Accelerating action on climate change takes lots of money. The quantity of capital we need to deploy to ensure our organisations and places reach net-zero is well beyond the reach of public finances. If this funding gap is met only by citizens and businesses through taxation and charges, there will be damaging impacts on the poorest sections of society, counter to the levelling up agenda.

To make matters more challenging, existing financing and delivery systems have not been designed to deal with the complexity of co-ordinating action locally in multiple sectors. Tweaking existing financing structures is unlikely to deliver the scale and speed of transition required in interlinked systems in a just and equitable way.