What does net zero mean for Reading?
12th June 2024
As the 2024 Reading Climate Festival gets underway REDA’s Chief Executive, Nigel Horton-Baker looks at how embracing the existing Reading 2050 Vision, making small changes, and developing green skills can all contribute to a cleaner, greener, and more sustainable Reading for the future.
As part of the festival, Nigel joined a panel alongside colleagues from other Reading organisations to discuss what net zero really means for our town. As Reading’s Economy and Destination Agency, REDA’s ethos is about partnership working, collaborating with Reading-based private and public sector organisations and acting as a catalyst for change. Nigel outlines three key priority areas for Reading:-
Embracing the Reading 2050 Vision
The Reading 2050 Vision was created in 2019 between REDA, Barton Willmore (now Stantec) and the University of Reading, with the ambition of Reading being ‘smart and sustainable city.’ The strategy focuses on three core themes: a city of smart technology, a city of culture and diversity and a city of parks and gardens. Some tangible outputs include:
- Inventing smart technology and using it will help reduce Reading’s carbon footprint and adapt to climate change (Reading’s dynamic technology and knowledge-based economy will support this).
- Embracing Reading’s green and blue land cover, ensuring we meet biodiversity targets (joint thinking between REDA and Reading Borough Council around creating green spaces / ‘green’ buildings can drive this).
- Reviewing the 2050 Vision, five years post launch – there is now a need to bring forward the work in line with revised targets (REDA will lead this to relaunch shortly).
- Aligning with the Council’s revised Town Centre Strategy, to ensure activities in the move to net zero are captured within the wider plan.
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Making small changes, working from the bottom up
For many, it can be difficult to envisage what net zero will look and feel like, and equally hard to understand its cause and effect. What can we all be doing, either as individuals or businesses, which can reduce our carbon footprint and support the climate emergency? Small steps can often lead to big change:
- Use tools and techniques to help you measure your carbon footprint. Often you can equate a financial benefit from the actions as well, especially in terms of reductions in energy use.
- Review your CSR policies and set out an annual plan of simple activities and ways of working that can help reduce your carbon footprint. For example, REDA has signed up for a Corporate Social Responsibly Accreditation - this national accreditation assesses CSR standards including polices and processes to operate more sustainably.
- Take up schemes which are already running – REDA manages Reading’s Business Improvement District (BID) which provides added value services to help businesses and the town become greener and reduce their carbon footprint, as well as using sustainable products such as low energy LED Christmas lights and new technology to turn off the lights off in the daytime.
Harnessing ‘green skills’
If Reading is to achieve net zero as a town, we need to foster our workforce’s ability and knowledge through green skills. REDA’s recent research looked at what this could mean for Reading, using data widely used by government and local authorities which measures key sectors in the economy which involve and/or require low carbon and renewable energy jobs (LCREE Jobs). This highlighted that:
- Supporting green skills could generate up to 20,000 ‘green jobs’ by 2050 in Reading.
- Green jobs would initially require people to assist with retro-fitting Reading’s buildings with more sustainable infrastructure.
- In the short term, Reading needs more construction workers, engineers and surveyors.
- In the medium term, Reading needs more research from its tech sector on sustainable technology.
- Longer term, Reading needs to address the lack of LCREE jobs in the IT sector – a huge sector for Reading, linking the two could see a huge increase in the number of green jobs created.
- REDA is using funding secured from this research to roll out green skills courses with Activate Reading College, as well as working with New Directions College to develop a programme of short courses for Reading employees.
