Green cities: The role of urban Britain in reaching net zero
Here are three key takeaways on how cities compare to one another in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
Here are three key takeaways on how cities compare to one another in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
Last month, the 911±¬ÁÏÍø published its annual report Cities Outlook 2024, our annual health check of the economic performance of urban Britain. One of our indicators looked at how cities compared to one another in terms of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Here are three key takeaways from the data.
In 2021, the UK’s 63 largest cities and towns accounted for 54 per cent of the total population but only 40 per cent of the UK’s GHG emissions (see Figure 1). The average UK emissions per capita in 2021 totalled 6 tonnes while the city average was lower at 4.4 tonnes.
While the UK has still a long way to go to hit its net zero target, there has been a reduction in GHG emissions across the country that has been led by urban areas. Figure 1 shows that not only were emissions per capita in urban areas lower than elsewhere in 2005, they have fallen by 50 per cent over the last 16 years compared to 39 per cent in non-urban areas.
Factors influencing this overall reduction vary from the transition away from coal and uptake of low-carbon energy to a shift away from manufacturing to less carbon-intensive, service-based industries.
Looking at the sources of greenhouse gas emissions shows why cities have lower per capita emissions, why they’ve seen sharper declines and what this might mean for further emissions cuts in the future. Figure 2 shows that cities have lower transport and domestic emissions per capita (41.5 per cent and 15 per cent less respectively in 2021), with higher densities of housing encouraging public transport use and cutting household energy use. Cities also have less manufacturing industry given the locational preferences of these activities, meaning industry emissions are lower overall.
The fall in emissions in both areas has been driven by a fall in industrial (48 per cent) and domestic (45 per cent) sectors. In urban areas, there was a fall of 46 per cent of domestic emissions per capita, compared to 44 per cent in non-urban areas. For the industry sector, unsurprisingly, as industries slowly continued to leave urban areas in the last decade, there was a fall of 52 per cent, compared to 44 per cent for the rest of the UK.
There has been much less change in transport (26 per cent fall). And so, there is much work to be done in cutting transport emissions in particular if the UK is going to get closer to net zero.
This, in principle, should be much easier to do in cities. While a move to electric vehicles will likely make a large contribution to future cuts across Britain, reducing the use of cars will be more easily achieved in cities than in more rural areas. This is because public transport is inherently easier to provide, and is better patronised, in dense urban areas because of the relative benefits of using it to cars in such environments.
This however will require a change in the density of many of our cities, which are much lower rise than their European comparators. And this will mean that planning policy will have an important role to play in the UK achieving net zero.
Given this, the Government’s recent of its desire to increase the density of development in cities is welcome. To achieve this will likely require two interventions. The first is the reform of the planning system by transitioning from a discretionary approach to a more rules-based system. And the second will be the derisking of such developments, especially in areas with lower land values, as the private sector is unlikely to shoulder the costs of this kind of development on its own.
You can consult our Cities Outlook data for further information on this and other economic indicators.
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