Ep 1: Cornwall’s Climate Emergency: A conversation with Councillor Martyn Alvey

To set the scene on arrival in Cornwall, we caught up with Councillor Martyn Alvey, Cornwall Council’s portfolio holder for Environment and Climate Change, at its Lys Kernow headquarters in Truro.

Nate meets Councillor Martyn Alvey at Cornwall Council’s Lys Kernow headquarters in Truro.

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Net zero position: Martyn is a climate-passionate politician integral to Cornwall’s emergence as the UK’s first rural county to declare a climate emergency. His brief is to lead on budget and policy formulation and implementation in relation to the environment, and provide executive member leadership for the Environmental Growth Strategy and Climate Change Action Plan while delivering better environmental outcomes through the Local Nature Partnership.

Hear it here first: The UK government is exploring licensing offshore floating wind licensing in the Celtic Sea, leveraging technology that unites static offshore wind wisdom with longstanding oil and gas rig anchoring capabilities.

Illustration credit: Tom Sears

Community catch: The University of Exeter is launching The Future is Green, a £2.2m skills training programme targeting high-growth carbon reduction sectors of strategic importance for Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, including energy and power, construction, and heating. Courses are bookable via Eventbrite.

Cornwall’s decarbonisation challenge

Martyn shares insights on factors shaping the environmental perspective from the UK’s southwestern tip, and how these contributed to the county setting a target to be net zero by 2030. 

We were struck by Cornwall’s commitment to integrating climate-conscious thinking into its planning. For example, a Local Nature Recovery Strategy aims for 30% of Cornwall to be “well managed for nature” by 2030, including provisions to gradually reintroduce beavers to help with flood management. Martyn also explores the ongoing formulation of Cornwall’s Local Area Energy Plan, which aims to partner with residents to find solutions to energy infrastructure integration issues. 

We learn how Cornwall was the location of the UK’s first commercial wind farm at Delabole, more than 30 years ago, and now hosts innovative companies like Bennamann, which is delivering a solution to convert methane captured from dairy farm slurries into biomethane that can power adapted vehicles and generators. Indeed, last year Case New Holland (CNH), the Dutch farmtech juggernaut, took a controlling stake in Bennamann to better tap its carbon negative solutions to capture, repurpose and store fugitive methane emissions for energy use. 

Martyn finishes with a vision for a decarbonised Cornwall in 10 years’ time, still reliant on carbon credits from schemes like the Forest for Cornwall and potentially seaweed-based blue carbon to offset emissions, but greener, better connected, and exporting its renewable energy to the rest of the country.    

Read the transcript

This text is exported from an audio editing platform and lightly edited. We apologise for any discrepancy with the final audio recording and for grammatical errors.

Nate: Hi, I'm Nature Nate here in Cornwall in the Cornwall County Civil Hall with Councillor Martyn Alvey, the Portfolio Holder for Climate and the Environment. Cornwall was the first county to declare a climate emergency. Can you tell me, what was that process like? What led to it? And how did everyone come to agree?

Martyn: So, Nate at that time, I wasn't a member of the Cabinet. I was, in fact, one of the backbench members of the opposition group within the council. And working with another backbencher. Again, a different political group to myself. But also passionate about the climate, we put forward what's called a motion to the full council to declare a climate emergency, which was voted on then by the council to pretty much a unanimous vote.

Nate: So there was, this was a cross-party motion that was then unanimous about setting a climate emergency?

Martyn: Yeah, and the reason for that is that whatever your politics, people are very aware of the environment, the climate. We live right at the far tip of the United Kingdom, we get the weather straight off the Atlantic.

We recognize how actually climate change is going to have a big impact on our day to day living down here , and people in Cornwall are that much more attached to their environment. Pretty much unanimously within the council. We understand the importance of climate change and the fact that we have to both adapt and mitigate.

Nate: That's really encouraging. What does it mean to declare a climate emergency? Does this engage funding or plans? What does declaring a climate emergency lead to?

Martyn: First of all, it is that declaration of intent and recognition. It's a call for action. We needed to put together an adaptation plan, a recognition of what we needed to do, and putting it into three columns.

Adaptation and mitigation, as I previously mentioned, and thirdly, also nature and the recognition that climate change is also having a big impact on the natural environment.

And indeed, we also went on to declare an ecological emergency in November 2021 in recognition of the fact that we also need to make sure that we are not just holding the line when it comes to nature, but actually we're involved in recovering nature back to where it should be.

