AFTER a tremendously challenging few weeks, the main budget meeting is over in Glasgow.

With the double pressures of extreme financial constraints and impending environmental catastrophe, Greens worked to support local services as much as possible while also making a down payment on addressing the climate emergency.

We made proposals and invited all parties to engage – the SNP were the only party that did, and in comparing the budgets of the various options, the administration’s budget was the least bad by quite some distance, preventing cuts to teachers and other education cuts. So together we agreed a budget that achieves significant steps forward on the climate emergency in Glasgow.

Greens have been leading on climate in the city. We got wide-ranging ideas agreed, and in the spring there will be an action plan – now that this budget has created a £10 million Climate Action Fund so that action can get under way immediately.

We’ve also agreed work to identify a further £20m of potential investment in greening the city – creating new nature reserves, improving biodiversity and increasing food growing to meet demand.

Green proposals also mean extra staff for carbon reduction initiatives, developing a new economic plan centred on the Green New Deal and work towards 20mph speed limits.

We will increase enforcement action on illegal business flytipping and create a bike library in 14 schools across the city to give kids access to bikes regardless of income.

We also agreed leadership measures from councillors, cutting free parking and ending UK flights for staff.

Together, the Green proposals will enable Glasgow to step up climate action ahead of COP26 and start to make meaningful progress on our 2030 target.

We are still utterly scunnered by the state of local finances, which is an avoidable political decision at a Scottish Parliament level. Councillors from across the spectrum said in debate that if we’re honest, none of this year’s budget proposals were good.

The draft Scottish Budget is a horror-show for Glasgow and while this year the administration has managed to find a way of preventing the kinds of education cuts we were so concerned about, it’s getting impossible to see how this can continue year on year.

We will continue to expect the SNP to impress on their Holyrood colleagues what the reality of the draft settlement is for Glasgow now and for the future.

And we still feel scunnered at the way we set budgets in Glasgow. Greens have consistently said that people should know what goes on in this city’s finances, so we’re pleased to have won a commitment to working out a new process with better transparency, scrutiny and wider understanding.

It’s going to continue to be a challenge to protect our vital local services while progressing the urgent work on climate. The need for decent funding for local government has never been clearer.

However, we should still feel proud of big steps forward in tackling climate change that we’ve taken this week.