How to Develop Green Collar Jobs in Your Area - Overview of Low Carbon Economy Policy in the West Midlands
How to Develop Green Collar Jobs in Your Area - Overview of Low Carbon Economy Policy in the West Midlands
Purpose of the presentation
This purpose of this presentation by Dr Simon Slater from Sustainability West Midlands was to give an overview of Low Carbon economy policy in the West Midlands. It covered the following areas:
- The regional sustainability vision and challenges
- The UK's first Low Carbon Regional Economic Strategy
- Emerging findings from Regional Growth into the Low Carbon Economic Study
- Key lessons when developing your own strategies
Relevance to the region
'Low carbon vision' report begins to set out what is possible now in terms of energy, transport, construction, demographic change to reach 2020 vision. The main regional sustainability challenges in achieving this vision include: the Productivity Gap, the Carbon Gap, Quality of Life Gap, Confidence Gap and Leadership Gap.
Developing policy areas that could be influenced by the new economic strategy and that would address the productivity and carbon challenges at the same time is essential. Also a parallel process of the wider sustainability appraisal is needed as low carbon does not guarantee environmental or social progress.
The West Midlands region should embrace its strengths in engineering, science and technology to deliver low carbon solutions to national and international markets. The greatest opportunities are in manufacturing of building products, transport/fuel equipment, energy generation/efficiency, waste reprocessing, agri-food, ICT and R&D.
Overall, there is a good progress in delivery and monitoring of Strategy Actions, but more sub-regional targeting at addressing risks and opportunities is required (i.e. more coordination is needed within Renewable Energy and Supply Chain and deployment programmes).
What SWM liked
We liked that this presentation gave a thorough overview and baseline of where the West Midlands region is at present. It not only discussed the strategies and policies, but also provided interesting facts and practical suggestions (slides 17 and 18). We liked slides 10 and 11 where the scales of the output and carbon challenges are explained respectively. Key lessons and summary of the main points can be found in slides 20 and 21.