By Rob Mackinlay

13 June 2022

Communities made radical changes for Covid-19, but will they do the same for climate change? Emma Noyce, Assistant Director for Culture and Information in Hampshire County Council and chair of the Green Libraries Partnership, explains how libraries can help. Emma will be leading a session on Working towards net zero at CILIP Conference and Expo on 8 July – book your place here.

FEAR sometimes motivates humans to change, but generally we don’t act until something happens that forces us to. Emma Noyce, Assistant Director for Culture and Information Services at Hampshire County Council, was an archaeologist before moving into the library sector.
She says: “My dissertation was about Upper Palaeolithic art and whether that was a response to climate change and adaptation. My work has always been about the relationship between people and the environments they live in, and how they react to changes in those environments. You asked about radical change and, looking back through the history of humankind, radical change isn’t something we do. We are a lazy species. We don’t do radical change until we hit a crisis point. And the problem with climate change is that it is always a little bit further away, always never quite in your face.”
Emma says Covid-19 may have shown us that we can change, but our action came when the crisis was happening. However, she sees libraries as valuable tools for helping society accept change before our environment forces it upon us.
“To me radical change is about significantly changing systems and governance,” she says, “and that’s only tolerable to people if there’s a general understanding and consensus that this is an important issue. You’ve got to build that understanding and belief that society wants to change. People will only tolerate radical systemic change if it’s a cause they truly believe in; otherwise, we all just revert to what is easiest for us. Change has got to be the easiest option to get most people to agree to it.”.

Inclusion
“I’m not the greenest person in the world. I would class my family as average – we make a bit of an effort, but we’re not as environmentally conscious as we should be. However, a golden thread in my life has been this relationship with nature and the landscape we live in. When I moved into libraries and I missed working outside, I started to think about how environmental awareness linked with inclusion. Some people may never spend their leisure time in green spaces, they may not engage with the environment, they have other interests or pressures meaning thinking about the natural environment is the least of their worries. For me there is a real role for libraries to engage all parts of the community, particularly those people who don’t automatically feel that environmental issues are relevant to their own lives. Because the issue of equality and inclusion is ingrained into tackling climate change. Climate change will make existing inequalities more profound. It will affect those people who have the least impact on the climate the most, they are the ones most impacted by rising fuel prices, by a lack of access to information, by the inability to adapt or mitigate.”

Green Libraries Partnership
Emma chairs the Green Libraries Partnership, made up of CILIP, Arts Council England, Libraries Connected. It has the following aims:

1. discover and harness the existing environmental work going on in libraries

2. build and support environmental ­understanding and action within libraries

3. enable libraries to work with their communities to continue to build environmental understanding and support environmental action

4. position libraries at the heart of local environmental programmes including those led by Local Authorities
She says “We want to build a lasting network of people and organisations and my role as chair is to facilitate that, and drive a collective ambition. Phase one will last until the end of the year and that is to develop an understanding of what’s happening and develop a tool-kit for public libraries. We have an exciting small grants project to fund ideas and initiatives across the public library sector. We also aim to have a network and a hub where the sector can come together and share information, and alongside this a manifesto which brings the ideas together. We will also be issuing a survey to all library authorities. We know there’s tons of stuff out there but we only hear snippets – and we want to use the partnership to share those good ideas.”

Profession
The survey will be issued imminently. One aspect Emma is keen for it to explore is the state of the profession’s confidence on climate change: “In Hampshire we did a survey to assess our service’s environmental awareness and confidence. We found that outlooks and confidence varies across the service, with some differences between managers and frontline staff. It was a bit of a surprise to us that there was a relatively low level of confidence in talking to customers about environmental issues in many of our frontline staff. So, it’s important that the programme doesn’t just talk to heads of service about the things they can do, but engages the sector as a whole. One of the interesting things we found was that the views were very different depending on who you speak to. Some are building and carbon reduction focused and others are more interested in knowledge and information. So it is really important that we engage with the whole sector, not just a specific level of it and, in the survey we’re keen to make sure viewpoints are represented.”

What actions?
“Every library service is different. Some are in direct control of what happens to their buildings and spaces, and some aren’t. It’s about understanding that range of operational models out there and providing options and ideas that services can use in ways that are appropriate to them.”
“We’re in a relatively good position here,” Emma says. “Hampshire County Council declared a climate emergency and we have our target of reaching net zero by 2050 and also ensuring our services are resilient to a two degree rise in temperature. We are also very lucky to have an in-house property service that is focused on a carbon reduction programme across our estate. So yes, we are in a good position but it’s not unique.”
But there is another key factor: Hampshire’s libraries have to pay their own energy bills. It is not unique, but not many other services have this responsibility. Emma says that this has put libraries in an interesting position.

