City green pledge ‘not good enough’, say campaigners
This... allows them off the hook on a definitive date by which the council will be net zero (carbon) Maryam Patwa
THE council’s environmental pledge is ‘not good enough’, a Birmingham green group insists. Last week, as reported by the Post, the full council debated the Route to Zero Interim Report, which discussed the external findings of a consultancy firm which said it would be ‘very challenging’ for the council to hit its target of zero emissions by 2030.
It followed on from the declaration of a ‘climate emergency’ by the council last year, after which it was promised that an action plan would be produced by March 2020.
This action plan is still yet to be produced, with the council receiving criticism from some quarters for a perceived lack of action since the declaration last June – a claim the council denies. Its aim is to become the first city region to become carbon neutral. Coun Waseem Zaffar, Cabinet Member for Transport and Environment, said that both the government’s target of 2050 and the West Midlands Combined Authority’s target of 2041 was ‘simply not good enough’.
Maryam Patwa, from Birmingham Friends of the Earth, said: “It was encouraging to see a robust challenge to this watering down of the city council climate commitments from a cross party set of motions.
“While debated they were ultimately defeated, although an internal Labour challenge to the executive was passed.
“This will ultimately drag the council to adopt an action plan by the end of the year but allows them off the hook on a definitive date by which the city council will be net zero nor allows the city council to recover the time that has been lost since June 2019. This is not good enough, from the largest local authority in England, which should be allocating its own resources, as well as securing much more from central Government to deliver net zero as soon as possible across the whole of the city. We need to get going now.”
The council’s only Green councillor, Cllr Julien Pritchard (Druids Heath & Monyhull), said the council needs to take more responsibility if it is to achieve what is required. “Yes, the government needs to step up, but the council and the city needs to do what it can as much as possible to tackle this,” he said. “And that means asking government for money and resources, but also looking elsewhere, and finding other ways to do things.
“Housing is one of the city’s biggest emitters of C02 and biggest contributors to climate change, and the city is the council’s biggest landlord. And we hear so often that we can’t tackle the climate emergency too much because, if we do that then it will be on the backs of the least well off in the city. But if housing is not tackling the climate emergency that is leaving the most impoverished less well off.”