The UK will struggle to reach its climate change targets unless more power and money is put into local hands, say a group of metro mayors and council leaders. 

The influential figures have written to the PM calling for “further and faster” action to protect the environment. They say the pandemic has shown that local leaders can get things done.

The government said councils and mayors had “a pivotal role” in reducing carbon emissions.

Labour’s Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Steve Rotherham, the Metro Mayor of Liverpool and the Conservative leaders in Hampshire and Leicestershire are among the signatories.

They say without a locally-led approach, the UK will struggle to reach its world-leading climate change targets. 

Ministers have committed to cutting carbon emissions by 78% by 2035 compared to 1990 levels, and to become carbon neutral – or net zero – by 2050. 

That will involve things like switching homes and businesses to sustainable energy sources, more use of public transport, encouraging the use of electric cars and better insulating homes.

A coalition of 21 rural councils, in partnership with UK100, have launched the Countryside Climate Network this week.

The Network aims to ensure rural communities play an active role in helping meet the ambition of net zero by 2050.

Chair of the Countryside Climate Network and leader of Cambridgeshire County Council, cllr Steve Count, said: ‘Cambridgeshire may be low-lying and vulnerable to sea level rise, yet far from a rural backwater, it has the highest ratio of entrepreneurs nationally, many focussed on advanced cleantech.

‘It can be hard to meet our sustainable ambitions when unlike urban areas we have additional pressures of needing to fund essential bus services to remote communities or invest in broadband because the market doesn’t reach isolated areas. These examples of typical rural disadvantage combined with a funding gap in rural areas twice that of our urban counterparts, diminshes our stretched resources further.’