Senedd Cymru | Welsh Parliament
Pwyllgor Newid Hinsawdd, yr Amgylchedd a Seilwaith | Climate Change, Environment and Infrastructure Committee
Datgarboneiddio'r sector cyhoeddus | Decarbonising the public sector
Ymateb gan Trafnidiaeth Cymru | Evidence from Transport for Wales
Gan adeiladu ar waith Archwilio Cymru, hoffai’r Pwyllgor gael barn am y canlynol:
We have been progressing delivery of the five ‘calls for action’.
1. Strengthen your leadership and demonstrate your collective responsibility through effective collaboration;
In 2022, we recruited an Energy and Environment manager, enabling better governance and expanding the remits of our asset environmental management systems. This will allow better collaboration between TfW Group and TfW Rail Environment management systems to deliver a ‘one-team’ approach.
We recruited a Climate Change Manager in Aug 2021 and strengthened the position with support from a Climate Resilience and Adaptation Lead in Sept 2022. The climate change team serves as subject matter expert on climate change and leads delivery of our Climate Adaptation and Resilience Plan. The team collaborates with public sector bodies to share best practice on carbon reporting and have volunteered to provide Welsh Government-led workshops on our approach with the wider public sector.
The Sustainable Development team is also now better integrated with station working groups to share expertise/best practices and steer projects. Working with the Carbon Trust, we also delivered Carbon Literacy training to colleagues.
We strengthened our electric vehicle infrastructure projects team by recruiting more experienced project managers and have also worked with Welsh Government to develop a support service for all public sector and private industries to facilitate EV infrastructure development; awarding £1.8m of capital to local authorities to accelerate/enhance their existing fleet decarbonisation and EV projects before Apr 2023.
2. Clarify your strategic direction and increase your pace of implementation
The sustainable development team worked with leaders across the organisation to develop our Sustainable Development Plan 2022-27, setting strategic direction in order to achieve our goals. The plan emphasises the need to embed behavioural change throughout our operations and we are implementing a behaviour change framework within our communication strategies. We will measure our progress against the WTS monitoring framework.
Our climate change team have begun the final development of our Climate adaptation and resilience plan. The plan, which was consulted on in the summer 2022 and is due to be published in December 2022, establishes the implementation timeline for adaptation governance.
Working with Welsh Government, we established our baseline Scope 1,2 and 3 emissions. We’ll use this baseline for the implementation of our emissions pathway. We’re working across both TfW and Welsh Government to model potential emission pathways for our corporate footprint. The approved pathway will form the basis of our carbon management plan.
We’re also developing a Power BI dashboard to improve oversight and reporting of corporate carbon, and to enhance identification of priorities for decarbonisation.
3. Get to grips with the finances you need
Work is underway to establish our approach to assessing/managing whole life carbon, and this will be embedded in all capital projects and infrastructure programmes. This will form development of a costed Carbon Management plan to 2030, including costed emissions pathways.
4. Know your skills gaps and increase your capacity
We’ve identified learning opportunities within our organisation and are supporting colleagues to increase their skills. Our teams facilitate industry wide working groups to enhance learning through shared best practice and identify learning gaps.
5. Improve data quality and monitoring to support your decision making
We’ve worked with the Carbon Trust to improve our reporting calculator and use ‘Power BI’ to create a carbon management dashboard for improved data quality/monitoring. Internal governance has been developed to improve accuracy of activity data provision from core teams and ensure a single source of truth. A forum has been set up by Welsh Government to support public bodies with reporting.
The Route Map presents an effective way for public bodies to review progress towards their achievement of the 2030 goal. As an organisation, we are on target within the ‘moving up a gear’ section. The reporting guidance provides a consistent methodology for carbon reporting across the public sector to aid benchmarking and measurement of progress.
The first year of actions 2021/2022 are a significant undertaking and it will likely take longer to implement some of the suggested outcomes. The actions require significant investment and resource to implement, which has been difficult to achieve in such a short timeframe since route-map publication. It does appear that this is reflected in the overlap of the dates outlined the next section (‘well on our way’).
Currently we do not have the oversight of the progress of other bodies, though we do see their reporting through the Public Sector Carbon Reporting and Feedback Workshops held by Welsh Government. We would benefit from development of collective approach, led by the Welsh Government, to support our implementation of priority actions, such as sustainable procurement. Public sector bodies are still getting to grips with the measurement and spend-based assessment approach for reporting; and would benefit from more clarity around supply chain emissions and help to identify opportunities for carbon reduction in procurement.
We have recently been invited to join a Decarbonisation Working Group and are awaiting more information from Natural Resources Wales.
We’ve worked with colleagues from the Welsh Government to deliver the National Transport Delivery Plan consultation document. The plan sets out various objectives to decarbonise the transport sector including achievement of modal shift, electrification, active travel uptake and behavioural insight.
The Welsh Government have also supported our development of data and mapping tools to identify and prioritise investment in areas most in need of EV charging infrastructure, and we will continue working together to deliver a comprehensive EV delivery strategy by end of 2022, ready to act as a clear framework in allocating support for public, third sector and private sector delivery.
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