CBCA City Case Study | The Manchester Climate Change Partnership
The City of Manchester is one of 19 cities and city-business partnerships globally that form the City-Business Climate Alliance network. The network is coordinated by C40 Cities, CDP and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.
The Manchester Climate Change Partnership (MCCP) was established in 2018. Coordinated by Manchester’s Climate Change Agency, the Partnership brings together organisations from the city’s public, private, community, faith, education and academic sectors to achieve the ambitious targets set out in the Manchester Climate Change Framework 2020-25.
In 2022, there are 21 members in the Partnership including Arup, Manchester Airport Group, Manchester City Football Club, and the city’s two Universities. Some members represent multiple organisations, like GMAST which represents local culture sector businesses. Collectively, members employ over 45,000 people and represent 15 different sectors. All the members have committed to:
1) Take urgent action within the scope of their own activities,
2) Work collaboratively through the Partnership to help others in the wider Manchester community.
The City of Manchester joined the City-Business Climate Alliance (CBCA) in 2019 to accelerate climate action by:
Adding new high impact companies to the Partnership
Increasing the number of businesses in the Partnership with a science-based target
Improving the frequency and consistency of progress reporting
Developing a business support program for Manchester businesses to reach net zero emissions
Establishing a working group focused on building decarbonisation.
Expanding the Partnership
In 2021, CDP provided all CBCA cohort cities with a ‘Business Scan’ – an analysis of climate leading businesses in each city, based on CDP’s corporate disclosure data. Manchester used the results of the scan to identify new potential members of the Partnership, ensuring it represents the most ambitious and impactful businesses in the city. Eight new businesses joined the Partnership since the beginning of the CBCA initiative including Deloitte, THG, The Wates Group and Muse.
Raising Ambition
When Manchester joined the CBCA network in 2019, only four stakeholders in the Partnership had committed to a science-based target. The City of Manchester was an early adopter of science-based targets for cities, establishing a carbon budget of 15m tCO 2 for the period 2018-2100 and a zero-carbon date of 2038. This represents a fair and proportionate share of global emissions reductions for Manchester and is recognised as an important step to help drive action to reduce emissions in line with the Paris Agreement to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5C. With this science-based approach as the guide, it was essential for the businesses in the Partnership to also align their ambition with the goals of the Paris Agreement. In 2022, CBCA partners organised a Science-Based Targets webinar for MCCP members, delivered by SBTi. A survey of members in the same year identified that 95% are aligned to or more ambitious than the zero-carbon date of 2038 and have policies which support the city’s ambition to stay within its carbon budget.
Improving Transparency
When Manchester joined the CBCA network, one of the challenges it faced was a lack of consistent progress reporting from MCCP members. CBCA partners supported the city to develop a new survey for Partnership members. In 2022, 42 members responded to the survey – 18 core members plus 24 culture sector businesses. They reported over 370 positive climate actions as complete or ongoing with an additional 95 in the pipeline.
Consolidated Business Support
The provision of decarbonisation advice and support available to businesses in the City of Manchester and Greater Manchester is broad and extensive. Multiple agencies and organisations provide comprehensive expert guidance to a wide range of sectors and companies of all sizes. In 2021, a group of local stakeholders led by the Greater Manchester Local Enterprise Partnership and including Greater Manchester Combined Authority, the Manchester Climate Change Agency and the CBCA partners came together to create Bee Net Zero, a single access point for the extensive support and advice available. The site aims to simplify the process for companies, who can find relevant resources and connect with different support providers from a single place. The site is a particularly useful resource for Manchester’s large and diverse SME sector.
Decarbonising Buildings
A key area for action in Manchester’s Climate Change Framework is decarbonising the city’s buildings. The 2022 Framework Update showed buildings are responsible for 76% of the city’s direct energy-related emissions. In September 2021, a group of leading industry players across the built environment sector formed a task and finish group and developed a roadmap to net-zero carbon new buildings in Manchester. The roadmap provides guidance on how net-zero carbon should be defined for new buildings in Manchester and how this ambition could be implemented from 2023. The roadmap covers all types of new buildings and is based on a whole-lifecycle carbon approach, including both operational and embodied energy. It aims to reach net-zero emission buildings at the lowest cost by ensuring the highest efficiency levels, without the use of offsetting or a carbon tax.
Key components of the roadmap to net-zero buildings include:
1. Reducing energy demand – optimising the efficiency of the building fabric
2. Reducing embodied carbon – driving down the carbon impacts related to product and construction stage
3. Measuring in-use performance to close the gap between modelled and actual energy performance and ensure the build performs in operation as intended
4. Low carbon energy supply – with low carbon heat, hot water, and electricity
5. Zero carbon balance – When a building produces the same amount of energy that it consumes.
Manchester’s Local Plan, due to be reissued in 2023, provides an opportunity to accelerate the adoption of these net zero initiatives now. As well as meeting the necessary requirements for adoption in the Local Plan, the roadmap also needs to be aligned with the recommended actions for buildings in the 2022 update of the Manchester Climate Change Framework (published in October). With the support of CBCA, the task and finish group came together again in November 2022 to discuss barriers to the adoption of the standard and routes to overcome them. Over the coming months, the group, led by Civic Engineers, will collaborate to tackle the existing barriers to the adoption of the standard into local policy. In parallel, the partnership has established a brand new task and finish group of local experts working on commercial retrofit, led by Bruntwood. They had their first workshop in November 2022 and over the following six months will develop a Commercial Retrofits Strategy for the city.
Meet a Member - Arup
Arup has supported the MCCP over many years, most recently with Arup’s Manchester Office Leader, Mike Wilton, becoming chair of the MCCP in 2020. Fellow Arup Director, Dr. Tim Whitley, based in Manchester and who leads on Building Sustainability and net-zero carbon across North West and Yorkshire, was part of the team of volunteers who input in the publication of the MCCP’s “A roadmap to net-zero carbon new buildings in Manchester”, published in August 2021.
Furthermore, Dr. Whitley and his colleague, Craig Havenhand, are supporting the MCCP in both the new build task group to address the implementation of the roadmap in a pragmatic and practical way, and the retrofit task group set up in November 2022 to collectively work on the targets for retrofit in the updated Framework. As Arup, we believe that partnership and collaboration in sustainability and net-zero is the primary way that cities and the construction industry can achieve the ambitions for a net-zero world that are so essential to deliver. The MCCP is a fantastic local way of delivering this ambition.
Conclusion
Manchester has been successfully collaborating with businesses since the formation of the Partnership in 2018. Through the city’s involvement in the CBCA network, Manchester has achieved its goals of expanding the network, raising ambition among members, increasing transparency, consolidating support and accelerating action on decarbonising buildings. As part of the network, Manchester has engaged in six peer exchange opportunities with the international community of CBCA cities. This includes building sector-specific knowledge shares with cities in the USA. The City of Manchester continues to take the lead on climate action, receiving its first A score from CDP in 2022. Collaboration with the business community will continue to be crucial as the city progresses towards its goal of net zero carbon by 2038.