Nate: I wanted to ask about wind as well. Onshore wind. Hasn't been many onshore wind turbines, but might be a sensitive topic…

Martyn: So renewable energy in Cornwall is a real opportunity, but it's also a real challenge. Traditionally, Cornwall used to import all its energy from the rest of the country.

Nate: Wow.

Martyn: Our grid is geared to take the energy from the big nuclear power station in Bristol and all the large power stations further up the country. It's not designed to export energy or indeed to make great use of the energy that we're actually generating here locally.

Nate: I see.

Martyn: But opportunities in Cornwall include wind turbines. And indeed the first commercial wind farm in the UK was actually in Cornwall. And that was nearly 20 years ago. We've got a big challenge with onshore wind because of, as I explained, we have that challenge around grid capacity, but also politically onshore wind became a bit of a thorny topic because of the visual impact of wind turbines. We're also seeing a significant increase in solar energy in Cornwall.

Nate: We lots of solar fields coming in on the train.

Martyn: And again, that is to a degree contentious, because of course, if you're planting solar farms, you're not planting crops, and so there is that balancing with food security and, and solar farms.

The big new opportunities that are coming forward though are in geothermal energy. Cornwall has incredible opportunity to actually generate geothermal energy into the future and, And finally, the opportunity for floating offshore wind is being developed.

Nate: Oh, really?

Martyn: The UK has a very strong offshore wind supply, particularly up the east coast, but the waters around Devon and Cornwall are not well suited to what's called static offshore wind, where the turbine is actually cemented to the seabed.

However, the opportunity exists to anchor turbines further off the coast and indeed those turbines can be even larger than the static offshore wind turbines that are located up the east coast of the United Kingdom, and the government is currently working with various providers to license the next generation of offshore wind, which will be the floating platforms in what's known as the Celtic Sea, which is the area of sea between the Southwest and Wales moving out towards Ireland.

Nate: so I guess going back to the planning for the council, to what extent are these things like geothermal energy and floating offshore wind, newer types of energy supported by these plans?

Martyn: There are newer types of energy but based on some existing technologies. So, for example, the geothermal energy uses much of the technology that is used in countries like Iceland.

But, of course, in Iceland that geothermal heat is far nearer the surface than in places like Cornwall where you have to drill several kilometers into the ground to actually reach those hot rocks. With the floating offshore wind you're effectively combining two established technologies.

Static offshore wind turbines are now well understood. Economy of scale is there in the development and of course, for many years, the oil and gas industry has been anchoring big rigs in deeper waters. And so it's a case of bringing together the turbine technology and the platform technology that the oil and gas industry is used in, into a single entity and then clearly running that big cable and network from the Celtic Sea ashore to actually distribute the power through the national grid.

Nate: So moving beyond energy and looking at the overall net zero goal, what are some of the projects that the council's been supporting or helping to grow that are going to lead to net zero?

Martyn: One of the things that we've been working with a company called Bennamann on is a technology to actually install covers on what are called slurry lagoons on dairy farms.

Nate: Okay.

Martyn: As you as you'll see now as you go around, Cornwall is a large farming community in Cornwall. A large part of that is livestock and dairy. And dairy farms in particular do a lot of their work undercover, particularly in the winter. The, the cows come in over, over the winter

Nate: Gotta keep the cows warm?

Martyn: Cows poo a lot, as you, as you would imagine and that is then collected as a liquid slurry in big tanks, because clearly it is potentially hazardous

Nate: Seems hazardous to me…

Martyn: It is hazardous. Now until recently, the methane that all that cow poo generates goes into the atmosphere –

Nate: Super potent greenhouse gas.

Martyn: A really potent greenhouse gas. However, Bennamann have developed a technology to cover those lagoon and convert that methane into a biofuel. So, that biomethane can then be used to power tractors, it can be compressed and taken away to power other vehicles, it can power a generator on the farm. So not only is it not going into the atmosphere, but it's actually a green fuel.

Nate: And that can just be used with the existing gas infrastructure that's already here?

Martyn: The vehicles that run off biomethane are adapted to obviously have the fuel storage tanks. But the engine itself is very similar to a standard internal combustion engine with some slight changes and Bennamann,

as a local company, has recently had a huge investment come in from Case New Holland (CNH), one of the largest tractor manufacturers in the world, to actually develop their technology in association with Case New Holland tractors. The idea being that we, we could see this on dairy farms across the world.

