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CLimaTe Change in manChesTer
An Origin Story
It was nearly thirty years ago, in 1994, that climate change first took cen-ter stage in the city of Manchescen-ter. This first appearance of climate change took the form of a conference called the Global Forum on Cities. The forum took place just two years after climate change had been raised to global prominence by the 1992 Rio Summit and was meant to be a follow- up to the “global forum” of ngos that had been run as a fringe event at the Rio conference. There was great hope that the conference would bring Man-chester to the heart of global climate policy making and climate change to the heart of city politics. The Manchester Global Forum on Cities was sup-posed to highlight the role of cities in global climate change and to explore how they could get involved in helping keep the climate stable.
Although this marked an origin point for climate talk in the city, it did not create the legacy that was hoped for. Many key groups like Green-peace, Friends of the Earth, and the World Bank didn’t turn up, and various people wrote after the event lamenting this failed opportunity for Man-chester to lead the way in climate change policy. One person who attended the event wrote an account shortly after that described what went wrong:
There was much internal bickering. Warren Lindner, an eco- bureaucrat from Geneva who was supposed to be the main organizer[,] resigned
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(or was dismissed) some months before the conference. At the end, only some 800 delegates attended. . . . [I]t was dominated by official-dom. At least 40 percent of the participants were local authorities (in-cluding the Mayor of Bombay, a woman), the rest industry and trade unions, except for about 20 percent consisting of genuine representa-tives of ngos. . . . An exasperated ecologist from Mazingira Institute in Nairobi shouted at one meeting, “Who are the stakeholders, and who decides who are the stakeholders?” This is indeed the question. (Alier 1994, 11)
Despite memories of failure, however, some of the key figures who were to take up the mantle of climate politics in the city in later years were present at the global forum. In building nascent networks and positioning climate change as a problem that the city needed to be considering, the global forum can still be said to have marked an important moment in the coming of climate change to the city, though it would not be until late in the first decade of the twenty- first century that it would officially rear its head again.
During the 1990s climate change policy was muted, although climate change was still being invoked and addressed in the city in activist circles.
In 1999 the Mancunian Way, a motorway that cuts across the city center, was blocked by Reclaim the Streets, a protest movement that brought to-gether anticapitalist, antiglobalization, and environmental concerns to call for the reclamation of roads as public spaces. Also in the late 1990s, activ-ists were mobilized by proposals made by Manchester Airport to build a second runway. This not only was going to increase the carbon emissions from air travel but also would lead to cutting down local woods in the Bol-lin Valley. One activist, known as “Swampy” — who had become famous for occupying tunnels that protestors built as part of a road protest near Swindon in the south of England — was there in the tunnels that protestors dug under Manchester’s runway, too. Some of the environmental activists whom I met during this research had been involved in the antiroad and anti- airport- expansion protests. So climate change concerns hadn’t gone away. But at the same time roads and air travel were part of Manches-ter City Council’s plans for economic expansion, so concern about climate change was suppressed by a gung ho urban boosterism focused on the postindustrial economic development of the city.
It took until the middle of the first decade of the twenty- first century for climate change to be explicitly rearticulated in official circles as a
prob-Climate Change in Manchester · 37 lem that the city should be concerned about and should be doing some-thing to tackle. The person who gave me the clearest explanation for how this came about was Neil Swannick, who was the head of Manchester Waste Authority from the late 1990s. He had been instrumental in intro-ducing recycling in the city in the late 1990s and because of this work had sat first on a council- run Waste Disposal Authority. A year later, in 2001, he joined another committee called the Physical Environment Scrutiny Com-mittee, later to become the Environmental Scrutiny Committee. In 2004 Neil was given the role of executive member for planning and environment in the council and started to explore in earnest what could be done to think about the city in terms of its environmental qualities.
I had been told by one city councillor that around 2000 Manchester was polarized into what he thought was a rather false opposition: “One [position] was that we should pedestrianize the whole of the city center, and the other was that the number of cars we have in the city is a measure of its economic success.” He told me that “the person who took the latter view had also become rather famous for opposing or rather supporting the expansion of Manchester Airport, and saying very unpleasant things about the environment lobby . . . and so environment had become some-thing where officers were scared to raise their head above the parapet.”
