Climate Change Hub

Read the Climate Change Blog >The climate crisis is at the heart of our work.

Climate change and the environment underpins all our work across ADEPT’s three priority areas of focus. People, place and planet are inextricably linked with the climate emergency and the need to decarbonise how we live and work. Our climate change key messages are set out in our Climate Change and Green Growth policy position.

Local authorities hold a pivotal role in meeting the net zero carbon emissions target by 2050. Local leadership is key to meeting national targets and the lynchpin of government strategies. Ensuring climate resilience to our places is vital: achieving net zero requires proactive adaptation to already ‘baked in’ changes to the climate, building resilience into infrastructure and designing and delivering our place-based services with this in mind.

There are many innovative solutions we can use to address the issues we face but they need to be right for each place and delivered at scale and pace. How do you plant one million trees over ten years? How do you replace gas central heating in five thousand homes in a year? What does this mean for the supply chain and workforce skills? These are the questions place directors grapple with every day.

ADEPT has a key role to play in bringing local authorities and partners together to share knowledge and learning on the most effective actions to tackle emissions, increase biodiversity, enhance our environments and overcome barriers. Local authorities have three main influences: to lead in our own operations; to enable a low carbon region with our programmes, policies and decisions; and to inspire business and residents to take climate action themselves.

ADEPT’s work on climate change - progress and updates

We are forging ahead to play our part in tackling the climate crisis. Since the beginning of 2023 we have:

• Launched ADEPT Live Labs 2: Decarbonising Local Roads in the UK, a three-year, UK-wide £30 million programme funded by the Department for Transport that aims to decarbonise the local highway network.
• Launched ADEPT’s Climate Change Board. The board is designed to be the voice of ADEPT when speaking on strategic climate change issues and is outward facing towards government and our partners.
• As part of the Blueprint Coalition, published a Manifesto Asks document, calling for all political parties to include overarching asks in their manifestos. We also hosted a 'Where next for climate action?' webinar event on the policy needed to accelerate local climate action.
• Worked with the Forestry Commission and Defra, to launch the Woodland Creation Accelerator Fund, a new fund to accelerate local authorities’ tree planting ambitions
• Delivered Green Finance training with CIPFA
• Run a series of regular Lunch and Learn webinars including Highway Sector and Resilience, Natural Capital and Nature Based Solutions and the Flood and Coastal Innovation programmes. You can look at future ADEPT events here.
• Published a new Value of Trees toolkit, designed to provide local authorities with specific guidance on tree planting, supporting them to plan for the landscape of the future and helping to tackle climate change, build greater resilience and develop nature recovery.
• Launched a new Future Highways Research Group (FHRG) prospectus, aimed at local authority highways service leaders.
• Worked with the Environment Agency to promote the adaptation pathways approach, which included producing an introductory ten minute video.

ADEPT’s Climate Change Hub brings together our work and resources on climate change and sets out our key areas of focus. You can also look for our policy positions, consultation responses and guidance documents on our website and read our Climate Change Blog. It is also worth checking our documents section, to read about related activity.