Nate: What are some, some other projects?

Martyn: We can talk about the Forest for Cornwall.  Tree coverage in Cornwall is actually very low compared to much of the rest of the United Kingdom. As a maritime nation we, we cut down an awful lot of our trees to build warships to fight the French and the Spanish a couple of hundred years ago and really never replanted them. We've actually deforested our county here. Historically it's recognized obviously that trees sequester a large amount of carbon. So we've set an ambition to plant 8000 hectares of new canopy cover across Cornwall between now and 2030. And that isn't a single forest of 8000 hectares That's a project owned by the whole of Cornwall, whether it's in parks and gardens, in the corner of a school, on some farmland. It's a

Nate: spreading it out. It's

Martyn: collective across Cornwall rather than as a single entity. It's as much a community project as it is a council project. The council has 84 farms of its own that it has tenants on across Cornwall. And we're working with them as well to actually plant woodland on the more marginal land, in other the land that they don't graze or grow crops on.

Nate: And does that link back to the ecological emergency? Cause then you're kind of doing both at once, right?

Martyn: Absolutely. It's a big part of our nature recovery strategy as well. The aim is for 30 percent of Cornwall to be well managed for nature by 2030.

Nate: What would well managed for nature mean? Would that be like a, I guess, like a typical forest we might imagine in our head?

Martyn: Well managed for nature recognizes the natural cycle – everything from the insects through to the predators and making sure the environment is such that it enables that whole cycle to function seamlessly.

So we're not damaging nature through inappropriate development. We're not cutting down trees. We're not using chemicals on land that may be killing the pollinators. Looking at possibly reintroducing some species that have died out, which are important parts of our natural cycle. For example, beavers. Beavers died out in the United Kingdom several hundred years ago, mainly because they were hunted. They're easy to catch, nice to eat, and you could make yourself a warm winter clothing out of the out the pelt.

Nate: Back then at sustainable material?

Martyn: Absolutely. It's now been recognized that beavers have been massive benefit in terms of natural flood management. So many of our particularly rapid catchments where a heavy rainfall could see flooding the settlement down the valley, you know, within hours. Beavers through their damming does what's known as slow the flow. It prevents those flash floods. So we're looking at reintroducing beavers and other creatures such as pine martens, which again are a natural predator that ensure that our forests can flourish. Red squirrels, again, another species that had all but died out in Cornwall.

Nate: So how does that, how does a species reintroduction work? Is this someone at a farm asking the council? Is the council asking the farm? How does that process work?

Martyn: Very much depends on which species you're talking about, but beavers as a good example There was a lot of scepticism from the farming community – uncontrolled beavers could possibly be quite damaging. So that reintroduction has to be done very, very gradually and initially within fenced enclosures, so the benefits could be proved. We're now getting to a point where those releases don't have to be fenced, but we still have to work with the farming community in order to ensure that we don't actually create a problem that then leads to their farmable land being compromised.

Nate: Right, that could be a problem with restoration or regeneration because they've been gone for 400, 300 years. Any successes you want to share? I know that both emergencies have been declared very recently. So, you know, it'll take time to really achieve the results you're looking for. But what are some early signs of success that you've already been been seeing?

Martyn: Not very many good things came out of COVID. But in terms of our ability to reduce our carbon emissions, COVID has been a game changer. Post COVID now, we have almost reduced by 75 percent the amount of office working that our council employees do.

Nate: Wow.

Martyn: We now have a system whereby each team within the council has a charter which decides how they are going to work as a balance from home and office based. But at the same time, you're recognizing that particularly younger members of staff, developing members of staff also need that camaraderie, and the ability to be in that office environment with their peers to learn and develop.

Nate: And productivity is still okay. The council is still running. Things haven't come apart?

Martyn: If anything, I would say it's improved because it's had a positive impact on morale because it's improved people's work life balance. The technology is there to enable somebody calling the council to dial the number for that member of staff and they don't have to have a phone on their desk anymore. If they're working at home on their computer, it'll ring through.

So many of our buildings are now being disposed of or being taken out of use. So we're not heating so many huge great office spaces. And of course, that in itself is an improvement on our carbon footprint. We're not all coming together for meetings so often. So many more of our meetings are now held online.

We still do come together for those key decision making meetings, those key public meetings of the council. But, all those briefings and more routine meetings now happen online.

