Cross Cutting Themes

• Develop a cross organisational vision for a net-zero Devon

• Train staff as climate champions
• Initiate carbon literacy CPD programmes and support behaviour change in staff
• Embed carbon metrics as KPIs within businesses
• Create local shared work hubs with subsidised rent e.g. in village halls and encourage people to work at or closer to home. Reward businesses for encouraging home working
• Procurement to prioritise carbon and ecological impact, looking to source locally where most beneficial
• Set up or use existing sectoral forums to share best practice and guidance

• Strengthen climate education and engagement to increase carbon and ecological literacy, understanding of the impacts of climate change to their lives and to empower people to reduce their carbon footprint in Devon through:
  • A programme of digital and print media campaigns
  • Offer hope and inspiration to people to overcome fear of climate change by highlighting benefits of acting, clear pathways to do so and regular sharing of Devon success stories, as well as global stories to counteract cynicism.
  • Reach out to people where they are in their everyday lives
  • Use plain English
  • Draw on existing research into effective climate change communication to position messaging
  • Highlight global and intergenerational moral implications of climate change
  • Public events
  • Create physical premises in every town to act as accessible hubs for information, education, training & co-ordination
  • Provide a one-stop public information service
  • Council to provide seed investment into behaviour change programmes
  • Identify policy and community system level interventions to disrupt carbon intensive and ecologically damaging social norms
  • Increase access to nature in peoples’ lives
  • Initiate public debate about changes we might need to make to the economy, e.g. explore post-growth economy debates
• Creating resilient communities must be deliberative and participatory, rather than being “done to” communities
• Collaborate and work with local community groups and with environmental organisations to deliver education
• Instil values of caring for people, the earth and sharing resources and cultivate gratitude
• Teach permaculture techniques and processes to embed holistic view
• Fund transition street style model

• Increase curriculum content on climate change and opportunities in schools to prepare children for living net-zero lives and to reach parents through children
• Teacher training around climate change education
• Use Ofsted to evaluate and enforce progress on schools’ climate change education and day to day practices
• Use parent networks i.e.newsletters of schools to educate wider community re climate issues

• Create a value shift away from consumerism
• Educate people about the carbon emissions and ecological impact of “scope 3” emissions
• Meet needs currently being met by consumerism in more sustainable ways:
• E.g. Offer greater opportunities for education, reducing work pressure and unpaid work hours, developing cultural resources for celebrations and community events.

Local Government as Key Connector and Convener of stakeholders

• Council must offer clear leadership on climate change
• Develop a local carbon trading scheme, however, prioritise reduction over offsetting:
  • Ensure standardised and clear definition of net zero, including offsetting methods, effectiveness, tools, certification and evidence requirements and the necessary support and resources for organisations to integrate this
  • Ensure offsetting is socially just
  • Agree on a common standard for tenders to be compared on, such as the Carbon Trust Footprint Label for products and ISO 14064, and push for regional alignment
• Systematic sharing of existing climate policy databases into intelligent open-access platforms, e.g. Climate View, Panorama.
• Consider news ways to raise taxes locally or raise levies to fund shift
• Deny permission to cultural events and festivals which are not compatible with a zero-carbon future e.g. air shows
• Provide support to parish councils to reduce emissions locally, including staffing an advisor to parishes and helping to identify baseline assessments
• A plan to develop sustainable health and social care community-based services in Devon
  • Making Devon an exemplar of sustainable health and care
  • Initiate whole community pilots
  • Encourage preventative medicine

• Ensure climate change and the ecological emergency are considered in all policy across departments and realign budgets accordingly
• Divest from fossil fuels and carbon intensive activities
• Develop a ‘social value framework’ for procurement to reduce footprint, encourage tendering businesses to adopt footprint calculation of services and increase local resilience
• Local government to report of their carbon footprint annually
• Practice participatory budgeting to increase democratic input
• Integrate regular deliberative citizens assemblies into council decision making and as a form of check and balance to the execution of meeting the transition net-zero, including opportunities to participate in planning
• Make Devon a unitary council to pool funds

• Address concerns over 5G, its energy use and adverse health and ecological impacts
• Outline and communicate to public the investment programme in infrastructure required for net-zero Devon.
• Local Authorities to issue mutual bonds to raise capital for infrastructure and reducing carbon
• Account for mineral use and ecological impact of extraction in delivering net-zero strategy
• Support communal spaces in communities to enhance social capital and therefore local resilience e.g. village cafes, pubs, churches etc

• Reframe how we envisage our local economy to move beyond using economic growth as the measure of success
• Recognise and address inherent conflicts between economic growth and reaching net zero carbon whilst staying within Earth’s other ecological limits and explore the policy implications, such as wealth distribution mechanisms, which might be necessary to resolve incompatibilities
• Support local test beds of a post-growth economy e.g. sharing and gift economies, such as creating shared resource libraries to allow people to share tools etc. to shift to collaborative consumption.
• Support organisational forms which may facilitate post-growth economic activity, such as cooperatives
• Support employment sectors which might become redundant and reduced in a net-zero economy to transition into new low carbon opportunities through retraining opportunities, with quality jobs
• Use planning to prioritise local and ethical businesses on high streets
• Consider the councils’ role in creating municipal companies to catalyse key sectors such as energy and transport into transitioning to net zero whilst socialising the costs and rewards
• Develop a Circular economy strategy –promoting design for disassembly, repair and reuse
• Address sustainability of Devon’s tourism industry

• Support the creation of financial institutions necessary for a more resilient Devon economy, such as a customer owned South West Mutual Bank which could increase access to capital for local SME enterprises and therefore shorter supply chains. Regional banks are more resilient to global shocks
• Increase access to patient capital for SME’s –local government to invest capital
• Encourage individuals to switch their banking to banks which invest in environmentally beneficial schemes

• Eliminate social and economic inequality
• Greater support for disadvantaged teenagers to remove barriers of societal inequality
• Recognise gendered impacts of climate change and address e.g. differing mobility patterns of men and women, as well as impacts on vulnerable members of the community, disabled, older people, minorities

• Adequate funding:
  • For climate change information hubs
• A coherent scheme to communicate the carbon intensity of products and services to the public, e.g. a labelling scheme for Kg of CO2 associated or agree on a common standard, such as the Carbon Trust Footprint Label for products and ISO 14064
• Legal obligation for businesses to report their carbon footprint
• Devolve necessary powers and budget for local authorities to act effectively on climate change
• Government to manage population growth, using immigration and subsidies which currently encourage/ support people to have children as levers. Provide adequate access to sexual health services
• Restrict advertising to combat consumer culture
• Tackle inequality and decentralise wealth–greater equality correlated with sustainable practices like cycling and recycling at national level
• Replace VAT with a carbon tax, including on imports. Introduce gradually and with long term predictability to allow businesses to adapt
• Green gilts are (or, rather, would be) government bonds whose proceeds would be earmarked for specific projects with an environmental or social benefit. Local Government to also look into issuing green bonds through UK Municipal Bonds Agency (UKMBA)e.g. City of Reykjavik Green Bond Framework