Enabling fair and inclusive climate action

Inspiration from across the region

In 2025 we called on public bodies to strengthen fair and inclusive climate action by changing the way they work with communities, through four key recommendations: active communities; inclusive decision-making; focused education and skills; and inspiring action through creativity.

The good news is that there are already many great initiatives happening across Yorkshire and the Humber that demonstrate these four principles, all of which provide inspiring examples of what can be achieved.

1. Active communities

Active communities are where people take shared responsibility for the decisions made about their local area. With the support of local authorities, they are able to own and run local assets (eg Sheffield Renewables), shape the local economy (eg Circular Malton and Norton and Community Wealth Building in Preston), protect the natural environment (eg Doncaster Environmental Pride and Barnsley: Love Where You Live), and are better equipped to deal with the impacts of climate change.

Physical spaces, where people can meet and collaborate, are vital for supporting active communities. These might be outdoor places (eg Green Estate in Sheffield) or community centres, cafes and creative hubs (eg We Are Seacroft). Local plans and national planning policy already provide some protections for community spaces, but funding schemes (eg North Yorkshire Shared Prosperity Fund) that can provide accessible, ongoing support to cover venue costs, operational costs and staffing costs are crucial for long-term viability.

We support the proposed strengthening of neighbourhood level governance through devolution, as this will rely on communities taking more ownership of decisions made about their local area. We’re also advocating for a ‘Right to Repair’ through legislation, to help communities collaborate and save money and resources.

2. Inclusive decision-making

Communities hold a wealth of knowledge about their local area. But conventional decision-making processes, particularly “decide and defend” approaches, fail to use the insights of local people to truly shape ideas or decisions. The ways that people can feed in are often limited, excluding hardly reached or marginalised groups and the needs of the natural world (see RYCA’s Ripple Effect Handbook).

If all voices in a community have the opportunity to be directly involved in decision-making, through citizens’ juries (eg Calderdale Citizens’ Jury on Retrofit), early engagement and deep listening exercises (eg Leeds Community Anchor Network), the outcomes are more likely to better serve local areas and garner support. This does require decision-makers, especially in local government, to be better at engagement that lasts beyond a one-off exercise, at listening to all voices despite conventional power dynamics, and at building trust with underserved groups – all of which requires resource and skills.

The Citizens’ White Paper for inclusive policymaking at the national level sets out a range of participatory methods that can be drawn on at local and regional levels. Devolution could also offer significant opportunities to renew trust and agency, if done well.

3. Focused education and skills

The UK workforce is changing as we move towards a low-carbon economy. While this shift creates huge opportunities in our region, there is also legitimate concern that places may never recover after widespread job losses and economic change. In the Humber area, communities are particularly exposed to the decline in oil, gas and steel jobs, and highly dependent on renewable energy industries for its economic future.

Local retraining and employment opportunities must therefore be central to policy decisions that will impact workers. Through Local Skills Improvement Plans and Local Growth Plans, our mayoral combined authorities have an important role in responding to the projected needs of an area, whether it’s critical infrastructure, adapting to climate impacts, or a shift in unemployment or demographics – building on initiatives in the region such as the North Yorkshire Retrofit Academy, Leeds Development Education Centre, CATCH Training Centre in Grimsby, and the East Riding of Yorkshire Future Communities Initiative. Concentrating skills provision where it is most needed could also help to address existing geographic inequalities in education and skills.

Environmental and social justice should also be at the heart of education in schools, colleges, universities and adult learning providers (Schools’ Climate Education in South Yorkshire). A more volatile climate presents social and political challenges, including significant national security concerns, but current education does not equip citizens with the skills and resilience needed to navigate these challenges.

4. Inspiring action through creativity

To progress towards a positive, more equitable future, we need to be able to visualise it. Storytellers shape how we view the present, and how we imagine the future – therefore the creative industries have an important role to play in inspiring and supporting climate action. Public bodies should be using local artists and storytellers to assist in consultation and deliberative engagement exercises, especially around the more difficult climate-related topics such as coastal change, landscape change and migration.

Despite the ongoing financial squeeze on arts and culture in the UK, in recent years cultural regeneration has been hugely successful for towns and cities across our region – examples include Co-Creating a Climate Ready Hull, Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture, The Ark Project: Bradford Climate Changemakers, University of Huddersfield Cultures of Climate Festival and Who Ya Gonna Call?.

Creative activities rely on artists, organisers and non-profit groups who are all stretched by the cost-of-living crisis and restricted funding landscape. Taking part can also be expensive: people least engaged in arts and cultural activities are also those most affected by financial pressures, deepening the inequality gap in cultural participation. Arts funding programmes should therefore offer targeted support to place-based arts and cultural projects, such as the cultural communities theme in Arts Council England’s Delivery Plan 2024-27, which focuses on making sure culture “plays its full part in making all our villages, towns and cities better places to live, work and play”.