Nate: So since we started this new season on net zero in the UK, there's been some policy changes that happen relatively rapidly, and speaking with other people for this season, they've highlighted the fact that inconsistent policy and government has made it difficult for them to develop businesses around clean tech, around net zero, around renewables. How does the council interact with the UK national government when it comes to things like net zero, setting a climate emergency?

Martyn: It can prove challenging. One of the reasons for that is that government tends to operate in quite a urban centric way. We're a very rural area. So our challenges are perhaps different to the challenges that are being faced in London or Birmingham or Manchester. Particularly around transport, for example. We work as closely as we can with government and try and stimulate them to consider our needs as well as those urban needs.

The administration at Cornwall Council is a Conservative Party administration. The government at Westminster is a Conservative Party government. So

Nate: you get along perfectly or?

Martyn: I wouldn't say perfectly. We have to agree to disagree on occasion. But we do have more levers to pull.

Whilst the council is on target for its net zero 2030 ambitions, the other target is for the whole of Cornwall to be net zero by 2030. That is proving far more challenging. We mentioned earlier about the energy supply and the need to make sure that if we're going to be powering our homes with renewable energy but also needing far more of that renewable energy because we're going to be driving electric cars and using heat pumps to heat our houses. We need to have that secure energy supply in order to make that transition. We also need to have support from government in terms of our transport infrastructure, the recognition that as a rural area, people do have to move to get to work. Invariably, that's in their own private transport. We have challenges that we have to meet around our built infrastructure. Clearly, if you're moving to heat pumps it's not just a case of pulling out the, the gas boiler and sticking in the heat pump. You have to make sure that the building itself can operate at the lower but more constant temperatures that a heat pump runs at, so you may be insulating older housing stock.

A lot of our housing stock is well over 20 years old, some of it hundreds of years old. And that housing stock needs to be sympathetically, but quite expensively upgraded to enable it to run off a heat pump.

In terms of the gas grid, 40 percent of Cornwall, because again we're a rural area, isn't actually on the gas grid. So many of those homes are being heated by fuel oil or bottled gas. So, we're looking at government to perhaps enable the use of what's called HVO, hydrogenated vegetable oil to replace the fossil fuel oil that runs gas boilers. This is a 90 percent carbon neutral fuel, but at the moment it's taxed as a vehicle fuel rather than as a heating fuel, which makes far more expensive than a fossil fuel oil heating oil. So we're working with government to try and get some form of change to that taxation to enable those changes to take place.

Nate: So those are some real serious rural challenges.

Martyn: Challenges, absolutely.

Nate: It's hard to have a walkable city when you're a series of farming communities connected by roads and you need a car. How do you see getting over these barriers and challenges?

Martyn: The way I see my job in bringing the people of Cornwall along on this journey is looking at it as a 20-60-20 percentage split.

20 percent of the population of Cornwall are climate change ambassadors. They totally get it. I will never be able to move as quickly as they would like me move.

Another 20 percent are perhaps either totally in denial about climate change still, or are just so set in their ways that they feel that their little contribution is going to make no difference whatsoever, so I'll just carry on as I am.

Again, a lot of hard work to do to bring them on board, however, that big 60 percent in the middle, they are ripe to bring on the journey towards living a more carbon neutral life, to understanding about nature recovery, and essentially doing their bit.

Nate: Are those percentages just from sort of what you observe or is there actual surveys or polling with that?

Martyn: That is not scientific, that is my observation. That is my feeling, I made that assessment when I initially became a member of the cabinet back in 2021. And I'm fairly pleased that it's remaining fairly constant.

Nate: I asked about the percentages because when I was developing this podcast, I had a similar theory, which was that most people want to do the right thing. Most people wanna protect the environment. They may not know how, they may not have the information.

So, I feel a little bit comforted that other people have come up with the same proportions. Speaking of the local area energy plan, what was the designing, the planning that went into that? . How did you create that plan?

Martyn: So Local Area Energy Plans, and it's quite hard to say that,

Nate: It's a tongue twister.

Martyn: LAEPs are not an entirely new concept. What we're doing down here is co-producing the plan. We're involving the people of Cornwall in its design to understand what their ambitions are, to understand what their fears and concerns are, and combining that with the number crunching technology that produces the plan at the end of it.

So we're developing the LAEP using a methodology that is understood and recognized by Ofgem because one of the key components of that energy plan will be the grid demand and needs moving into the next decade. Ofgem, using that methodology, National Grid, who's the district network supply – in other words, the company that provides the electricity for the National Grid in Cornwall will be able to then use that money to capitalize to make the necessary changes to the grid to actually upgrade it to accept the additional energy needs for Cornwall.

