Manchester's carbon budget is already blown, but the council has a £100m plan to catch up

Manchester is not going green fast enough. The council knows it, the councillors know it, and the numbers make it hard to argue otherwise.

The latest Manchester Climate Ready report for 2026 lays it out plainly. The city's emissions have fallen by 50 per cent since 2005, which sounds impressive until you look at what has happened since Manchester actually committed to a target. Since 2018, when the council set a goal of becoming a carbon zero city by 2038, emissions have dropped by just 23 per cent. The target for that period was 55 per cent.

Worse still, Manchester has already "exceeded" the total carbon budget of 15 million tonnes that was set in 2018. In 2024 alone, the city pumped out 1.74 million tonnes of CO2, nearly double the annual allowance.

A group of councillors met on Tuesday 6 October to discuss what comes next. The mood was frank.

How worried are councillors?

Councillor Mandie Shilton Godwin, the Labour cabinet member for clean air and environment, did not try to sugarcoat it. "We know that we are not decarbonising at the pace that we need to," she said.

Councillor Alan Good, the Liberal Democrat member on the scrutiny committee, described the carbon budget figures as "depressing."

Councillor Angeliki Stogia, chairing Tuesday's meeting, struck a more measured tone but acknowledged the gap. "Manchester is moving in the right direction in terms of reducing our emissions, but I think it's clear that we are not at the pace we want to be," she said. "The reports are clear that there are significant challenges that remain."

So what is the plan?

The council's MCR Plan 2025-30 sets out a "£100m project pipeline" of milestone schemes, funded from a mix of sources including central government and GB Energy. The broader programme of works identified across the city is worth around £1bn in total, with officers now assessing which projects are most likely to deliver major carbon savings and attract investment.

The headline targets for 2030 include installing more than 50,000 heat pumps, retrofitting nearly 80,000 homes to better energy performance standards, and switching 28,000 more vehicles to electric. There are also plans to increase the share of journeys made by public transport, walking and cycling.

Making Manchester net zero by 2038 would put the city 12 years ahead of the UK's national target of 2050, but the cost is expected to run into the billions, requiring investment from both the public and private sector.

Can Manchester still hit 2038?

Sam Nicholson, director at Manchester Climate Ready, told the meeting the target is still achievable, but only if the "pace and scale of activity" increases dramatically.

The report itself put it more bluntly: the pace and scale "must increase" for the city to stay on track.

Whether that increase actually materialises, with the carbon budget already blown and the halfway point of the 2018-2038 window now behind them, is the question hanging over every green project the council puts forward from here.