How Glasgow became an urban climate action leader on the world stage

Has the culture war around climate become a bigger part of how you talk about the climate crisis now?

Undoubtedly. I think there was a period there where you didn’t have to preface remarks with science as much because you understood that you’re talking to audiences who understand that this is something necessary and important. Now, it’s almost having to take a step back, going back to basics in some ways, and just reminding everyone why we’re here. We talk a lot about resilience and adaptation in Glasgow as well, and our climate action plan is now combined – resilience, adaptation, and mitigation are all in there together.

There is something about us having to talk much more, but it’s the right thing to do to talk to communities about how climate change is affecting them. Even in a moderate climate like Glasgow’s –where we haven’t in the past seen the extremes of climate and impact, where, by and large, people aren’t losing their lives or their livelihoods – people are being much more regularly inconvenienced. We are seeing much more flooding impact. We were already a rainy city – a rainy city with Victorian infrastructure in terms of drainage – but we are now seeing more monsoon type rainfall, which is overwhelming that that drainage system more quickly than ever before. We’re seeing flooding incidents, even if they’re relatively short-term flooding incidents, happening more often. For those in communities seeing those impacts, we can point to that and say, “this is climate impact, this is climate change that’s happening on your doorstep”.

Even with heat, which kind of gets laughed about in Glasgow, we’re seeing more days in the high-20s. Are people protecting themselves from the sun, drinking enough, eating properly, turning off the heating? We are getting warmer as a climate, even in a place like Glasgow, where we’ve always treated the weather as a joke because if we didn’t laugh, we’d cry. Now there’s no question that we have to start taking that more seriously.

What would be much better is if we can adapt and mitigate at the same time; build that resilience, but also try and put a ceiling on the extremities of weather that we’re seeing – and certainly on the impact that it’s having on communities.

In many ways, it’s becoming easier to talk to people about climate because it’s becoming less abstract. People can see those impacts happening in their own communities and on their own doorsteps.

Does that give rise to greater community action, like community groups going the extra mile?

Absolutely, and that’s something particularly that our young people have really led the way on. We are very lucky to be part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Climate Youth Climate Action Fund, which has supported our ability to be able to support young folk in our schools and in youth groups to identify and take their own hyper-local climate initiatives like that. A lot these initiatives are around green space and food growing, but we’ve also seen them do some really fantastic creative work, like peer education through art, drama and songwriting, for example. We’ve seen a lot of work around recycling initiatives, too, and they’ve done some incredible things with reuse as well, into circular economy initiatives.

"We are definitely seeing particular sections of our communities identifying things that they believe they can do to make their contribution, and then we try and support that as much as possible"

We also see our business community and chamber of commerce do some fantastic work on the circular economy. As a council, we have provided grants to local businesses to be able to do their own step up to net zero – green business grants, for example, particularly around circularity.

We are definitely seeing particular sections of our communities identifying things that they believe they can do to make their contribution, and then we try and support that as much as possible, without getting in their way. We see ourselves as facilitators rather than and enablers of that work. The more that we can encourage community action, the more these incremental actions add up, while we focus on the major reductions that we need to see.

Domestic heat and transport are significant areas where we need to see that happening, but also some of the big jobs we need to do around sequestration, too. That is very challenging in a city like Glasgow, where we also have a housing emergency. Where we’ve got spare land, we want to be building houses on it, so we’re trying to think as creatively as possible about how we address what will be a sequestration requirement in our journey to decarbonisation. 

We’re now in our second round of community shares as well – basically community investment into climate interventions. We’ve done it for community solar, we’re now doing it on trees and on greening as well, which has had a brilliant response. The first time round it was a target of raising a £1m, which we did quite quickly, with a lot of local businesses and local community groups investing. We know that in itself won’t decarbonise the city, but what it does is give our communities a stake in it and literal ownership of some of those smaller interventions that contribute to the whole.

As you prepare to step down as leader of Glasgow City Council, what advice would you give your successor?

First and foremost, don’t let opportunities go by. Looking back, it’s clear that we would not be in the place we are – which I can confidently say is as a global climate leader among cities – had we not had the opportunity of hosting COP26. We took the decision early, pretty much as soon as we knew that we were going to be hosting, that it wouldn’t be something that happens to the city, but that we would use it to drive and quantify our own ambition, and to really show detail and clarity around what we wanted to achieve in our climate action. At that point, those were high-level ambitions, but we could use the opportunities that COP26 gave us to make ourselves as visible as possible.

"That’s my biggest lesson: don’t let any opportunity go to waste and don’t be shy in asking for help"

The term we use in Glasgow and in the west of Scotland is asking for honours – asking for help, asking for assistance. We went to ICLEI and C40 Cities, we went to all sorts of different networks to explain we were hosting COP26 and wanted to really mobilise that and maximise the impact in our city to be seen as much as possible as an exemplar city. The response we got was absolutely brilliant. COP26 was where the response of the financial sector and the banking sector, and the role that institutional finance plays, came into focus. The Cities Commission for Climate Investment, which then became 3Ci, was launched at COP26. I was one of the founding board members, along with then Mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, now Lord Rees.

We really leveraged that and the capacity and knowledge of those networks to develop our own climate finance vehicles, which are now very close to reaching a point where we can go out to the markets and say, “come and talk to us”. We are ready and have the confidence in saying that we have robust climate investment vehicles that you can sign up to as partners to deliver some of these major interventions, particularly around heat transition. We want to combine that with the retrofit piece as well, which is something that all cities are wrestling with in terms of how to get it financed. That will be a major win and something we can point to that shows we are ahead of the curve in Glasgow. The reason for that is because we were Glaswegians – we were Weegie. We went out there and decided “shy weans don’t get any sweeties”, so we weren’t shy.

That’s my biggest lesson: don’t let any opportunity go to waste and don’t be shy in asking for help. If you can demonstrate that you are absolutely up for this, that you’re showing ambition, you’re showing vision, you want to do it collaboratively – you’re saying we need to do it collaboratively – then you’ll find there are plenty of collaborators out there who will be willing and eager to work with you, and to give you support to get where you need to be.