Issue - meetings

To receive an update on Council initiatives in relation to climate change adaptation and its progress to becoming carbon neutral by 2030.

The Cabinet Member for Neighbourhoods, Planning and Sustainability, presented the report of the Director: Housing, Commercial & Customer Services, which updated Cabinet on progress being made to meet the Council’s target of becoming carbon neutral by 2030 and meeting the challenges of current and future impacts of a changing climate.

The Cabinet Member said that this report was the annual update on progress to Becoming Carbon Neutral by 2030 and she wanted to thank the teams across the Council since this was embedded across the organisation, which took climate change very seriously.  In thanking the teams, the Cabinet Member paid particular thanks to Ian Wykes, the Council’s climate change lead, for bringing everything together into this quite lengthy report. The update, which related to the 2024/25 Municipal Year, would usually be brought to Cabinet in the autumn and the Cabinet Member would look to doing so moving on.

The Council continued to be on track to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030, having reduced its carbon emissions by 63% since it declared climate emergency in 2019.  There was a lot of misinformation being deliberately circulated on this subject and it was clear that some of this was now starting to affect the political consensus, which had up to now been united in the need to reduce carbon emissions in order to stop the planet getting warmer and warmer.

Carbon dioxide was a natural gas, which existed in the atmosphere and was needed as it was part of the natural carbon cycle.  It was a gas that trapped some of the heat from the sun around the earth, which made the earth habitable. The cause of climate change was primarily the burning of fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas, which released carbon that was locked away deep underground.  Since the start of the industrial revolution, the excess carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels in huge quantities had been building up in the atmosphere and was now approximately 50% higher than it was at pre-industrial levels.  Aesthetic excess carbon dioxide was now trapping more of the sun's heat, causing global temperatures to rise and the rate of change was faster than any observed in millions of years.

The fast pace of change being seen did not allow time for species to evolve and adapt to a warmer climate, and this had huge implications for our own species. When talking about carbon neutral or net zero, this did not mean removing all carbon dioxide from the atmosphere but was about returning to that balanced carbon cycle where the amount of carbon dioxide released from people’s activities into the atmosphere and through natural processes was then matched by that, absorbed, and removed from the atmosphere. There was not a debate on this and the scientific consensus for climate change was overwhelming.

The Cabinet Member said there were those who agreed that climate change was happening, but say that the UK had done enough, and this was a problem for countries like China, but that  ...  view the full minutes text for item 41