Transport Secretary Grant Shapps will today (8 July 2020) launch the first meeting of the Net Zero Transport Board to help guide the decarbonisation of UK transport.

The board will bring together high-profile leaders from a range of fields including behavioural change and policy, as well as experts from a number of prominent industry sectors including environment, science, aviation and technology. The meetings will guarantee a truly collaborative and joined up approach to tackling the wide-ranging issue of transport decarbonisation.

The group, who will meet for the first time later today, will provide the opportunity for the Transport Secretary, Transport Minister Rachel Maclean and Minister for Clean Growth Kwasi Kwarteng to hear from high-profile expert stakeholders on what steps they feel government should be taking to ensure a green recovery from coronavirus (COVID-19) and the associated economic impact.

The agenda will cover what further action the government should be taking to support jobs and the economy in line with the UK’s transport decarbonisation goals with the Transport Secretary highlighting the government’s aim for 2 million jobs by 2030 in the low carbon economy and its supply chains, up from 460,000 today.

Mr Shapps will add that many of the actions being taken to deliver net zero are investments that will also stimulate the economy and grow new low carbon industries across the UK.

Transport Secretary Grant Shapps said:

Transport has a huge part to play in tackling climate change and today’s meeting is another important step for this country on our road to net zero.

Clearly our ground-breaking transport decarbonisation plan must be shaped by the best brains and informed by the widest array of expertise and experience.

I’m determined to build a greener, healthier, more prosperous Britain for future generations and I have no doubt that the Net Zero Transport Board will play an integral part in our green recovery.

The board will also help shape and inform the transport decarbonisation plan coming later this year. It is the first time the UK will lay out its approach to decarbonising every form of transport, setting out a credible and ambitious pathway to delivering transport’s contribution to carbon budgets and to meeting net zero by 2050.

Last year, the UK became the first major economy in the world to pass laws to end its contribution to global warming by 2050. The target will require the UK to bring all greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, compared with the previous target of at least 80% reduction from 1990 levels.

Alongside the first meeting of the board today, the government is also providing an opportunity for the public to feed back their views online on the development of the transport decarbonisation plan to ensure that the plan works for everyone.

Transport Minister Rachel Maclean said:

The Transport Net Zero Board will be a key component of our greenprint for the future.

The coronavirus pandemic has led to people making huge changes to the way they live, work and travel, and we want to capitalise and build on the new habits people have developed, as well as champion the power of new, cleaner technologies on our road to a green recovery.

The government has pledged to put a green recovery for transport at the heart of its decisions, and the meeting later today follows the unprecedented work taking place as part of the green economic recovery including a £2 billion fund for cycling and walking – the largest investment ever made in this area.

Thank you so much, Helen, for the introduction and for the brilliant framing questions which are spot on, in my view. It’s a huge honour to be co-hosting this event, and I hope this finds you all safe and well.

As Helen has already said, the COVID crisis has already had an unprecedented impact on the world and it has brutally exposed so many of our vulnerabilities. And it is undoubtedly a wake up call, not just in the narrow sense of pandemics. COVID itself is likely a consequence of our abusive relationship with the natural world. But it is just one such consequence and horrific that it has been for so many people around the world, it is nevertheless dwarfed by other threats. If trends continue, the effects of climate change and the industrial scale environmental degradation that we are engaging in will be many times more dramatic and the facts are stark. In my lifetime, more or less, populations of animals on average have more than halved; around a million species now face extinction, many within decades; and every minute the world loses roughly thirty football pitches worth of forests. For the first time ever, environmental risks now fill the top five places of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report. The IPCC, IPBES, the Global Commission on Adaptation, Professor Dasgupta’s review, they all tell the same somber story: we are undermining our very foundations and it makes as little sense economically as it does ecologically.

But as Helen also said, it is also said it is also a moment of opportunity. As we recover and rebuild, as we all must, we can make different decisions, we can make wiser decisions. Governments everywhere are currently designing their economic recovery packages, and they can stick with the status quo, bailing out high carbon, environmentally damaging industries and locking in decades of emissions, or they can choose to make environmental sustainability and resilience the lens through which we map out our recovery.

In the UK, our Prime Minister has committed to “build back better and build back greener”. And through our joint leadership of the ‘recovering better for sustainability’ workstream of the UN Secretary-General’s Financing for Development Initiative, we will set out plans alongside our partners, the EU Fiji, Rwanda, to enhance international cooperation to ensure a Paris and SDG-alligned recovery. We will use our G7 Presidency, and work with the Italian G20 Presidency, both to push for a green and inclusive recovery, and to encourage countries to come forward with much stronger Nationally Determined Contributions ahead of COP26. And on that note, I do want to congratulate our co-hosts Jamaica and Rwanda for submitting new, ambitious plans, and I hope others will do the same.

Through our international climate finance, which we’ve committed to up to doubling to £11.6 billion, which is roughly $14 billion, we’ve established a Green Recovery Challenge Fund to directly support countries to design their recovery packages in a way that supports a green and resilient recovery. And I can proudly say that a green and resilient recovery from the COVID-19 crisis will be at the heart of our COP26 Presidency, running through each of our priority action areas.

