Think co-benefits to deliver 2020 environmental goals
This article was first published by Infrastructure Intelligence in May 2015.
Time and tide wait for no Government. So whilst the new one has only just opened for business, it is intriguing to think that the new term will take us through the next half a decade to 2020 – a date which has long had significance in terms of energy/carbon policy targets.
Many of the UK’s most pressing priorities for environmental improvements and a low carbon, climate resilient economy are well rehearsed. But with a full in-tray across Government Departments, how can this Government accelerate the speed and improve the effectiveness of delivering its environmental policy choices?
The starting point is the work in progress inherited from the greenest coalition Government ever. There is clearly unfinished business on energy efficiency, updating how we protect our natural environment, increasing our competitiveness through resource efficiency and transitioning to a low carbon economy such as the step change required in carbon reduction associated with infrastructure programmes.
The recent Supreme Court decision also brings air quality improvement into urgent focus, stating that the government must speed up efforts to meet European pollution standards for nitrogen dioxide and submit new air quality plans to Brussels by the end of this year.
Longer term, continuing attention will be needed to evolve the energy market and bring through UK-friendly technologies like wave and tidal whilst setting a framework for the public and private sectors alike to improve resilience to a warmer, stormier climate.
The list goes on but time and financial resources remain scarce. There will be clear advantages to the public purse if these agendas are tackled through a joined up approach. In other words, working with the grain of other planks of policy to deliver environmental priorities. This applies as much to specific infrastructure asset renewal programmes and new capital projects as it does to policy formulation where the results will naturally take longer.
Government’s philosophy to appraising and evaluating public sector proposals and funding decisions is enshrined in the Green Book. It invites an expansive approach to considering impacts stating that “In this context, relevant costs and benefits are those that can be affected by the decision at hand” and that wider social and environmental costs or benefits “should not be ignored simply because they cannot easily be costed”.
However co-benefits of policies and infrastructure investments are not easy to pinpoint. And so unless they are high profile or critical to the business case, they can be rather neglected. This can result in an inefficient game of catch up when it is discovered later in the development of a project that it makes sense to try to address another social or environmental outcome.
There is clearly unfinished business on energy efficiency, updating how we protect our natural environment, increasing our competitiveness through resource efficiency and transitioning to a low carbon economy.
For example a collaborative team designing a new infrastructure project may identify significant shared carbon and cost savings, environmental measures for reducing flood risk or ways of offsetting biodiversity impacts. However they may not be able to optimise those solutions when it is too late in the process to consider, for example, upstream flood storage as opposed to downstream attenuation.
Worse still is where opportunities are missed and left to be addressed through some future, potentially expensive intervention.
There are many obstacles to this kind of joined up approach as highlighted in work by Infrastructure UK (IUK) that points out key behavioural and regulatory constraints. IUK has an ongoing work programme to understand and address infrastructure interdependency and is promoting strategic collaboration across utilities through the newly formed UK Regulators Network.
Given the constraints it certainly won’t be achievable in all situations, but putting effort up front into identifying co-benefits of policy and project implementation and challenging the constraints where necessary has been proven to have significant rewards.
And if the immediate gains of getting more bang for the buck is not enough, this approach also opens up new niche opportunities in the global market for environmental goods and services for the UK’s business community including our many innovative SMEs.
We only need to think of the output from UK industry in construction products that perform better in terms of the environment and natural resources of around ￡2bn per annum, and counting.