Greater Manchester Environment Plan 2019–2024
Chapter 9: Our media and what’s missing
An in-depth analysis of city region’s environment policy and where it falls short, presented in a series of 10 chapters related in the style of a fictional leader using language the crisis calls for #TellTheTruth
By now it should be utterly obvious that we desperately need an urgent, massive and prolonged behaviour-change campaign — one of unprecedented scale, creative skill and impact.
One that touches on the key areas of our lives — how we heat, cook, and eat; work, shop, rest and play.
However I have to tell you, we don’t have a plan for that — nor even consensus on who should create or pay for it.
That’s right — there is no budget, no brief, no client and no template.
There is a deadline — 2024 by which time we need to have cut our fossil fuel emissions pretty much in half !
And there is no bigger motivation — the creative challenge you have been waiting for!
Not selling cars or clickbait — but changing the world!
And we do have the fastest growing creative sector outside London after all.
So I’m really hoping some of you will want to team up to solve this challenge — because sadly in the public services we simply don’t have the money, the staff, or the expertise to do it on our own.
Yet without a mass information campaign aimed at changing ingrained mindsets, like driving short distances and wasting precious resources, we seem doomed to fail.
So advertisers, marketeers, communicators, designers, product managers, digital specialists, bloggers, vloggers, videographers and photographers and many more..
Could you come together in a creative climate coalition?
To help create a mass behaviour-change campaign to underpin these measures — such as that which helped British people through the Second World War, and is so iconic still?
Could you create new versions of Dig for Victory, our Grow Your Own, our Put Out Your Paper Bones & Rags, our Squanderbug?
Not so much ‘She Talked/This Happened’ (navy ship sinks, sailors die)….
But ‘She Walked/ This Happened’ (car stays at home, children live).
Who will step forward to help?
Because we don’t have the funds or clout for this (and should it be down to us anyway?)
But also — over to you Mad Men —because to be fair you did kind of create the problem of over-consumption in the first place….
Of course, there is also so much that is positive and good that is happening that we could trumpet — to show people how much we are all already doing and the power of communities coming together.
But it’s hard for local newsrooms owned by national syndicates and run on shoestrings, and our cash-strapped councils, and a public sector now staffed largely by volunteers — to find the money or the time to promote themselves.
One simple way we could signal the gravity of the situation — is by declaring a climate emergency, as many councils are doing.
Kendal, Carlisle, York, Leeds, Plymouth, Stroud, Newcastle, Preston have all done so — with many announcing an accompanying target of 2030 to be carbon neutral, eight years in advance of GM, as well as Citizens Assemblies to help figure out the answers. This is tricky stuff after all!
So far Trafford is alone among the 10 Greater Manchester boroughs to have declared — and a petition has been launched to try and rectify that in the city of Manchester.
You would think that the fact most citizens seem blithely unaware of even the 2038 plan and what it requires of them — that Manchester City Council and the other boroughs would see that a climate emergency is now required?
And that April’s climate action in London shows there is far more concern in the general population that the current bi-partisan system of British politics is able to represent.
Given it is acknowledged to be a gesture that simply signals intent and conveys urgency, one does wonder — what the sticking point could be?
I’m sorry, I don’t know.
Under current mayoral powers, they don’t have to listen to me.
This page is part of a series critiquing and presenting the Greater Manchester Environment Plan, in the style of fictional leader Sandy Turnham.
All measures and facts and descriptions are accurate as far as my understanding but some artistic licence has been taken with tone in order to #TellTheTruth.
3. Our homes and the energy we use
5. Our cars and how we get around
7. Our food and the waste we create
8. Our businesses and their responsibility
