Contextual Evidence Report INFORMING STRATEGY TO ACHIEVE CARBON NEUTRALITY, RESILLIENCE AND NATURE RECOVERY IN STROUD DISTRICT BY 2030 Contents 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................... 3 1.1 The scope of this paper .................................................................................................... 3 1.2 Aims of the paper ............................................................................................................. 3 2. Global Context ................................................................................................................... 4 2.1 What is Climate Change? ................................................................................................. 5 2.2 Understanding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions ........................................................... 7 2.3 Global Effects ................................................................................................................. 12 2.4 A Global Policy Context .................................................................................................. 14 2.5 Ecological Emergency..................................................................................................... 24 3. UK Policy Context ................................................................................................................. 27 3.1 The UK Climate Change Act (2008) ................................................................................ 28 3.2 UK Declaration and Vision ............................................................................................. 31 3.3 UK Government Clean Growth Strategy ........................................................................ 33 3.4 UK Climate Assembly ..................................................................................................... 33 3.5 A District Council Context .............................................................................................. 34 4. UK GHG emissions ................................................................................................................ 36 4.1 UK GHG in 2019.............................................................................................................. 36 4.2 UK GHG by sector ........................................................................................................... 38 4.3 UK Reccomendations and A District Remit .................................................................... 40 5. Stroud District Council and Climate Change ........................................................................ 42 5.1 Commitment to Climate change .................................................................................... 42 5.2 Baseline Emissions ......................................................................................................... 43 5.3 Background Evidence ..................................................................................................... 45 1. Introduction 1.1 The scope of this paper On 13th November 2018, a Climate Emergency was announced by the Stroud District Council Administration which pledged “to do everything within the Council’s power to make Stroud District Carbon Neutral by 2030”. Stroud District Council is preparing its strategy and plan to fulfil 2030 ambitions. This paper has been prepared by our researchers to coordinate and consolidate a range of evidence including scientific papers, policy documentation, specialist commissioned reports and district survey data in order to inform the strategy and plan. 1.2 Aims of the paper The Background Paper’s aims are to: 1. Summarise the global context for the extent of the climate change challenge and the global policy context to the recent declarations of the climate change emergency 2. Review the commitment of the UK government as the first national parliament1 to declare a climate change emergency 2.1 Summarise the relevant national policy framework 2.2 Summarise the national emissions picture 2.3 Reflect on the scope of District Council policy making within this 3. Provide local context for the climate change emergency and evidence on the impacts of climate change for the Stroud District 1 Scotland and Wales were the world’s first governments to declare a climate emergency 2. Global Context Climate Change: A Planetary Emergency ‘Climate change is the defining issue of our time and now is the defining moment to do something about it’2 Climate change is one of the most challenging issues that modern society faces and has been developing slowly over the last 150 years. But the rate of change has been increasing more dramatically over the last 30 years; the consequences of which are likely to be physically and economically ruinous on a global scale. According to the latest Global Risks Report published by the World Economic Forum3, data collected from a survey of members of the World Economic Forum’s multi-stakeholder community indicate that: climate change related issues have for the first time dominated all the top five long-term risks in terms of likelihood and also make up three of the top five risks by impact. 2 UN Climate Action Summit 23 September 2019, on https://www.un.org/ClimateChange 3 http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risk_Report_2020.pdf 2.1 What is Climate Change? “a change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g. using statistical tests) … and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer. It refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or 45. as a result of human activity” - - INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) Established in 1988, the IPCC is an intergovernmental body of the United Nations for assessing the science related to climate change. Awareness and a partial understanding of the Earth system and climate change predates the IPCC by many decades. There is increasing evidence of anthropogenic6 influences on climate change and the IPCC has made increasingly more definitive statements about human impacts on climate. Debate has stimulated a wide variety of climate change research with the main scientific conclusions that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal7 and that human influence on the climate system is clear and growing8. In its Fourth Assessment Report (2007), the IPCC provides a review of the historical perspective that has led to the current state of climate change knowledge9. The climate system is a complex, interactive system consisting of the atmosphere, land surface, snow and ice, oceans and other bodies of water, and living things. It evolves over time under the influence of its own internal dynamics and due to changes in external factors that affect climate (called ‘forcings’). External forcings include natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions and solar variations, as well as human induced changes in atmospheric composition. 4 https://archive.ipcc.ch/pdf/special-reports/srex/SREX-Annex_Glossary.pdf 5 This is different from that in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), where climate change is defined as: “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.” The UNFCCC thus makes a distinction between climate change attributable to human activities altering the atmospheric composition, and climate variability attributable to natural causes. 6 Resulting from or produced by human beings 7 IPCC Working Group I report, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis 8 IPCC (2014), Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report 9 Le Treut, H., R. Somerville, U. Cubasch, Y. Ding, C. Mauritzen, A. Mokssit, T. Peterson and M. Prather, 2007: Historical Overview of Climate Change. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA. Solar radiation powers the climate system. There are three fundamental ways to change the radiation balance of the Earth: incoming solar radiation - changes in Earth’s orbit or in the Sun itself reflected solar radiation ‘albedo’ - changes in cloud cover, atmospheric particles or vegetation longwave radiation back from Earth towards space - by changing greenhouse gas concentrations Climate, in turn, responds directly to such changes, as well as indirectly, through a variety of feedback mechanisms. The reason the Earth’s surface is warm is the presence of greenhouse gases (GHG), which act as a partial blanket for the longwave radiation coming from the surface. This blanketing is known as the natural greenhouse effect. The two most abundant gases in the atmosphere, nitrogen (comprising 78% of the dry atmosphere) and oxygen (comprising 21%) exert almost no greenhouse effect. Instead, the greenhouse effect comes from molecules that are more complex such as water vapour and, the most important, carbon dioxide CO2. Methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and several other gases present in the atmosphere also contribute to the greenhouse effect. Clouds, on the other hand, do exert a blanketing effect similar to that of the greenhouse gases