Climate-ready places

Making Yorkshire climate-ready
Yorkshire and the Humber face the interrelated challenges of rapidly reducing carbon emissions and restoring nature in urban and rural settings alongside those of reducing inequalities and improving wellbeing. The region’s high proportion of older building stock (pre-1920 buildings, some listed) and high energy bills demand retrofit solutions. But high costs and the lack of agreed standards for effective retrofit, especially in heritage settings (including, but not limited to, conservation areas), stand in the way. Similarly, the future role of land and landscapes in nature recovery, carbon reduction, and climate resilience is subject to multiple statutory duties that are not locally integrated. They include (non-exhaustively) carbon budgets, Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirements for new development, Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRS), water and flood risk management and coastal change management. Barriers to climate policy innovation often arise from a lack of confidence that workable solutions can be scaled or replicated, alongside capacity to invest in the collaborations needed to address the complex challenges. Demonstrators are needed to show place-based Net Zero initiatives can work well, attracting investment, enjoying community support, and unlocking barriers to wider adoption.

How We Work
This work package builds on the Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commission’s (YHCC) regional networks and is in effect, a cluster of accelerator projects for the Commission’s flagship projects, which provide rapid pathways to impact across the region. The team includes the expertise of key sector partners such as Stockholm Environment Institute, York Civic Trust, and Leeds Beckett University as well as the Climate Commissions’ Team at the University of Leeds. The urban resilience demonstrator projects of St. Nick’s in York and The Green Estate CIC in Sheffield provide further community-led, collaborative local insight alongside the academic-led activities. We are also drawing learning from the community funded projects, exploring how they support climate adaptation efforts in their communities and places.

Why It Matters
Regardless of how climate, and indeed wider environmental action, is being positioned in the media and political debates, there remains a large amount of common interest. By focussing on the benefits of climate action to wellbeing, health, and wider society needs (like community cohesion and resilience), we aim to support policymakers and communities to continue accelerating their work on this critical area, including providing compelling evidence to inform strong businesses cases at a time when budgets are being pulled in several directions.

Our Priorities

Retrofit – reduce carbon emissions in historic built environments, with the aim of maximising health benefits at the same time
Land use – provide insights and evidence that support the effective implementation of the Local Nature Recovery Strategies, by exploring how they work at local authority and neighbourhood scales.
Environmental resilience – demonstrate climate action in diverse places, including why and how it is important to businesses, with a view to scaling up and transferring learning and insight

Climate-ready historic built environments

This workstream looks to enable historical and heritage built environments to become fit for purpose in the changing climate, for the benefit of their users and of meeting climate targets.

This exploration of retrofit will include:

mapping current available guidance and scoping the existing policy drivers and hooks that enable or constrain heritage retrofit
interviews with retrofit and conservation officers from local and combined authorities across Yorkshire
producing a decision tree guidance document to understand the different routes taken to retrofit heritage and historical buildings
a listed building case study at Fairfax House, York

Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commission (YHCC) policy engagement

Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commission are utilising their existing work streams to support YPIP’s focus on sustainable living in a greener economy.

They will be producing policy papers on:

Retrofit and health
Retrofit and relational energy decision-making
Use of Conservation Areas as proactive planning policies
Integrated land-use indicators
Fair and inclusive climate action

YHCC colleagues will also be exploring what support would help communities initiatives adapt to climate risks. This work will be carried out with a stakeholder group of St Nicks and The Green Estate demonstrator projects, and the climate theme projects funded through the Communities Innovating Yorkshire Fund.

YHCC [email protected]

Future land management integration pilots

This workstream looks to optimise the impacts of land-use change for nature recovery, amenity and climate mitigation, by piloting place-based integration of key policy drivers.

The work package will explore local applications of Local Nature Recovery Strategies (LNRS) to go from broad regional strategies linked to policies for biodiversity improvements towards identifying specific places in actual neighbourhoods where land use changes can take place:

evaluating co-design approaches

reporting on spatial land-use change scenarios that optimise biodiversity gains, cultural/amenity gains, and climate mitigation;
delivering workshops to critique the land-use change options.

St Nicks: Green Corridors demonstrator (York)

This demonstrator project is utilising existing work and relationships to test and demonstrate the vale of improved knowledge exchange in increasing nature recovery. It will use ‘Wild York’ to demonstrate a model of community-connected nature recovery that may be adapted and applied in other communities.

St. Nicks will be:

establishing and running the Green Corridors York community of practice
developing Wild York to be an online resource for data networking, reporting and learning

Jonathan Dent [email protected]

The Green Estate: Urban Resilience demonstrator

The Green Estate urban resilience demonstrator project is convening communities to co-design a blueprint for place-based urban resilience and build capacity in growing green and resilient urban areas for people and nature to thrive.

There are three main strands to this project:

Defining and creating a blueprint for place-based urban resilience – a rapid review of existing global definitions of ‘place-based urban resilience’ carried out by researchers at the University of Hull has found that this combination of terms is not widely adopted in theory and practice, with these elements often connected to one another in discussions but rarely under an overarching term of ‘place-based urban resilience’. A working definition of ‘place-based urban resilience’ has been developed as a starting point for future discussions.

Co-designing with the local community to understand what place-based urban resilience means to them – expert Dr Al Mathers is developing and delivering a co-design programme with our local community to tell the ‘Changing Story of Manor Castle Ward’. A community group will come together to discover the past stories of our local Ward, share what’s happening now and what could be the future – members of the group will be community detectives, storytellers and changemakers all rolled into one!

Learning together through showcases and masterclasses to grow green and resilient urban places – showcases and masterclasses are being held to bring together experts, researchers and local community members to explore topics related to place-based urban resilience.

Roz Davies [email protected]