How can our communities in Bolton come together to make sustained change and accelerate our progress towards net-zero carbon emissions?

The aim of this research is to understand how we can enable individuals, businesses and communities to come together to make sustained change and accelerate our progress towards Bolton's net-zero carbon emissions. There is currently a climate change emergency as global temperatures rise every decade, causing more profound environmental and health impacts, from rising sea levels and melting ice caps to air quality, food insecurity and increased frequency of extreme weather events such as flooding. There is a need therefore to reach net zero carbon emissions sooner to limit the impact of climate change. In Bolton, our target around reducing carbon is net-zero by 2030, which means that all the carbon released into the atmosphere is balanced by the amount of carbon captured in the atmosphere resulting in net-zero. Recent learning from Bolton's response to COVID and the Variants of Concern, through surge testing and surge vaccinations, highlighted the importance of the community as a key delivery partner in that emergency response which resulted in the halting of rising COVID cases. The community were a key partner from the start helping to shape the response raising awareness through word of mouth, social media and leafleting and also delivering the response. They provided assurance and delivered messages via the 'trusted voice', they developed their solutions responding to the need of the community. Many of these interventions grew organically and the community started to identify new ways of engaging and delivering to the community. This study will build on the community response to Bolton's Variant of Concern, taking lessons learnt and distilling that to enable a similar social movement for the climate change agenda so that we can accelerate change towards our net zero carbon emissions target. The design and methods used will be participatory community engagement whereby the research is co-designed in collaboration with the community and the community will be involved in every stage from designing, delivering, collection and sharing of the results. The methods used will ensure that all voices are heard, not just the strongest voices, contributing to reducing health inequalities. Local authorities across the UK have climate change as a high priority so the findings will be captured in written reports and shared across networks and at conferences where appropriate.