The UK is committed to reaching a constructive, negotiated outcome at COP26 that concludes the outstanding elements of the Paris rulebook and drives forward collective climate action. And in addition to supporting this, we’ve chosen five key themes for COP26, and I hope you don’t mind me describing them briefly to you now.

First, we want to drive international cooperation on clean energy so the countries realise its potential to create jobs, provide cheaper power and stimulate economic recovery. We want to bring countries, development banks, investors and civil society together to help countries considering new coal plants access investments in the cleaner alternatives. We will increase innovation in technologies like smart green grids through a second phase of Mission Innovation.

The second theme is making zero emission vehicles cheaper than petrol and diesel and speeding up progress on low-carbon transportation to reduce emissions and improve public health.

Third, and underpinning all our goals, we need to harness the power of the markets to deliver a rapid transition and to protect nature. We will need to meet and move beyond the current $100 billion target, accelerating the shift in global financial flows.

Fourth, we need to help every part of society, and especially the most vulnerable, adapt and become more resilient to the effects of climate change by turning the Call for Action on Adaptation and Resilience, which was launched at the UN Climate Action Summit last year, into tangible action on the ground.

And then finally, in my view, most importantly, we need to massively ramp up our efforts to protect and restore the natural ecosystems. This current crisis shows what happens when our relationship with nature breaks down. Numerous studies show that biodiversity loss is increasing the risk of infectious diseases like COVID-19, and we know the destruction of nature contributes disproportionately to climate change and poverty. Well over a billion people depend on forests, the same forests that we’re destroying at an appalling rate. Well over a billion people depend on fish as their main source of protein. And we cannot tackle climate change without ramping up our efforts to protect and restore nature. And nature based solutions to climate changes, things like protecting and restoring mangroves, forests, peatlands and even planting trees to cool our cities, these could provide a third of the cost effective climate change mitigation we need over the next decade, while also helping communities adapt to become more resilient.

But despite that, despite the huge contribution, they can make attract just 3% of global climate funding. And that makes zero sense. A growing market for the clean technology revolution is emerging. But that is not so for nature. Consider the Amazon and other great rainforests. The whole world depends on them. Yet their value barely registers, worth much more dead than alive. Financial incentives that destroy forests outstrip those in favor of their protection by over 40 to one. In the UK, we’ve doubled our climate finance, as I said, to £11.6 billion, or $14 billion, and we will be spending much of that uplift on nature.

Under our COP26 Presidency, we will build on the foundations laid at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit and encourage other donor countries to invest far more in nature-based solutions. But the cost of renewing and protecting nature is vastly more than public money can provide. So just as we are doing for carbon, we need to attach a market value to nature recovery and a cost to its destruction. We need to tackle those perverse incentives. Consider, for example, that the top 50 food producing countries spend over $700 billion a year in support for often destructive land use. Agriculture causes around 80% percent of deforestation. Imagine the impact if that support, the $700 billion, was shifted in favour of sustainability.

As countries respond to COVID-19, the coming months are crucial for climate and the 2030 agenda. Decisions that we take now are going to have impacts for decades to come. Countries developed and developing alike, international institutions, donors and civil society, must now work together to show international leadership for a green and resilient recovery that delivers on the promise of the SDGs. Without action, we will simply be backing vast problems for future generations. We have all the tools we need and working together, it is now time to deploy them.

Thank you very much indeed.

Head of commercial for project delivery Richard Lennard talked to the international audience about how the Programme and Project Partners (PPP) contract works and what it means for collaborative working to deliver our infrastructure.

The online workshop, run by the World Economic Forum and the Engineering Construction Risk Institute, focused on infrastructure delivery and improving the risk sharing between public and private sectors through collaboration.

Richard was speaking to 80 people from all over the world including Europe, the United States and Canada.

He was invited to deliver a talk about the PPP contract as an early adopter of the Project 13 initiative, an industry-led initiative to improve the way high-performing infrastructure is delivered and managed.

Project 13 is sponsored by the Infrastructure Client Group, which Sellafield Ltd is a member of, including a joint group of industry figures, academics and infrastructure owners representing public, private and regulated infrastructure sectors.

PPP is widely seen as a recommended model to deliver complex infrastructure programmes.

Attending these events helps to increase learning and show wider industry there are alternative models for collaborative working, which are more outcome based and less transactional.

As the delivery of complex infrastructure changes, the industry is adapting and embracing this new journey.

Richard said:

It was very useful and insightful to be able to hear the different perspectives. Although we’re all delivering work in different parts of the world, it was clear that we often face the same challenges.

By working together, it is clear to see the positive impact on our projects.

Neil Crewdson, interim project delivery director said:

Being invited to a prestigious event such as the World Economic Forum shows how Sellafield Ltd is viewed as industry-leading for our collaborative approaches to delivery.

This is a great achievement for the organisation and Richard who was instrumental in developing this.