Talking about climate change was not easy, and when it was talked about it, it was always already seen as political and potentially disruptive to the ambitions of urban growth. Interestingly, at this time climate change was still being talked about as part of “the environment” generally and not as climate in its own right.
Luckily, though, Neil found himself in a position to push for the envi-ronment to be taken more seriously in the local authority. This was pos-sible partly because he had support from the leader of the council, Richard Leese, who many said was a crucial player in helping climate change to appear in council work. Later this would be strengthened when Richard would find himself sharing a platform with Friends of the Earth in support-ing a congestion chargsupport-ing scheme for the city. Supported by Richard, then, Neil worked with an academic from the university and a woman working at the Co- Operative Group to draw up what came to be known as Man-chester’s Green City program. At first climate change was not explicitly present in these documents, as we can see from the list of strategies that were drawn up: an energy strategy, a biodiversity strategy, a tree strategy, a canals and waterways strategy — but not a climate strategy.
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According to Neil, he was under pressure from ngos and lobbying orga-nizations to do a climate change strategy from the beginning. However, he is a politician, and he was worried that doing a climate change strategy too early “was likely to run ahead of people too far.” But climate change was to get a strategy eventually. A couple of years into Neil’s tenure as execu-tive member for planning and environment, he led the drafting of a pre-strategy document initially called “Principles for Climate Change Strategy”
(Manchester City Council 2008), which positioned Manchester as one of three cities in the United Kingdom that were explicitly addressing climate change in local authority work. He had explicit support from the leader of the council, Richard Leese, who publicly supported the idea that Manches-ter should try to take climate change seriously. But, Neil stressed, it was not easy putting this document together. Trying to write a strategy for climate change is really difficult, as we will see in some of the later chapters. Neil said the document “went through lots and lots of drafts — it was in the twenties by the time it came out because there were certain issues that were really, really hard.”
So here we get to the nub of the issue as to why it took so long for the city to think again about climate change as a core consideration of urban politics. The hardest thing was the issue of how to build robust evidence about climate change that could have direct relevance to the city.
Neil told me, “I needed to be absolutely able to say, ‘We’re not com-pletely bonkers here, we can back this up with scientific evidence,’ ” and so he started to work with scientists — both in the city council and at the uni-versity — who could provide that evidence. Early versions of this evidence were cited in the “Principles” document (Manchester City Council 2008) as the objective, scientific set of reasons why climate change was something the city should be thinking about, as we can see articulated in the docu-ment: “In its Climate Change Bill the government has proposed a target of a 60% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050, and a potential interim target of between 28 – 32% reduction by 2020. Even if the world is successful in reducing CO2 emissions by 60% the Tyndall Centre in Manchester has cal-culated that there is still a high probability that the average global temper-ature will exceed 2°C by the end of the century. All indications suggest that the reduction targets in the Climate Change Bill may need to be increased even further” (Manchester City Council 2008, 2 – 3).
Further down the page the document continues, “Manchester’s annual CO2 emissions are over 3.3 million tonnes (47% commercial, 30% domes-tic and 23% transport, dEfra, 2004). Whilst our domesdomes-tic emissions per
Climate Change in Manchester · 39 household, at 2.6 tonnes, are similar to the UK average, they are generally higher than other cities” (Manchester City Council 2008, 3).
Summing up the challenge, the document asks:
So what would we have to do as a city to reduce our emissions by a mil-lion tonnes a year? To achieve a reduction of this magnitude we would have to erect over 100 large wind turbines or all Manchester businesses would have to cut their energy use by half. The task is daunting, if only we consider a one sector or one intervention solution. . . . However this reduction can be achieved by committing to a variety of carbon reduc-tion opreduc-tions that will avert annual carbon emissions. In order to create
“bite- sized” targets, the reductions options are broken down into three areas; commercial, transport and domestic. (Manchester City Council 2008, 4)
From early on, then, scientific predictions of temperature rises, and science- based targets for appropriate levels of carbon emissions reduc-tions, were central to the work of bringing climate change into politics and reframing economic development in governing the city. It was numbers that did the work of bringing climate change back to the city in the late 2000s. This then — the numbers of science — is where we will also start our story of what it means to begin to try to think like a climate.