When Andy Burnham walked into Downing Street on July 20 as the UK’s seventh prime minister in a decade, he promised to act as a “circuit-breaker for Britain”. Burnham is the first UK premier to come straight from running a major city region. Used well, that experience could transform the UK’s response to the climate and nature crises.
As mayor of Greater Manchester, Burnham brought buses back under public control for the first time in 40 years through the Bee Network, with a commitment to a zero-emission fleet by 2030. He backed the city region’s target of carbon neutrality by 2038, 12 years ahead of the UK’s national goal, and in 2025 Greater Manchester signed a five-year partnership with the manufacturer Daikin to scale up heat pumps across the city.
Now he says he wants to apply the Greater Manchester governance and economic model – often dubbed “Manchesterism” — to the entire UK. Our research suggests that cities can play a vital role in delivering national climate goals.
Working with the C40 cities network (a global group of 97 cities that have signed up to climate crisis goals) and the engineering consultancy Arup, we have published two reports on how cities can trigger positive tipping points in the shift to clean technology.
A positive tipping point occurs when a clean technology becomes more affordable, accessible and attractive than the fossil-fuelled option it replaces. Adoption then becomes self-propelling: creating a domino effect whereby more sales bring more visibility, falling costs and better infrastructure, which bring even more sales.
Read more: How to help trigger positive tipping points – and speed up climate action
Cities, responsible for more than 70% of global carbon emissions, are where these interventions bite hardest. In Norway’s capital Oslo, electric vehicles rose from under 14% of new car sales in 2015 to 96% in 2025. Shenzhen in China became the world’s first city to fully electrify its bus fleet in 2017.
The pattern across these leading cities is consistent: national governments make clean technology affordable through grants and tax breaks, while cities make it accessible and attractive – building charging networks, streamlining permits, electrifying their own fleets and buildings, and creating clean-air zones. In the UK, for example, the national plug-in car grant works alongside London’s congestion-charge exemption for electric vehicles.
Sequencing matters too. Successful cities “pull” first with incentives, then “push” with regulations announced well in advance. After London’s ultra-low emission zone was announced in 2013, the original scheme came into force in 2019, giving people and businesses time to adapt.
Our second report, published in June 2026, applies this thinking to one of the most challenging sectors to decarbonise: road freight. Heavy-duty trucks make up less than 10% of commercial vehicles but produce a quarter of transport emissions.
Modelling truck adoption and costs in London and 44 other world cities, we found that regulation consistently has greater impact than pricing. Initiatives such as zero-emission zones and vehicle sales targets increased electric truck uptake several times more than carbon taxes on non-electric trucks.
It’s not that taxes are useless, but price signals on their own can’t trigger the positive tipping dynamics needed to accelerate the transition to electric freight and other zero emissions transport.
Increasing the taxes on fossil fuels increases the pain of driving vehicles with an internal combustion engine each year, whereas a zero-emissions mandate makes electric inevitable. This gives everyone – firms, city planners, consumers and investors alike – the certainty they need. With greater certainty, manufacturers can invest at scale – and the more they build, the cheaper and better each electric vehicle becomes. This increases demand.
The UK currently has an escalating mandate for new electric cars and vans, with goals to reach 100% electric cars sold by 2035, and by 2040 for HGVs.
But our modelling finds coordinated action by the largest UK cities could bring forward the point at which electric trucks become cheaper to own than diesel by up to 2½ years. Globally, electrifying freight could displace nearly 5 million barrels of oil a day by 2030 – roughly India’s entire daily consumption.
After the oil-price turmoil that followed the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, this represents energy security policy as much as climate policy.
Read more: What does climate adaptation actually mean? An expert explains
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