Lewes District Council has recently revised its climate and nature strategy and action plan to bring its plan for reaching Net Zero up to date. This blog from Green Party Councillor and Cabinet Member for Climate Nature & Food Systems, Emily O’Brien, describes how they went about it, and considers some of the implications of proposed local government reforms

I’m a massive believer in the power of local action, and up and down the country there are brilliant examples of councils and communities playing their part. At Lewes District Council we committed in 2019 to playing our part in tackling the climate emergency. Shortly afterwards we committed to tackling the nature emergency, and we developed a detailed plan aiming at Net Zero in 2030 in partnership with our local communities.

I took on the the lead elected councillor role after in 2023 and that was the perfect moment to learn from what had gone before and, again working with our local communities, bring our commitments up to date. I’ve pulled out my top three areas of action below, but climate action is not just about the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ we go about it, and based on our experience we’ve developed three key principles for how we do things.

Firstly, climate action means Climate Leadership – which also means getting our own house in order. As a council we control less than 1% of the district’s carbon dioxide emissions, but we can’t ask others to do their bit unless we take our own share seriously. We’ve already looked at our vehicle fleet and introduced, for example, electric food waste vehicles. The next big challenge is how we heat our council-owned buildings – especially as we’ve moved to the fabulous Marine Workshops in Newhaven, a landmark heritage building which had been lying empty. This move was vital for our community and for building community wealth – but being an old Victorian industrial building, it’s going to be a real headache for green heat but also a great chance to demonstrate how even heritage buildings can play their part.

Secondly, leadership is nothing without partnership, and the council and our partner organisations need to work together along with our local residents on the other 99% of our area’s greenhouse gas emissions.

And thirdly, none of this works without fairness. It’s often the most vulnerable people who are most affected by the impacts of climate change, whether that’s rising food prices or flooding, which is why our plan commits to a ‘just transition’, which means that  benefits go to everyone, for example via new green jobs, and also that we bring communities with us – vitally important in an age of widespread sharing of dangerous misinformation on climate action.

Selling the strategy

Clear communication is vitally important. Even as someone who has worked around climate, nature and sustainable food for many years I often find the language used can be baffling and unnecessarily jargon-filled and people don’t always explain what things mean. I’m on a personal mission to be a lot clearer about not just the language but the purpose of what we do. For example the climate and nature emergencies are two separate (though linked) things – yet all too often they just seem to get lumped together. We’ve tried to be really clear about why we are taking action – is it to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the sky? Or for the benefit of nature? Or in the sweet spot zone of both?

But we also need to go beyond clarity to really sell the ‘why’ – why we should bother, why they should bother. For example I often talk to residents and local community groups about climate zones and the way they are moving northwards every single year. We can literally measure climate change in kilometres on the ground. You can get out a tape measure and measure 13 metres and that’s the amount, on average, the climate moved northwards from the spot where you are standing, on just this one day. And when you talk about how fast that is now happening and translate that into local areas, it really brings home the extraordinary pace of change and why nature just can’t keep up.


“To really understand the impact of our heating climate, I find it helpful to think about the distance that nature needs to move north in order to adapt to the current rate of change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has suggested that climate change is causing climate zones across the northern hemisphere to move northwards. Rewilding Britain has estimated that ‘British climate zones are moving northwards at up to 5km a year, a rate hundreds of times faster than species recolonisation after the last ice age.

If we applied that figure locally, in just four years our local plants and animals would have to move from Newhaven to Chailey to enjoy the same climatic conditions as they have currently. Since trees can take hundreds of years to grow, and roads, railways and built-up areas can block animal migration, it’s no wonder that so many species are in trouble.”

 – Emily O’Brien introduction to Lewes District  2023 Climate and Nature Action Plan


So part of our job is to make the case. But we also need to show where real action can happen. If I had to pick my personal top three action areas from our district’s action plan it might be:

  • Putting nature at the heart

The Ouse runs through our district and it forms a natural north-south nature corridor, as well as holding a special place for many local communities, along with our many other watercourses and green spaces. As well as funding innovative natural flood and rewilding solutions  and our flagship partnership restoration of The Cockshut  – a local chalk stream – we have committed to introducing the most stringent local planning policy we are allowed on nature protection; holding water companies to account over sewage discharge; and to exploring a ‘rights of rivers’ approach.

Cockshut stream restoration work, with Emily O’Brien (centre)

  • ‘Including the food’

Food is up to one third of our individual carbon footprint yet often gets overlooked in climate action, so we have committed to doing our bit for local food systems e.g. opening up our land to community food growing, and working with our local fishers to support a thriving local fish economy.

  • Prioritising adaptation – Because climate change is already here

We are seeing locally and globally increasing impacts from climate breakdown, and ever more pessimistic predictions from scientists. We have made adapting to the local impacts including flooding, overheating, coastal erosion and water shortages a central part of our plans.

A warning going forward on local action

As I write this, the government has announced the biggest changes in local government of the last 50 years. Every area will soon have a regional strategic or combined authority in place as well as local authorities. In my area, for example, this will probably cover all of Sussex including Brighton and Hove. These regional-level authorities will be a new introduction to much of the Southeast outside of London.

This new regional layer could bring some advantages for climate and nature action, for example energy and transport need to be considered at a larger scale, and nature recovery plans are already happening across bigger areas, plus government has promised to pass some funding and responsibilities down to these regional bodies.

However separately, as well as the regional layer, a parallel process of reorganising local councils has also been announced. This means existing district councils like mine will be combined with several other district councils plus county councils across potentially very large areas – half a million people (the size of the whole of East Sussex) is the suggested size we are told we should be aiming at.

At the same time, some of our local responsibilities and our ‘place shaping’ powers on planning and housing and indeed on climate action will pass away from the most local level and upwards to the new regional strategic authorities.

In this new world it will therefore be all too easy to lose the best and most innovative local ‘place-based’ approaches. Some of the things I am proudest of in our council like our recently introduced New Homes Principles or the very stringent local planning policy we are currently consulting on might well get lost down the cracks. And it’s difficult to picture a very large council – let alone the even larger and more remote regional strategic authority – being able to do that detailed collaborative development work with local residents and community groups and businesses, some of them very small – talking to the Newhaven fishers for example – without those trusted local connections. It’s vital that in our newly reorganised world there remains a place for local action, and for truly local action plans like ours, as they could all too easily disappear.


For further reference, see the 2023 Lewes District Council Climate and Nature Plan and annual reports on progress here.

Emily can be contacted at Emily.OBrien@lewes.gov.uk.

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This