Enabling conditions are key for implementing, accelerating and sustaining adaptation in human systems and ecosystems. These include political commitment and follow-through, institutional frameworks, policies and instruments with clear goals and priorities, enhanced knowledge on impacts and solutions, mobilization of and access to adequate financial resources, monitoring and evaluation, and inclusive governance processes. (high confidence)
(source: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability)
In 1987 the Brundtland Commission, in the publication, Our Common Future, defined sustainable development as:
“Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
There are many other definitions, including the The United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Many systems and partnerships – including Climate Action Leeds – have used Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics approach. The Leeds doughnut provides a regional exemplar for adopting this approach across the Partnership. The doughnut approach is a way to think about how a place can meet its local aspirations while also living up to its global responsibilities. It helps to consider the UN’s SDGs that put human development in balance with sustainable and responsible planetary limits. Considering each factor in the doughnut when making each decision, will help make trade-offs visible and explicit, quantify and manage risks, and demonstrate progress towards sustainability.
Adopting an integrated sustainable decision-making approach will help make sure we create a West Yorkshire that is safe and just, exceed a ‘social floor’ of what communities need for a good life while staying within the ecological ‘ceiling’ of local and planetary environmental limits.
While humanity is currently far from achieving balance in line with this model, we can see that adopting the doughnut is not such a big change from our current approach in West Yorkshire as it may first appear. The social floor is the things that we are already working on across the whole Partnership. The ecological ceiling is things which we are currently working on but in an unstructured way. By adopting a model along similar lines, we can ensure that all dimensions of sustainability are incorporated into our existing risk management processes. Although lots of the thinking might be familiar to us, by tying them together and assessing trade-offs between the dimensions, the actions and outcomes will be very different, and much healthier, for the whole system.
Climate risks are experienced across our Partnership. We identify these risks and register them at a system level in the corporate risk register. Governance of climate change activities sits, where the work happens, with individual organisations so these risks are identified and registered at a system level in the corporate risk register. Governance of climate change activities sits, where the work happens, with individual organisations.
Building the current work and harmonizing it across the Partnership will help drive the necessary change. For example, digital transformation is helping to streamline processes, find patterns that are not obvious, reduce unnecessary variation and share information much more efficiently. But we need to do things differently too. Climate change is not an 'either-or' consideration, where working on one thing means that something else misses out. Instead, we take an 'also-and' approach, where climate action is built into all our other decisions and actions across West Yorkshire.
While some actions – like digital transformation and waste reduction – will save money, meeting all our ambitions will need investment, and accessing capital is challenging. We recognise the financial pressures across the health and social care system, among partners and our people. Even so, the cost of inaction is greater than the cost of investing to mitigate and adapt effectively around the climate and biodiversity crises as they unfold. Proactively addressing the climate emergency as a Partnership will reduce community need and vulnerability – and system workload – in the long term.
West Yorkshire’s health and care system employs around 100,000 people and controls a budget in excess of £5bn per year. We have people who think big, care deeply, and work hard. We can choose to commit our considerable pooled resource to changing the way we currently work in order to address the climate emergency and deliver better outcomes for the public. See: Public health benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions: overview and implications for policy makers - The Lancet.