The Strategie's impact
Why the strategy is needed
Our strategy is based around the core principles of environmental sustainability, with an understanding that our survival and wellbeing depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment.
Living more sustainably is crucial because our planet, like a delicate balancing act, has certain limits or 'planetary boundaries' that we must not exceed to maintain a stable and habitable place for us to thrive.
Think of Earth as a spaceship with finite resources and a delicate life support system. When we exceed the limits on things like carbon emissions, deforestation, and biodiversity loss (or in the case of the spaceship - food, water, and oxygen) we risk disrupting the balance that sustains life as we know it. Living sustainably is about ensuring we stay within these limits, preserving the health of our planet to secure a liveable future for generations to come.
What the impact of the strategy will be
By becoming a more environmentally sustainable district we will deliver health, wealth, and happiness to the people who live, work, and study here.
This strategy is structured by our four themes, Bringing it Home, Closing the Loop, Kirklees on the Move and Nurturing Nature, as they represent the areas and activities within Kirklees that put the most pressure on our environment, and those areas and activities where action and change would have the biggest positive impact.
The three Always-on priorities are a vital part of our strategy as they represent the benefits that can be experienced by taking environmental action across the four themes. These demonstrate that it's not just the environment that will profit from this strategy, and that our efforts to become more sustainable do not come at the expense of households or the wider Kirklees economy.
For many households in fuel poverty continuing to take measures to decarbonise social housing will see monthly bills come down as we become more sustainable. More widely, some of the important technologies we need to deploy, such as electric vehicles or heat pumps, are increasingly comparable in cost to their less sustainable alternatives and can offer considerable cost savings in the longer term.
Action to reduce waste will save the district money. At a household level, everything from reducing food waste to adopting more re-use and repair, will also save money. More sustainable travel choices can reduce costs too, particularly if residents can dispense with one car, which in the UK costs the average household between £3,000 - £5,000 each year as shown by What Is The Cost Of Owning A Car In The UK .
The Institute for Government:Paying for net zero outlines that the overall cost of achieving Net Zero by 2050 in the UK will involve considerable investment (probably around £1.4 trillion) but will result in an overall return on investment of over £200 billion. As one of the largest local authorities in the UK, it's vital that Kirklees sees that sustainable wealth creation opportunity unlocked for our residents.
Launched in 2018, the Northern Forest is transforming large areas of Northern England with through an ambitious tree planting programme. Together, the Woodland Trust and four of England's northern Community Forests are planting at least 50 million new trees across 10,000 square miles of land, stretching from Liverpool to Hull, with a considerable number being planted in Kirklees. After the first five years, a study by Liverpool John Moores University assessed the programme's impact and found it has:
- Put 302,000 extra households within a 10 minutes' walk from a publicly accessible woodland.
- Created 423,626 m3 of water storage, delivering a 33% improvement in flood mitigation.
- Delivered an 11.6% improvement in air purification and sequestered 19,000 tonnes of carbon each year; and
- Delivered an overall associated annual economic uplift worth over £43 million in ecosystem services.
For more information please visit: The Northern Forest: Planting 50 Million Trees | The Woodland Trust .
Saving people money
As work on this strategy has progressed, the context has shifted. The people of Kirklees have witnessed a global energy crisis with huge increases in their monthly bills, a cost-of-living crisis and subsequent pressure on those with mortgages have seen interest rates double or even triple. It will be vital that every aspect of this strategy is shown to:
- Offer excellent value for money and efficiency in delivery, minimising the impact on Council funds and ensuring other services can continue to be delivered;
- Delivers opportunities to save our residents money through lower bills, general lower costs, and no-cost benefits like access to nature;
- Supporting the idea of a 'just transition' in that poorer households are not disadvantaged by for example, a transition to Net Zero; and
- Bring direct economic benefits to the region through new jobs, business opportunities and an upskilled and efficient economy.
The bigger picture for Kirklees
This strategy is a high-level framework to provide direction for action. Being Kirklees Council's first Environmental Strategy, it will become the Council's fourth top-tier strategy, sitting alongside the Kirklees Health and Wellbeing Strategy, Inclusive Communities Framework and the Inclusive Economy Strategy which is currently in development.
These four strategies will work in harmony to deliver their individual and collective aims, ultimately helping to implement Kirklees' Council Plan 2024/25.
The Environment Strategy provides the ambition for Kirklees Council and partners to achieve. It is not a detailed action plan - the detailed actions will come through the plans that feed into our strategy.
For the Council, examples of other strategies and plans that provide this detail include, but are not limited to, the Kirklees Waste Strategy 2021-2030, the Air Quality Action Plan 2019-2024, the White Rose Forest Plan 2021-2025 and the Kirklees Climate Change Action Plan.
Partners also have their own action plans and strategies. Our strategy is designed to support these, providing an area-wide ambition, commitment, and partnership to continue to deliver this vital work.
Kirklees Council Plan
Our Council Plan 2024/25 is the driving force for the four top-tier strategies, providing a mandate for their development and ultimate delivery. It creates a shared sense of purpose, aiming to bring together our collective insight, expertise, and resources to achieve greater impact and make our local places even better.
Our Council Plan has eight shared outcomes - each of which are addressed by one or more of the four tier strategies in Kirklees. For the Environment Strategy, these shared outcomes are as follows:
Clean and green
This strategy forms an important part of the Council's overarching Clean and Green shared outcome within 'Our Council Plan 2024/45'. The objective of this shared outcome is:
People in Kirklees enjoy a high quality, clean and green environment.
Our built and natural environment contributes to people's quality of life and makes the district a more attractive place in which to live and invest. We want to connect people and places, improve air quality and green infrastructure and be resilient in the face of extreme weather events and climate change, as well as helping people reduce waste and recycle more.
Shaped By People
Shaped by People is a shared goal, created by our citizens. It was introduced as a foundational shared outcome in 'Our Council Plan 2024/25'. Shaped by People describes how people in Kirklees want things to be in the future. It's about enabling more people to come together to make local places even better, through the shared aspiration that:
We make our places what they are.
This sense of personal agency in the places where we live, work and study is important for the natural environment we call home. By enabling more of this to happen, we can help our environment to thrive.
We have co-developed the vision and ambitions of this strategy in partnership with people who live, work or study in Kirklees. Through a series of engagement activities, we worked with residents, local organisations, agencies, and businesses, enabling them to shape the environmental ambition for our district.
If we are to successfully deliver and achieve this ambition, we must continue to work in partnership, sharing power with all people, organisations, and businesses. By doing this, we can all make a positive change to our environment. We've been told many times during our co-creation process that a culture shift is needed on the environment for Kirklees. This can only happen if the vision has been Shaped by People.
Our shared commitment to Shaped by People means that through the delivery of this strategy, our work will help more people feel inspired to take part, give people confidence to act, help people feel included, respected, and listened to, and help people get to know others in their communities well. We will continue to enable and encourage individuals from all backgrounds, and from all our local places, to share their experiences, ideas, and solutions.
To ensure this strategy's work is shaped and powered by people who live, work and study in Kirklees, we will also be guided by our Working Alongside shared values:
- Recognise everyone
- Involve others early
- Recognise we are coming from different places
- Work on mutual trust
- Grow mutual confidence
- Be flexible with each other
- Take courage from kindness
- Share with each other
- Be open and honest
- Listen with curiosity
- Be flexible in our approaches
- Learn by doing
