Gwersi o Gymru / Lessons from Wales

'Australians are on the frontline of climate change impacts. We are experiencing more severe bushfires, hotter and longer heatwaves, rising sea levels that are exacerbating hazards along our coastlines, cyclones that are projected to intensify and possibly track further southwards and an increase in rainfall intensity and associated flooding as the climate warms.’

                                                  Insurance Council of Australia (ICA, 2023a)

Hunting is impacted. I’m hearing my mob saying they got to chuck an extra half a tank of petrol in and drive another two hours to get kangaroo. Five years ago that wasn’t the case’ 

                                             (Northern Territory participant (Murawin, 2023).

‘Unless climate change is addressed in an orderly and just way, the long-term retirement savings of millions of Australians are under threat’

                                                                Investor Group on Climate Change

Wales and Australia are clearly very different, but as these testimonies from the Australian Climate Authority annual report underline, we face common challenges in dealing with the effects of global warming that are already baked-in; and have a common goal of reducing future emissions to NetZero no later than 2050.

Wales is small nation of just over three million people (and could fit into Australia more than 360 times). Though an old country (the Welsh language has the oldest literature in Europe), we are a very young democracy. It has only been 25 years since our own elected tier of Government has been in place, and only a decade since it has had law-making and tax-raising powers.

But our reach exceeds our grasp, and our size does offer a useful model to trial ideas and policies.

We passed a Wellbeing of Future Generations Act in 2015 to encourage long-term thinking, which the EU is looking to emulate in some form; and we created an independent Commissioner for Future Generations to speak up for those who have not yet been born, and to challenge decisions that put short-term needs ahead of long-term interests (In itself this does not change any decisions, the Welsh Government that brought it in was simultaneously pressing ahead with a new motorway scheme through a protected wetland).

We put climate targets into law, trialled a cross-Government Climate Ministry to coordinate action, and set in train a series of policy initiatives to put us on the right trajectory to reach NetZero emissions no later than 2050.

Setting strategies and long-term targets is relatively easy though, it's making different choices now that is the really hard part - especially ones that require changes in people’s behaviour. And we need to do that at both scale ad pace.

The independent UK Climate Change Committee says that over the next ten years we need to double the level of emissions reductions that we’ve achieved over the last 30 years. More than three decades worth of cuts in less than a decade.

That can only be achieved if every policy area contributes to a decade of action.

As I told the UK Local Transport Summit in 2022, “For too long nobody in Government in any part of the UK has been willing to challenge the orthodox view that tackling transport emissions is too difficult and too expensive. ‘There are three pillars to sustainable development you know and we can’t trade off the economic one for the environment one’ was what I was told by a senior economy official 15 years ago. That thinking is still alive and well in the world of economic development and transport all across the UK. And it needs to be challenged”.

Since 1990 the UK has been able to cut carbon emissions from waste by 64%, from industry by 36%, the same from the energy sector; even in agriculture we’ve cut emissions by 10%. But in transport we’ve managed just a 6% fall in emissions over the same period.

The scale of carbon reduction needed from the transport sector is significant. The Climate Change Committee, the independent advisor to the UK Governments, has said that in Wales emissions from surface transport must be roughly halved between 2020 and 2030 from 6 to 3 million tonnes CO².

The World Economic Forum and other conventional economic thinkers emphasise the importance of technology in getting transport emissions down. In its options analysis of the way to reduce road transport emissions the Australian Climate Authority places a heavy emphasis on fuel efficiency through low emissions liquid fuels, and on the transition to electric vehicles.

Whilst electric cars reduce tailpipe emissions, they are not inherently green unless the electricity is generated from renewable sources - and even then they do not solve other harmful air pollution from brakes and tyres. Their wholescale adoption does nothing to address the need to reduce overall energy consumption, and simply electrifying the existing fleet of cars will require a massive expansion of electricity production and the harmful mining of rare minerals to power the batteries.

The independent advisors to all the Governments in the UK, the Climate Change Committee, reported that while electric vehicles would contribute the bulk of the savings they would not materialise until the late 2020s and possibly later.

As Australia''s Climate Council acknowledged in its most recent statement, “We can cut climate pollution from our transport system in half by the end of the decade, using simple solutions we know work – particularly mode shift to shared and active transport”.

This view is reinforced by the independent advisor to UK Government’s, the Climate Change Committee. They support a strong role for electrification but are also clear we cannot achieve the levels of cuts needed by relying on technology alone.

After all we’ve already seen significant advances in tech over the last three decades and yet carbon reductions from the mobility sector have been the most sluggish. Efficiencies have been simply absorbed by increasing levels of demand.

As well as decarbonisation we also need demand reduction and modal shift. We need to drive less far, less often. And when we do make journeys we need to make greater use of public transport and for local journeys travel actively by foot or by bike.

But as the great Welsh folk story-teller Max Boyce famously said, Duw, it's hard…

Over the last five years under the First Ministership of Mark Drakeford (December 2018 - March 2024) the Welsh Government made considerable strides to reform the approach to transport policy as part of a cross-Government effort to match actions with words on tackling climate change.

This paper set out chapter by chapter on this blog describes some of the steps taken, and concludes with some thoughts on what lessons can be drawn and what needs to happen next.

Wales has a good track record in driving down emissions in another traditionally high-emitting sector which offer some pointers. Wales’ journey to second position in the global waste recycling league table, as a step towards our ambition to become a ‘Zero Waste nation’.