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Category: Climate Adaptation

Government Announces UK is Failing on CO2 Emissions

Eastbourne Borough Council, like many other local authorities, has committed to do all it can to reduce carbon emissions in the town to net-zero by 2030 and has declared a climate emergency. However, much of this cannot be achieved without Government initiatives. Their advisers this week are warning that the UK is falling behind on its own target to cut greenhouse gas emissions and risks an increase in CO2 emissions now that the COVID-19 lockdown is easing.

Eastbourne Borough Council,  like many other local authorities,  has committed to do all it can to reduce carbon emissions in the town to net-zero by 2030 and has declared a climate emergency. However, much of this cannot be achieved without Government initiatives. Their advisers this week are warning that the UK is falling behind on its own target to cut greenhouse gas emissions and risks an increase in CO2 emissions now that the COVID-19 lockdown is easing.

Lord Deben, chair of the committee on climate change (CCC), published its progress report to parliament this week and it states that ministers must act fast to avoid a carbon rebound. Chris Stark, chief executive of the CCC, said: “Without central and integrated leadership we will fail in our task”.

These initiatives would include more active travel, new schemes to insulate homes, raising carbon taxes, switching to electric vehicles and ensuring reliable broadband to allow working from home.

Much of this can be supported by the local authorities. Taken from the best examples in the UK is the Friends of the Earth, Ashden,  31 climate actions for councils. This outlines practical suggestions to reduce carbon at a local level in areas that local authorities have either direct control of or could influence.

So how much progress is being made?  This week the latest CO2 statistics for Local Authorities were published by the Government. Eastbourne, for geographic and industrial reasons, tends to have a lower than average carbon footprint.

The latest data is for 2018 and shows a 1.4% decline from 2017. The carbon footprint for Eastbourne is now 293,000 tonnes per annum or around 3 tonnes per person. This reflects the steady improvement across the UK, over the last 10 years, with less coal and more renewables.  So for example, one challenge for the town is natural gas, which is over 40% of all our carbon emissions.

Locally, as across the rest of the UK, commercial and residential sectors have shown significant reductions with only transport remaining stubbornly at around 80,000 tonnes p.a. The report also states that nearly all of Eastbourne’s footprint is within “the scope of influence of the local authority”.

With 2030 only 10 years away there will need to be a major change in strategy to even begin to approach the net-zero carbon target.

Read Delivering a Better Eastbourne by EEAN Transport Group outlining some suggestions for improving our town’s carbon emissions.

Paul Humphreys

EEAN, Transport Group

Img Veeterzy, Unsplash.

Cleaner air and healthier food beyond the pandemic

The COVID19 pandemic is an unintentional real-time experiment in how our economy and society can cope with and adapt to a profound shock. There are already many lessons to learn from it about how to build a more resilient and sustainable economy in the future, one that also better protects people’s health and wellbeing.

Some of the environmental effects of the pandemic have been significant, such as a cleaner, more breathable air as a result of the collapse in traffic levels and a resurgence in wildlife and nature as a result of the lockdown of the entire communities.

The COVID19 pandemic is an unintentional real-time experiment in how our economy and society can cope with and adapt to a profound shock. There are already many lessons to learn from it about how to build a more resilient and sustainable economy in the future, one that also better protects people’s health and wellbeing.

clean air eastbourne

Some of the environmental effects of the pandemic have been significant, such as a cleaner, more breathable air as a result of the collapse in traffic levels and a resurgence in wildlife and nature as a result of the lockdown of the entire communities. The citizen science air quality monitoring project led by the volunteers of Clean Air Eastbourne has already recorded a 70% drop in particulate air pollution during March 2020 compared with March of 2019, confirming that air pollution can decrease rapidly in Eastbourne if road traffic levels drop far enough and stay reduced for long enough. 

This is leading to calls from across Eastbourne, mirrored across the rest of the country, for more safe cycle lanes and better walking infrastructure now, even if only on a temporary basis, so as to ensure that the much needed modal shift to active travel  –  a shift already accepted as necessary by Eastbourne Borough Council in its draft local plan  – can be accelerated during the pandemic, and sustained after it. The UK government is responding to these calls by introducing new statutory regulations authorising those local councils responsible for local highways to introduce such cycling and walking infrastructure and providing a £2 billion fund to facilitate their construction. 

The pandemic has also highlighted many of the issues around food supply and delivery in a crisis and the difficulties involved in ensuring that everybody has all the food they need, an issue that may get more urgent over the coming year given the acute shortage of foreign labour to help bring in the summer harvests. The Climate Adaptation and Food working Groups of the EEAN, in collaboration with the Eastbourne Food Partnership, organised a joint visit, just before the pandemic, to two ecological community farms at Arlington – Aweside Farm and Fanfield Farm – which are about to start providing fresh organic sustainably produced food for local delivery.

organic vegetables

More such local farms, together with the already existing local organic farms and horticultural nurseries, will surely be needed as the large commercial farms begin to struggle and the international food supply chains start to fracture during the upcoming global recession. According to Sustain, only 1-2% of all the food we consume comes from local food chains. So bringing local food producers and suppliers into a resilient local food network to provide local people with a diverse range of fresh, healthy local food is an essential part of any strategy to create a truly sustainable local food economy in the Eastbourne area, cutting down food miles, reducing food and plastic waste, reducing overdependence on fragile international food chains, and reducing carbon emissions through the sustainable care of soils practised by organic growers.

The pandemic may be a time of great tragedy and suffering, but it is also a time in which the positive changes previously thought too difficult to introduce are now becoming possible, helping to improve health and wellbeing in the long run. The EEAN aims to promote and facilitate those changes through collaboration across all sectors of our local community.

Andrew Durling

Climate Adaptation Group, EEAN Director

Eastbourne ECO Action Network

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