GREATER Manchester councils must work more closely if they want to forge a genuinely sustainable future, environmental experts claimed last night.

Panellists at a major MEN debate agreed environmental challenges could only be tackled at a city-regional level - and said real leadership was needed to push forward a genuinely 'green' urban agenda.

"We need the right governance," said Professor John Handley, head of the Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology at Manchester University.

"The [old Greater Manchester Council] did do strategic planning. We need that kind of co-operation because that is the scale at which we have to work."

The debate, called Sustainable Cities - The Future, was held at the MEN offices in Scott Place to discuss how urban areas like Greater Manchester should approach climate change.

It featured a high-profile panel led by former Friends of the Earth executive director Tony Juniper.

Mr Juniper said the key to winning people over to an environmentally-friendly agenda was to show them that that sustainability was not a kind of 'punishment'.

Instead, he said, people must be made to realise that thinking, acting and legislating in an environmentally-friendly way could lead to better quality of life by improving housing and transport.

Mr Juniper said cities that were 'green' could prosper economically, lessening their dependence on volatile fuel markets and creating jobs in cutting-edge technology. But he warned that the scale of the challenge remained huge.

"We need to make cuts of 80 per cent in carbon dioxide [emissions] by 2050," he said.

"That means we need to begin immediately. "We can have a very happy prospect for the rest of the 21st century. But the worst thing we can possibly do now is to deny there is a problem or to delay any longer."
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