Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
Response to climate emergency lacking in speed and focus
As the Covid-19 crisis forces a change in priorities, Labour city councillor Dave Wilson urges the authority not to lose sight of the growing climate emergency.
There are many ways of responding to a major emergency. Among those not recommended is waiting three months to begin taking action, and then suspending any further decisions for another four months because of another emergency.
Yet that is what our city council has done since we declared a Climate Change Emergency just over 12 months ago.
I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask whether the council - or more precisely, the ruling Tory Party - has really understood the scale and immediacy of the climate crisis, and thus whether the response for which they have responsibility has been fast enough or determined enough. If there is one thing any experienced crisis manager will tell you it is that speed and focus are crucial to preventing an emergency from spiralling out of control. Canterbury’s response so far has lacked both.
That is not to say no progress has been made, and council staff have been working hard to bring forward options. Nonetheless, if a typical response has four key stages mitigation, control, resolution, recovery - then the council has barely begun on the first stage. Meanwhile, the clock ticks on the deadline target of zero carbon council operations by 2030.
The council is beginning to understand the scale of the challenge to address the biggest source of carbon pollution: domestic heating in its housing properties. There is, though, a significant difference between knowing the scale of the problem and being able to do anything about it.
With an estate of over 5,000 homes you can imagine that the costs of, for example, replacing gas heating boilers with electric ones is huge. Is that deliverable at all, let alone over nine years, for a council which has been hit as hard financially as this one has by the Covid-19 crisis? Has the response to one crisis, climate, now become overwhelmed by a combination of a public health emergency and a financial crisis?
The choice facing councillors is stark and it is critical. Showing determination early in the process is key to spreading the cost of change and to mobilising resources to be applied in the remaining nine-year period.
We need to apply some imagination: new developments must immediately become carbon neutral in operation and construction, requiring radical improvements in the design of houses and developments. We must repurpose existing buildings - offices and retail units - and make much more intensive and dense use of “brownfield” sites.
We must build for a walkable locality - the 15-minute city, as some call it - with shops, schools, co-working hubs and integrated cycle and walking routes. We need to help farmers and industry transition from fossil fuels. And we must apply natural solutions to off-set and capture carbon, mitigate climate change impacts and aid recovery.
All this is possible. It requires imagination and commitment, as well as money and staffing.
Above all, it requires political leadership. We can’t afford to wait much longer to find out if this council possesses that.