State of the natural environment in the West Midlands

On Thursday 23rd April 2009, I attended the Annual Biodiversity Conference organised by the West Midlands Biodiversity Partnership (WMBP) at the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham.

Key speakers included Olwen Dutton (Chief Executive of the West Midlands Regional Assembly), Roger Owen (Regional Director of Natural England), David Pape (Head of Ecology, Hampshire County Council), Conor Kretsch (Director of Cohab Initiative) and Heather Webb (Coordinator at Bedslife).

During the day the speakers highlighted the key role that biodiversity plays in the development of the West Midlands.

April 2009 briefing on economic downturn’s impact on skills and labour market in the West Midlands

The West Midlands Regional Observatory has produced its third quarterly briefing monitoring the impact of the economic downturn on skills and the labour market.

The overall picture is one of continued decline but with the first tentative indications of some improvement. This is reflected in the decreases in the rate of job losses expected, at least in the service sector.

It is also notable that over 60% of firms are maintaining their investment in training budgets at present levels.

‘Green’ firms fight the recession

The environmental technologies or “green” sector is showing greater resilience to the recession than the manufacturing sector as a whole, according to recent skills research by the West Midlands Regional Observatory.

The environmental technologies sector comprises companies concentrating on renewable energy, pollution monitoring and waste management, amongst others. Although the sector has been adversely affected by the recession, companies are fairing better than their counterparts in other sectors.

Can we do it? Walking the talk on climate change

Chris Crean is the West Midlands Regional Campaign Coordinator for Friends of the Earth and he provided the final presentation to delegates at the Observatory’s State of the Region climate change event.

Chris posed the question of whether we are prepared to, or capable of, walking the talk on climate change.

Chris’s presentation considered the impacts of regional strategies and the contradictions and challenges they present when looking at climate change.

In simple terms Chris’s message was “efficiency, efficiency, efficiency!”

Evidence based climate change policy: six tricky challenges

Roger Levett of Levett-Therivel sustainability consultants led the presentations at the Observatory’s State of the Region Climate Change event. Roger laid down six tricky challenges to delegates.

He stressed that the evidence is already overwhelming that unless we cut greenhouse emissions deeply, fast, soon, irreversible catastrophic climate change will almost certainly become unpreventable. Delaying action to improve the evidence is no longer necessary.

Roger was also keen to lay down challenges to the Observatory in how we present and use the data to influence policy makers in the region. How we tackle these challenges will be key to the development of the State of the Region dialogue.

West Midlands unemployment now highest of all regions

Latest data from the Office for National Statistics reveals that unemployment has increased to 8.4 per cent in the West Midlands – higher than any other English region – as 36,000 more people became unemployed in the quarter from November 2008 to February 2009.

The unemployment rate has now increased by 2.4 percentage points on the same period last year, and 1.4 percentage points on the previous quarter. Employment has declined by 2.8 percentage points in the year February 2008 to February 2009 and is declining at a rate almost three times the national rate of 1.0 percentage points.

Is this the future for the West Midlands?

Dr. Ann-Marie Brouder from Forum for the Future shared a vision of what the region might look in 2020. This is not just any vision though, as it considers what a low carbon West Midlands will look like.

Developed on behalf of Sustainability West Midlands, A low carbon vision for the West Midlands 2020, looks at the technologies and developments that may have shaped our lives over the next decade.

Will we be seeing vertical farms in our city centres or power generating dance floors in nightclubs?

Climate change dialogue underway

We had so much interest in our new State of the Region dialogue on climate change on Monday, that we had to move it to a bigger venue!

The dialogue got off to a great start, and there seemed to be real concensus amongst the forty or so delegates on how to progress some of the issues raised.

Understanding labour migration

At the launch of the State of the Region dialogue on population change Anne Green, from the Institute for Employment Research, spoke about recent developments in labour migration, such as the impact that the recession may have on migration and about the difficulties of measuring short-term international mobility.

Understanding migration is important when trying to understand population change.

Anne began by talking about the changes in migration from Eastern Europe and the implications for local areas. Recent data show that there has been a decrease in worker registrations from Eastern Europeans, particularly in large urban areas.

Subnational population projections

The Observatory’s recent event to launch the State of the Region dialogue on population change started with a presentation from Anthony Szary on subnational population projections.

Anthony is the Regional Statistician for the Office for National Statistics and is based at the Observatory.

Anthony took the group through the ONS process for calculating population projections at the subnational level. The easy part (relatively!) of the calculation is to take account of trends in fertility and mortality while it’s much more difficult to try to measure trends in migration.

The latest population projections show that the West Midlands population is expected to grow by 11.4% between 2007 and 2027 to over 6 million. This is slower than the expected growth across many of the other English regions.  However, this projection is based on past trends in fertility, mortality and migration and could be very different if, for example, the birth rate became much higher or lower.

Universities, industry and innovation: brokering for successful knowledge transfer

Speaking at the Observatory’s innovation workshop on 19 March 2009, Prof. Lynn Martin from Birmingham City University discussed the role that universities can have as catalysts for innovation, but also how barriers continue to exist that weaken universities’ potential.

How well a university links with other types of organisations has been found to depend on its strengths, geographic location and relative business infrastructure – and on the social capital of both academics and local entrepreneurs.

OPAL (Open Air Laboratories)

The OPAL (Open Air Laboratories) project is a new partnership initiative funded by the National Lottery through the Big Lottery Fund (£11.75 million) and co-coordinated by Imperial College London.

One of its major aims is to get research scientists working with local communities on local environmental issues.

Portfolio partners include nine universities such as Birmingham, Natural History Museum, Open University, Field Studies Council, Meteorological Office and the National Biodiversity Network.

The project will also work closely with the Environment Agency and many voluntary sector organisations. The portfolio has three major themes of particular environmental importance: biodiversity, pollution and climate.

Regional habitat data project

The Regional Habitat Data Project is managed by the West Midlands Biodiversity Partnership and aims to create a reliable spatial representation of all known priority BAP habitat across the West Midlands region.

This project intends to pull together all the existing reliable national, regional and local data sets, making them available as a regional resource as a tool for future planning and development of strategies.

Understanding our local populations

At the Observatory’s recent event to launch the State of the Region dialogue on population change, Richard Wilson from Sandwell PCT spoke about some of the problems with population data. However, with help from quotes from David Brent to Albert Einstein, Richard argued that these problems should not lead to ‘data paralysis’ where problems with data become reasons for not making decisions.

Richard said that although population change is nothing new, it is important to understand how our population is changing by understanding, for example, which age groups are changing quickest, what the new family structures are and where new people are coming from.

Better ways to share information digitally

The Observatory’s Population & Society Group is planning a seminar in the summer to investigate and discuss how research organisations in the West Midlands can get better at sharing information digitally. Do you have any thoughts on this?