with younger workers. Reducing energy use and decarbonising heat sources can decrease carbon emissions, in many cases up to 60%. Upgrading old buildings emits much less carbon than building new ones. Talking to workers about the unions' efforts and the support it needs, can help to attract new, active members to your branch.

Talk to workers about it

Talk to all workers, not just members. Have they been too hot or cold at work, or had problems with ventilation or damp?

Are they feeling OK? Have they got ideas for how to deal with building issues?

Do they understand how the temperature could be adjusted?

Are there particular times or parts of their work process when temperatures are a problem?

What issues have they noticed? (e.g. damp, gaps, cracks in walls)

Make sure incidents or ill health are reported to your employer and recorded in the accident book.

Are building works (such as boiler, ventilation, and cooling systems) completed by outside contractors being signed off and handed over by a professional?

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IPCC Synthesis Report - March 2023 (Sumamry)

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A podcast on climate change hosted by the Danish Minister of Climate, Energy and Utilities Dan Jørgensen. Inviting some of the world's leading experts, policy makers and activists to share their thoughts with us. Not only to address the challenges and dilemmas inherent in climate change. But also to talk about its possible solutions.

A podcast on climate change hosted by the Danish Minister of Climate, Energy and Utilities Dan Jørgensen. Inviting some of the world's leading experts, policy makers and activists to share their thoughts with us. Not only to address the challenges and dilemmas inherent in climate change. But also to talk about its possible solutions.

Surprisingly positive

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A podcast on climate change hosted by the Danish Minister of Climate, Energy and Utilities Dan Jørgensen. Inviting some of the world's leading experts, policy makers and activists to share their thoughts with us. Not only to address the challenges and dilemmas inherent in climate change. But also to...

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Overheating, drafts, mould, damp, and poor air quality, are common issues in the workplace as a result of poor maintenance and lack of insulation. This can contribute to ill health including respiratory conditions & allergies.

Reduce costs and build a working relationship with your employer

The cost of heating and cooling is putting businesses under risk of closure. Improving insulation and replacing inefficient old equipment can slash a building's energy use, when done correctly. Your ideas for reducing workplace accidents and increasing energy efficiency will appeal to your employer and help build a good working relationship.

Take climate action and mobilise new members

Climate change is a great issue for recruitment and organising, in particular with younger workers. Reducing energy use and decarbonising heat sources can decrease carbon emissions, in many cases up to 60%. Upgrading old buildings emits much less carbon than building new ones. Talking to workers about the unions' efforts and the support it needs, can help to attract new, active members to your branch.

Talk to workers about it

Talk to all workers, not just members. Have they been too hot or cold at work, or had problems with ventilation or damp?

Are they feeling OK? Have they got ideas for how to deal with building issues?

Do they understand how the temperature could be adjusted?

Are there particular times or parts of their work process when temperatures are a problem?

What issues have they noticed? (e.g. damp, gaps, cracks in walls)

Make sure incidents or ill health are reported to your employer and recorded in the accident book.

Are building works (such as boiler, ventilation, and cooling systems) completed by outside contractors being signed off and handed over by a professional?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The TUC guide to building retrofit at work

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Cold and draughty buildings with poor air quality affect our wellbeing and health at work. Running buildings is increasingly expensive due to the cost of living and energy bill crisis, and is the third largest carbon emitting sector globally. Done in the right way, maintenance and retrofit can fix these issues.

# data[].attributes.headline
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GwyrddNi is a community-based, community-led climate action movement that brings people together in five areas of Gwynedd to discuss, share and act locally to tackle climate change.

We are part of social enterprise DEG and our work is funded by The National Lottery's Climate Action Fund. In each of the five areas we work we do so in partnership with a thriving, local social enterprise: Ynni Llŷn in Pen Llŷn, Cwmni Bro in Bro Ffestiniog, Yr Orsaf/ Siop Griffiths in Dyffryn Nantlle, Cyd Ynni in Dyffryn Peris and Partneriaeth Ogwen in Dyffryn Ogwen.

During 2022-2023 we will host a series of four Community Assemblies on the Climate in these five areas, facilitating a community-generated climate action plan.

Explore our website or get in touch to find out more about our work.

Find out more

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
GwyrddNi is a community-based, community-led climate action movement that brings people together in five areas of Gwynedd to discuss, share and act locally to tackle climate change. We are part of social enterprise DEG and our work is funded by The National Lottery's Climate Action Fund.