Advancing Action for Climate Empowerment in the UK

Today’s post is by NAEE President, Prof Justin Dillon. These are his thoughts following a stakeholder workshop for ‘Advancing Action for Climate Empowerment in the UK’. As ever with our posts, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by the Association.

Every now and again, I find myself in a meeting where I’m not really sure what’s going on or why I’m there. Thursday’s stakeholder workshop for Advancing Action for Climate Empowerment in the UK was a case in point. However, it became clear that I wasn’t the only one feeling somewhat out of my depth in the audience of around three dozen academics, civil servants, and representatives of charities and environmental organisations.

The term ‘Action for Climate Empowerment’ (ACE) was adopted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). ACE encompasses actions carried out under Article 6 of the Convention and Article 12 of the Paris Agreement (2015). Kicking off the three-hour workshop, Conrad Jefferies, from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, explained that the aim of ACE is to empower all members of society to engage in climate action. A whole host of begged questions, opportunities and challenges instantly emerged from that one simple statement. The strategy for achieving what has to be either an inspirational or an aspirational goal involves focusing on six priority areas: Education; Training; Public awareness; Public participation; Public access to information, and International cooperation. At this point, I suspect, many of the audience members began to see how their work related to a UN initiative that they might barely have been aware of before.

At COP26, in Glasgow, a decade-long ACE Work Programme was approved and a four-year ACE action plan was adopted at COP27 in 2022. The plan sets out what the signatories are going to do to help to achieve four aims: Policy coherence; Co-ordinated action; Tools and support, and; Monitoring, evaluation and reporting within the six priority areas. So, for example, the Parties (representatives of all the countries that are signatories to the UNFCCC.) “are encouraged to: Integrate climate change learning into the curricula of schools and other institutions that provide formal education, and support non-formal and informal education on climate change, including respect for and inclusion of indigenous and traditional knowledge”*. One can only imagine how long it took to come up with that wording; how many hours were spent before during and after COP26 and 27 to get us to where we are now. 

It’s easy to be cynical and to dismiss the COPs, conventions, reports, frameworks, priority areas, etc. as irrelevant, ineffective or worse. But these processes allow a range of voices to be heard and provide access for charities and other organisations to policy-makers and to feel part of a worldwide community that is slowly and inexorably moving things forward. Just as long as it doesn’t become and end in itself.

As with all workshops of this ilk, we worked in small groups, and I found myself working with Conrad who had kicked us off, a senior policy adviser from UNICEF, a colleague from UCL’s Grand Challenges initiative and a senior civil servant from the DFE. We talked, listened, thought, questioned, responded, and summarised with grace and good cheer. We gained small insights into what people did and what drives them. We heard from online speakers about the sometimes dark side of having the youth voice at COPs. We heard from speakers from Mexico and Indonesia about progress in other areas of the world which sometimes puts what we do in the shade.

Room-sized events such as this one, held in the Grade I listed, Mary Ward House, one of London’s finest examples of the Arts and Crafts movement, are invariably inspiring and worthwhile. Kudos, then, to the organisers including my own colleague, Kate Greer, described by someone recently as a paper-clip – able to bring people together for short periods, such as this workshop. Cards and emails were swapped and we’re all now familiar with ACE and how parts of the policy jigsaw fit together. But we were also encouraged to think of who wasn’t in the room – the media, who control so much of what influences public opinion and, subsequently, action, as well as business and industry, whose impact on the environment and democracy are crucial. And, some people were unable to attend because of Storm Ciarán, yet another weather extreme that some of my UCL colleagues attribute to climate change. As someone said recently, we’re in a climate emergency and we should bloody well act like it.

* UNCC Glasgow work programme on Action for Climate Empowerment https://unfccc.int/documents/310896

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Justin can be contacted at: justin.dillon@ucl.ac.uk