To receive any announcements from the committee chair and general housekeeping matters.
Minutes:
Climate issues have come to the forefront in recent months with us having the sunniest, driest spring on record. Whilst that was an absolute blessing to help us get through the pandemic, it presages disaster at the global scale. Last week, temperatures in Siberia, usually around 20°C in June, reached 38°C. This is especially alarming because methane and carbon dioxide lie frozen in the ‘permafrost’ below the ground and are released as the permafrost thaws. Methane is 30 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) exists to ensure secure supplies of energy and has hitherto shown no aversion to fossil fuels. Things have changed. The IEA say the world has only six months to change the course of the climate crisis and prevent a post-lockdown rebound in greenhouse gas emissions. We welcome the well-researched report today from our officers setting the scene for us to do exactly that, change course with a Green Recovery from Covid-19.
Elected members have been working with officers too to produce the new draft Corporate Plan which shifts the emphasis away from growth for growth’s sake, and towards genuinely sustainable living, carbon reduction and biodiversity recovery. We have the opportunity to comment on this today from a climate and biodiversity perspective.
At the same time, Council has been preparing for the Local Plan hearings. Elected members who commented on the plan in 2019 have not had an input into the dialogue between planning officers and the inspector. Indeed, the inspector has been concerned about senior elected members being present at the hearings at all, least it make our planning officers uncomfortable. Members have been instructed to be uncritical at the hearings.
This is worrying for those of us concerned that a 50% increase in housing is unnecessary, when our population is set to rise by only 10%; unsafe as it will create large greenhouse gas emissions in construction and operation of the homes; and insecure as it takes land from wildlife and farming when the natural world is collapsing, and food security considerations demand that we grow more food locally.
However, our last meeting of this committee bore fruit, in that a CEAC task and finish group is to have an input into the new policy DES11 which defines reductions in operational carbon emissions from new homes. Laudable though it is to increase energy efficiency standards for new homes, this in itself will not make the Local Plan compliant with the Climate Change Act 2008 (amended 2019), the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 nor the Strategic Environmental Assessment Regulations.
To make the Sustainability Appraisal, on which the Local Plan is based, compliant with statute and international law, it must show how emissions will be reduced district-wide, baselining the whole district for carbon stores and sinks, estimating climate impacts for prospective sites and prescribing monitoring, and mitigation for carbon absorption and reduced emissions. All land use policies should take account of extreme weather events, of serious and prolonged water shortages, and of the need for a modal shift in transport to car-free living. Additionally, not to forget the natural world, landscape scale mapping and planning for nature should underpin a new Sustainability Assessment.
Our climate action plan and the draft Corporate Plan set us off upon just these sorts of assessments right now and we will ensure that our work will produce future Local Plans that are legally compliant on the climate and biodiversity front.