Hackney Climate Action Plan

London, UK

Project details
Client

London Borough of Hackney

Duration

2019-2026

Services provided by Buro Happold

Hackney Council declared a climate emergency in June 2019. The local authority is committed to doing everything within its power to deliver net zero emissions across council functions by 2040 – ten years earlier than the target set by the government.

Hackney Council’s goals include a 45% reduction in emissions against 2010 levels by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2040. In May 2023 the Council updated its net zero commitment for its non-tenanted buildings and transport fleet to 2030 as part of signing up to the UK100 climate network.

Buro Happold has worked with the London Borough of Hackney on climate action planning and research since late 2019. This has included an initial commission to develop the Hackney Council Net Zero Energy Strategy, a set of Borough-wide decarbonisation pathways, remodelling to investigate different emission reduction scenarios, the development of a borough wide climate action plan and supporting the development of a three-year implementation plan for the Council.

Challenge

Hackney Council’s mission is to support and enable collective action toward a net zero borough. This means developing and implementing policies and programmes that generate measurable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, protect biodiversity, mitigate and manage climate risk, while ensuring a just transition.

Hackney has an ambitious vision to rebuild a greener borough in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, and has already led some of the UK’s most innovative interventions to improve air quality, reduce motor vehicle traffic and greenhouse gas emissions, and help residents to tackle the climate emergency. The key challenges facing our team included understanding how different activities will reduce emissions and how the local authority and stakeholders across the borough can be galvanised to take collective action. Hackney has a wealth of cultural diversity. It is also however one of London’s most deprived local authorities.

This would require our specialists to build a full and deep understanding of the borough, of Hackney Council policies and activities and to develop a vision that tackles climate change while also ensuring activities continue to be delivered in a just and inclusive way.

Hackney Council is committed to doing everything within its power to deliver net zero emissions across council functions by 2040 – ten years earlier than the target set by the government. Image: Adobe Stock.

Solution

We used the Buro Happold Local Authority Climate Action Pathways tool to model the key technical and behavioural changes required across Hackney to take effective action on climate change. This includes changes in fuel types (e.g. more electric vehicles), reductions in fuel demand (more use of public transport) and new economic structures (i.e. more, affordable repair shops so vehicles last longer). This helped Hackney to understand the types and scale of changes required. We then used this tool and other best practice studies to identify goals for the borough for 2030 that are aligned with the terms of the Paris Agreement – asking how much needs to happen and by when.

Our team has worked closely with Hackney Council staff and their partners to understand the barriers, opportunities and existing work linked to climate action in the borough. This has included internal workshops with officers, and conversations with the thematic climate action working groups within the council. We built on this work with a detailed policy review of existing projects and plans linked to climate action, peer reviews of other local authorities’ work, and a series of workshops with communities of interest and key partners.

This enabled us to gather a detailed sense of the existing work in Hackney linked to climate action, and the levers for change this area has to engage to take further action. We then worked with Hackney Council officers to map this information into a detailed set of actions for the next three years, spanning both regulatory changes they might consider, changes to the council’s own assets and operations, and ‘enabling’ activities linked to education, promotion and incentivisation that might encourage residents and organisations across the borough to take action.

The Climate Action Plan is organised around five themes: Adaptation, Buildings, Transport, Consumption and Environmental Quality. Within each theme an ambitious, science-based, collective goal that the borough can work towards achieving by 2030 is defined. Within each goal, we have identified a set of objectives that should be worked towards over the next three years. Realising the goals in the Climate Action Plan requires collective action by all stakeholders in Hackney, including the Council. Recognising this our team developed an implementation plan for each theme that identifies what the council will work toward delivering in the next three years.

The Council aims to develop and implement policies and programmes that generate measurable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, protect biodiversity, mitigate and manage climate risk, while ensuring a just transition. Image: Adobe Stock.

Value

The Climate Action Plan sets out an integrated approach for tackling the climate and ecological crises. It provides a framework for everyone to take action to reduce emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change that are already occurring, driven by an ambitious vision for a greener Hackney in 2030.

Our experts were able to use their broad experience of working on similar climate action plans as well as Buro Happold’s own tools for local authority climate action planning to build a robust and ambitious plan to outline what a greener Hackney could look like by 2030 based on a fair and just transition to net zero.

Image: Adobe Stock.