What works now? Local government action on climate and nature in 2026

How do councils keep making progress on climate and nature goals when the landscape is shifting beneath their feet? That was the question at the heart of a recent three-part learning programme run by New Local and the British Academy, which brought together local government practitioners, academics and policy experts from across the UK.

The context will be familiar to anyone working in local government. Councils are navigating organisational change against a background of long-term financial and resource constraints. Local Government Reorganisation, devolution, new political priorities and ongoing budget pressures are all reshaping the context in which climate and nature work takes place. It’s not surprising, then, that many are wondering: what works now?

To explore that question, we ran a three-part cohort programme of online sessions for local government officers. Rather than focusing on technical climate policy, the programme examined the conditions that enable change, using the British Academy’s recently published reports, Governance to Accelerate Net Zero and A place-sensitive approach for environmental sustainability. These provided a well-evidenced starting point to explore how language shapes legitimacy, how climate priorities become embedded in everyday organisational life and how partnerships and trusted relationships help sustain progress over time.

Drawing on provocations from academics, local government and partnership practitioners, the sessions were designed to encourage honest conversations about what is difficult, what is changing and where the opportunities lie.

Collectively, the sessions surfaced several consistent themes that reveal how thinking in local government is evolving, moving beyond technical climate policy and towards ideas around language, culture, trust, leadership and the relationships that enable change.

Climate succeeds when it is integrated with everyday local priorities

Perhaps the strongest observation from participants was that climate action now feels more resilient when it is woven into the everyday business of local government, rather than being treated or talked about as a standalone agenda.

Councils described moving away from leading with terms like net zero or even climate change. Instead, conversations increasingly begin with the issues that resonate more directly with either the organisation’s wider priorities or people’s lives: resilience, service improvement and delivery, adaptation, health, cost of living and nature.

However, participants didn’t feel that this represented a watering down of ambition. Rather, it was about recognising that climate outcomes are often best achieved through wider goals – delivering better public services, healthier communities and stronger places.

The programme also challenged the assumption that better evidence automatically leads to greater public support. Again and again, participants returned to the importance of centring culture, identity and lived experience for legitimising their work with communities.

In Hackney, where conversations about low-carbon living have been reframed through food, heritage and local culture, the Council created spaces where climate conversations emerged naturally from shared experiences, rather than asking communities to engage with abstract climate policy. This sparked a broader reflection across the cohort. Successful engagement often means entering conversations that communities are already having, rather than expecting them to enter into spaces owned by others.

Relationships are the necessary infrastructure for navigating change

Our second session focused on organisational change, but the discussion repeatedly returned to one word: relationships. Participants spoke openly about strategies that looked impressive on paper but struggled to gain traction in practice and contrasted these with examples where strong relationships between teams, partners and communities had enabled progress despite political uncertainty or organisational upheaval. Relationships were no longer spoken about as a ‘nice to have’ but were recognised as critical infrastructure. This came across particularly clearly in a provocation from Oxford County Council, where the speaker discussed conceptualising climate action as either centralised through the local authority or decentralised through partnerships.

Within this, participants also challenged assumptions about who communities trust. In some contexts, councils were seen as the natural convenor; in others, community organisations or even commercial partners were considered more credible messengers if they were offering practical solutions.

Rather than assuming trust resides with any one institution, the discussion suggested that successful partnerships start by asking who people are most likely to listen to ‘at that time, in that place, on that issue.’

This was felt especially strongly in Oldham Council, where our speaker talked about the deep work done to build trust with communities, the role of trusted intermediaries in doing this work, and the fragility of trust in times of change.

The final session deepened this insight by exploring partnerships as a form of institutional memory. Participants described deliberately shifting ownership beyond the council – to VCSE organisations, health partners and community networks, for example -not because they wanted to step back, but because partnerships could provide stewardship through the disruptive cycles of reorganisation, political change and staff turnover. In this framing, partnerships are not simply delivery mechanisms; they are the custodians of long-term relationships and ambition.

There was also a realistic acknowledgement that partnership working cannot compensate indefinitely for shrinking resources. Participants challenged the assumption that community organisations can simply fill the gaps left by councils, noting that short-term funding cycles often undermine the very relationships everyone agreed were essential.

Embedding climate action: ‘help me, help you’

To make climate action ‘business as usual’ participants cautioned against expecting every team to become climate specialists. Instead, they see their role as helping other services understand how progress on climate and nature goals supports their objectives.

Participants described a wide range of practical mechanisms for embedding climate and nature in this way – from procurement processes and corporate risk registers to appraisal systems and regeneration frameworks.

This represents an important shift in thinking. Success is no longer measured simply by the existence of a climate strategy or dedicated team. Instead, it is increasingly measured by whether climate considerations have become part of how an organisation routinely makes decisions.

Adapting to change without abandoning ambition

One of the most striking aspects of all the discussions was their pragmatism. Several participants were working within rapidly changing political contexts, yet very few described abandoning climate work altogether. Instead, they described adapting: focusing on resilience rather than net zero, talking about adaptation rather than carbon reduction, or emphasising financial risk, public health or economic resilience rather than climate targets.

The work itself often remained remarkably consistent. What changed was the language, framing and routes through which that work could continue. Far from signalling retreat, participants saw this as an example of good public leadership: responding to changing contexts while remaining focused on long-term outcomes.

Looking ahead

Running through all of the sessions was a broader reflection about the changing role of local government itself. Rather than seeing councils primarily as organisations that deliver climate programmes, participants increasingly described their role as creating the conditions in which change can happen. But they must be enabled to do so, both within their local systems and by national government more generally.

That means creating the policy and funding conditions that are conducive to convening partners, connecting communities, translating evidence into practice, supporting local leadership and helping different parts of the system work together.

The conversations also suggest that work on climate in local government is maturing. In a rapidly changing world, the future of climate action may depend less on making good climate arguments and more on building stronger relationships, more resilient organisations and places where communities genuinely feel able to influence their futures.

About the British Academy

The British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. Their policy work mobilises and leverages our unique capacity to convene world-class expertise from Fellows and other scholars, global thought leaders, business and civil society. They bring rigorous, authoritative and independent perspectives to major policy challenges globally, nationally and locally, across a range of sectors and issues.

Photo by Alfred Kenneally on Unsplash.

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