Nate: Going back to that transmission challenge then. So for the Local Area Energy Plan, we're looking 10 years into the future. We have these ecological emergency, the climate emergency. Where do you see Cornwall 10 years from now?

Martyn: First of all, if our ambition has been realised, we will be net zero as a region. We will be exporting renewable energy to the rest of the country as well as meeting our own renewable needs. We'll be traveling around less and differently. They'll probably be even more working from home.

The public transport network will probably have improved further and people will be happier to use that. People will still be driving around in fossil fuel powered cars because we are not a wealthy part of the country and you know, a lot of people won't be able to afford a new electric vehicle.

I would imagine that most of our homes will have heat pumps or some other form of renewable fuel to heat them, but there will still be outliers with gas boilers, because if you're getting an oil boiler installed today, it's still going to be operating in 10 years’ time.

We are not going to see people pulling out good working boilers to replace them with heat pumps. So, all of those demands will require us to be actually offsetting. And that's part of what the Forest for Cornwall is about. But beyond that at the moment, the carbon code in the UK, really the only creditable way that you can count carbon credits is through woodland. However, there are other methods of sequestration that are becoming known, which will soon, I think, be properly accredited. So what we will also be seeing is a far broader better carbon market, a far more versatile carbon market taking into account, for example, seaweeds

Nate: Blue carbon –

Martyn: Which at the moment is well recognized academically but you can't go and buy blue carbon. I can see us you know, ten years from now, there being a mechanism to buy blue carbon. Also things like peatland. At the moment, we, we recognize that peatland is an amazing sequester of carbon. You can't buy a buy a piece of peatland, protect it and say, these are carbon credits that I have bought.

But what we want to try and avoid is, is greenwashing. And so we want to see sincerity as well in that carbon market, and that's gonna be a challenge.

Nate: That's a pretty romantic vision that I like, you know. An interconnected Cornwall, an exporter of renewable energy, one that has vibrant forests and maybe even blue carbon. What barriers today do we need to get rid of to see this vision realized?

Martyn: For us, the biggest challenge remains grid supply. The other barrier and it's something we touched on earlier, is around the public perception of climate change and the importance of climate change and how it's man made, but B, how we are in control not just as a county or as a country, but as a world of our own destiny in terms of climate change.

What we'll also see maybe not in 10 years’ time, but 20, 30 years’ time, is some of our coastal communities will no longer be viable.

Nate: Because of sea level rise.

Martyn: Because of sea level rise and changing weather patterns. So even a place like Cornwall, I can see actually populations moving, and things changing purely because the world will change in a way that will make some of our communities unviable.

Nate: Wow. What do you have planned for that? Is there kind of a managed retreat style like in parts of the US of slowly moving people back out of flood risk or what's the approach?

Martyn: As a council, we're working on a project called Making Space for Sand at the moment, which has been funded by government, because it's recognized that many of our coastal communities are protected by sand dune systems. And we need to be able to manage those dune systems. For nature. Because it clear those coastal processes are impacted by human intervention.

Nate: So in the UK there's a national level goal of installing 600,000 heat pumps, and often times it's been brought up that there's a skills shortage, there's simply not enough electricians or plumbers or people who can install these heat pumps. Are there enough people here who can do the work that needs to be done to implement these plans?

Martyn: There aren't enough yet and we recognize that there is still a serious skills gap, but also a need for retraining because as we move from gas boilers to heat pumps, all those gas engineers unless they retrain are going to become fairly redundant.

It's about inspiring young people that are coming out of education that there are these opportunities and in terms of green skills, we're not just talking about people that install heat pumps and solar panels.

So, it's about making sure that a motor mechanic knows how to repair an electric vehicle as well as a car with a petrol or diesel engine. It's recognizing that pretty much every business has a green skills element to it. We work very closely with our further education colleges and the university around green skills and certainly looking at where funding goes, it's about promoting those skills.

I think that the greater challenge is actually to persuade the public to go on the courses and acquire those skills rather than the provision of the courses. There are plenty of courses available, it's about getting people to actually recognize it's time to either retrain or to actually embark on those career paths in the first place.

Nate: Well, thank you so much, Councillor Martyn Alvey, for taking the time to speak with us today.

Martyn: Thank you, you're very welcome.