Interview: Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees – you can’t decarbonise the UK until you decarbonise its cities

Bristol mayor Marvin Rees wants a green-blue future for his city. But delivering that vision needs room for everyone to get on board

What does a green future Bristol look like?

I prefer to use the term green-blue; a future of land, sea and waters. It’s a city that’s decarbonised, with cleaner air. It will look different. What kind of homes we build to house our growing population – where we build them – will determine this. People will live more densely and centrally. We will reduce the ratio of cars per person, with a better, larger mass-transit system and more active travel.

For success we need more integration of race and class – Bristol is a very segregated city and the environmental movement can replicate the social factors it claims to be working against. Bristol is a fractured city. One in four kids live in poverty. Nearly 16,000 people are on the housing waiting list.

Around 1,200 households live in temporary accommodation. Many are at risk of hunger. And Covid compounded these inequalities, hitting the most vulnerable first and hardest. So a green future needs a social element too.

What climate impacts has Bristol felt so far?

Climate impacts are not just about Bristolians and what happens within our city. I’m working with C40 Cities’ global mayors’ taskforce on climate and migration. It may not look as though someone coming to Bristol has come because of climate change. But the push factors are often rooted in climate change, whether in rural-urban migration or conflict and instability in urban areas.

People tell stories about how the environment around them changed in their country of origin, which led them to come to the UK. We could see something like 200 million climate-related migrants by the middle of this century.

What are the main obstacles to Bristol becoming a green-blue, more resilient city?

Money. People say the only thing that stops Bristol decarbonising is political will. That’s so naïve. We need political will and nearly £10 billion. We’ll need £9.5 billion to decarbonise the Bristol economy – digging up the roads, electrifying vehicle fleets, retrofitting homes’ boilers and building heat networks.

But we also need a just transition – it’s the poorest people most at risk of falling foul of the economic restructuring we need. We need money to make sure that doesn’t happen. If you don’t feed people, build homes and create new jobs for them, you risk a political backlash.

What do green jobs mean for Bristol?

We haven’t locked down what that means in a Bristol context. Is working in retail a green job or a non-green job? It’s not about making one green life-choice at a time – that takes knowledge, motivation and spare cash.

If you’re worried about putting food on the table or have your child kidnapped into county lines, how much time do you have to agonise about how to decarbonise your life? Individual behaviours matter but it takes investment to decarbonise the systems that cities depend on.

We are working to decarbonise Bristol’s city systems. We’ve fitted district heating schemes in Hartcliffe and Redcliffe; we’re including ground-source heat pumps at a new development in Ashton Rise, air-source heat pumps in Lockleaze and water-source heat pumps in Castle Lock that use a reverse-refrigeration process.

How do you scale that up?

We need a 15- to 20-year plan for UK cities. And that’s about leadership from government. We’ll need support from government, philanthropy and the private sector to develop these plans.

The challenge isn’t lifestyles; it’s spreadsheets and Gantt charts, to lay out what happens when in each UK city – which should have happened in the run-up to COP26. Government should have sat down with all the cities before the summit, to lay out what needs to be done and when. That’s frustrating.

We need long-term planning and finance. It can’t be a project here and a sector there. COP26 is more likely now to start that conversation and we aren’t as far ahead as we need to be. I think we’ll see a dash, after COP, to retrofit success onto the event.

Bristol was the first city to declare a climate emergency; how confident are you that you’ll get there by 2030?

We also declared an ecological emergency – we can’t solve the climate crisis without solving the nature crisis, which presents an existential threat.

We will do what we can to get there – but I don’t think there’s one serious person who thinks that’s going to be easy, when so many levers are beyond our control… And things like solving our housing crisis require us to build on brownfield land.

Are public-private partnerships the way forward?

Our City Leap energy scheme is a £1 billion package, where the money is private and uses our expertise. That’s really innovative and government has picked it up.

We’ll be putting up more turbines in the harbour, tapping ground source and air source heat. The university is developing new tech, to recycle heat from its computers back into the buildings.

And we are still having conversations with the Western Gateway group of local authorities about tapping marine energy from the River Severn, which has the second-largest tidal range in the world. That’s about finding appropriate technology – there are questions about ecology, and about access to Bristol port.

Climate change and #BlackLivesMatter are bringing young people out to protest – what kind of leadership do young people, including those from minoritised communities, need most?

What they need is hope. Because things really can feel hopeless sometimes. And I sympathise with that. National governments seem unable to broker the deal. Even when they declare a commitment, they don’t know how to put a plan together.

However, Michael Gove has more bite than Robert Jenrick; we now have a secretary of state who understands the need for place-based leadership – that you can’t decarbonise the UK until you decarbonise its cities.

The threat is that bad urbanisation drives emissions. The opportunity is that good urbanisation creates lower-impact lifestyles. Our cities can be part of the solution to our growing population. Investing in our city-regions is going to be key.

Interview by Karen Thomas

@CIWEM