Green recovery at London Climate Week 2020

Emma Howard Boyd, Chair of the Environment Agency and UK Commissioner to the Global Commission on Adaptation

I think quite a lot of people are suffering “new normal” fatigue. In 2020, the expression has been used so many times that as soon as you see “the new normal” written down there’s an even newer “new normal”. London Climate Week was a month ago now, and the time between then and now has shot past, but the green recovery from coronavirus we discussed is only just beginning.

When the Prime Minister talks about building back “better, greener and faster” he is not talking a one-time project to recover from coronavirus. Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, has talked about “building a recovery that is focused on a great transformation”.

Nature is key to that transformation and the green recovery was the focus of the first event I attended at London Climate Week with the Council for Sustainable Business.

The event at Canary Wharf, and online, was attended by CEOs of major companies and Ministers, with a message from HRH the Prince of Wales. It also featured a speech by the filmmaker and founder of Comic Relief, Richard Curtis, about “Make My Money Matter” a campaign to help people realise the power their pension savings have to make change. You can read more about it in this article.

I spoke about how the green recovery can help close the STEM skills gap and vice versa. The Environment Agency’s goal of net zero by 2030, can only be achieved by employing the right skills and a lack of STEM skills is currently estimated to cost the whole of industry £1.5 billion a year in recruitment, inflated salaries, and additional training costs. Solving both of these problems is mutually beneficial.

I also mentioned the work on green finance the Environment Agency is doing with Defra, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Triodos Bank, and aims to scale up with the Green Finance Institute. Businesses have a lot to gain from embracing the “build back greener” agenda.

The Secretary of State, George Eustice, made a speech about the importance of nature based solutions in the Environment Bill. The Secretary of State for BEIS, and COP26 President, Alok Sharma asked businesses to commit to 100 per cent renewable sources by 2050, commit to all of their vehicles being zero-emission by 2030, and to join the Race to Zero Coalition.

On the Thursday, I took part in a panel session hosted by E3G called ‘How can UK green finance policies and practitioners support a green and resilient economic recovery?’

John Glenn, Economic Minister at the Treasury, talked about the launch of the ‘Green Finance Education Charter’, a fantastic initiative to ensure professionals in the financial sector understand the impact of climate change on their work better. 

I spoke about the Environment Agency Pension Fund and how we are not only focussing on net zero but also on the adaption & resilience agenda: as well as reducing emissions to mitigate as much climate change as we can, we also need to adapt to make the economy more resilient against impacts it’s too late to stop.

Later in the week, I joined a panel about Resilience and the Road to COP26 (hosted by the International Institute for Environment and Development, E3G and the Global Resilience Partnership) where international speakers stressed the importance of early warning systems, grassroots involvement, and disaster response plans.

Many of the speakers stressed how the impacts of the pandemic and climate change have compounded each other – for instance, the need for social distancing while trying to escape the super cyclone and floods in Bangladesh. They also emphasised the desperate need to redress the inequalities that have resulted in the poorest being hit hardest by both Covid-19 and climate change. We will need collaboration between nations on resilience if we are to turn the ambitions of COP26 into action.

This year, London Climate Week mostly took place online which felt “new”, but the shared knowledge and goals coupled with a collective desire for action felt “normal”. The new normal? We’ll see next year.