SOUTH Gloucestershire Council has dropped plans to make the district “carbon neutral” by 2030.
A new four-year nature and climate draft strategy has been approved, replacing the one agreed in 2020, and will instead focus on improving lives and health for residents and wildlife, with few targets.
A report to the council’s health and wellbeing board in October said both the council and the district as a whole were reducing harmful emissions but that the rate was not fast enough to reach ‘net zero’ by the end of the decade. It said that while renewable energy was growing, this was not at the levels needed to achieve the original goal.
The new draft strategy has ten aims by 2030, which still include making the authority itself a carbon neutral council, despite a pessimistic update in the report. The aim to make South Gloucestershire as a whole net zero is replaced with a vague pledge towards “area wide emissions reductions”.
The report said: “In 2019, South Glos Council declared a climate emergency pledging to provide the leadership to enable South Glos to become carbon neutral by 2030. We wrote the original public facing strategy in 2020 and the agenda has moved on since then.”
The report said 500 residents and businesses took part in a survey asking what actions were most needed to tackle the climate emergency.
It said: “The two most important issues to residents were protection and restoration of nature and improving the quality of water and rivers. These were closely followed by support for those who are more impacted by local climate breakdown (eg, the elderly and very young, people with existing health conditions) as well as support for increasing locally based renewable energy.”
The revised strategy will be submitted to the cabinet and full council in December.
By Adam Postans, Local Democracy Reporting Service