“We did a lot of work on things like prioritising buildings for window replacement and LED lighting as part of the Salix grant scheme decarbonisation programme to bring down energy costs. But it’s particularly interesting now because local managers have been quite disappointed that their energy bills haven’t come down as much as they had ­expected. When you see what’s ­happening, it’s because our energy consumption has come down dramatically since we started that programme, but energy prices have gone up. So, we’ve managed to protect our service that way. And no, we haven’t seen the financial saving we were maybe anticipating, but what situation would we have been in if we hadn’t done that?”

Data
“There can be a fairly prosaic, linear approach to climate change: planting more trees, decarbonising buildings, stopping single use plastics. You either deliver or you don’t.”
This is the first of the three strands the partnership has been set up to explore. Its aims are important, and the results are measurable, but it is not part of the traditional library offer. However, the data, information and culture around these processes is vital and does play more to the sector’s strengths.
“Things like smart data for energy, if you have access to those smart data meters you have some options,” but she acknowledges “it takes time and capacity to think about how we use data well when thinking about climate change. We made smart meter data available for all libraries and managers so they can see the energy consumption of each library building by day of the week. It means they can see their own progress and compare themselves with other libraries in the county. Some have had a lots of work done with photovoltaic panels, LED lighting and double glazing, and others have not ­because of the nature of the building and what it lends itself to. It has led to very local changes – like managers turning plugs off at the switch on a Sunday to bigger things – more strategic decisions. For example data showing cases where energy consumption is off the scale because of some very old boilers and heating systems.”
It’s a similar case for waste data: “We’ve also managed to get data around how much waste we’ve sent to ­recycling. It means you can do big things around your recycling contracts but also little day-to-day things, like targets to increase the proportion of waste recycled, and to reduce consumption.”
“The Green Libraries Partnership is very keen on data and evidence driven action,” Emma says. “We want to make sure we understand what we’re doing. In Hampshire it’s been really illuminating as there is often an assumption that we need to demolish an old and inefficient library building and replace it with new a green one, but in fact when you start to look at embedded carbon in the construction industry, it’s very, very rarely more environmentally efficient to build a new building. That data and evidence base is really important, hence the survey, and the need to understand what is happening in the sector.”

Grass roots
“Unlike library hardware, interactions with library users is not so easy to measure. It can sometimes even be difficult to pin down which agenda a particular project is addressing. But Emma says that good community relations are not “top-down”. Sometimes it is possible to provide direct environmental messages.
“In Hampshire we have adult and community learning funding and decided to deliver some courses on waste reduction and working towards net zero. This changed the attitudes of people who took part and even led to some participants setting up a zero-waste shop.”
The message is usually delivered more tangentially and therefore can be more hit and miss. “We have quite a devolved management. Yes, we have a strategy, but every library has flexibility to work out its relationship to that strategy. It can be hard to manage with different initiatives, but good practice evolves out of it. A very relevant example was Ringwood Library in the New Forest getting together with a local food bank, and then another library doing the same thing. This won’t work in a top-down way. You have to give your libraries the freedom to follow their own path.”

Another example was the reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “Ukrainian Connection sessions were very much grassroots, popping up according to need. Our overall strategy will evolve out of this, but it’s important to pilot new things – even if they don’t quite work! We have sessions running in loads of libraries and sometimes they haven’t had anyone, and for some the engagement has been incredible. These differences really help us learn about our individual communities and what they need.”
She thinks encouraging this kind of grass roots action and learning how to communicate about it will be important because “tackling climate change will be a mix of different priorities and therefore different initiatives, and our job will be to encourage and share what is achieved.”

Foodbanks
“Grass-roots initiatives work on many ­levels. We know that for people in disadvantaged communities it may be humiliating to have to go to a foodbank – or it was in the past, it’s probably more normalised now, sadly – but it can be a humiliating experience.”
While existing library users might see libraries as safe trusted places, Emma says people who don’t use them, have no reason to have this view. “Food banks or pantries have had a really interesting ­effect. We get a different demographic coming in, people who might not be comfortable coming into a library. Not everybody is.”
The task then is to help new users see the core value of the library: “We’ve been able to work in partnership with community pantry teams on events and activities. Some with an environmental theme, aimed at these audiences. For example we had an energy company come in and talk about how to manage energy bills for people from disadvantaged communities. And where we differ from community centres is that we have a core around books, reading and literacy. So outside of that community pantry we had a display of book stock around home cooking, and feeding your family on a budget, that kind of thing. So we always link it back to the core library offer.”


Emma will be leading a session at CILIP Conference and Expo on 8 July focused on Working towards Net Zero – ideas and discussion to take back. To book your place at this year’s Conference and Expo, taking place in Liverpool on 7 and 8 July, visit the Ciliip Conference pages to book and find out more.