City climate crisis set to cost billions to solve
NEW TEAM DISCUSSES CARBON NEUTRAL TARGETS
NEWCASTLE’S climate crisis will cost billions of pounds to solve, city leaders have warned.
A new council team tasked with delivering plans to make Newcastle carbon neutral by 2030 met for the first time on Thursday, and councillors were quickly made aware of the huge scale of the challenge facing them.
Newcastle City Council’s climate change committee, established after the organisation declared a climate emergency in April, has six months to report back with ideas on what the council and the wider city needs to do to slash carbon emissions.
But the meeting at the Hancock Museum, to which campaigner Steve Emsley brought a home-made dodo replica to highlight the extinction threat posed by climate change, heard that civic centre bosses will not be able to finance the huge shift from council coffers.
Council leader Nick Forbes, who will chair the committee, said: “We are talking about billions of pounds, much of which we will have to find ways to leverage from the private sector.
“We can’t fund all of these things from the council, obviously. It starts to raise very important questions about the scale of the challenge.”
Helen Dickinson, the authority’s chief executive, said that the council would be restricted from funding environmental projects that are the “right thing to do” if they do not bring financial benefit.
She said: “As a council, we are only able to borrow when we can see a financial return.
“It is difficult for us to invest if we are not getting a revenue stream.”
Council documents based around previous targets to halve carbon emissions in Newcastle highlighted almost £1bn of projects, plus many with unknown costs, to achieve that aim.
But the city is now working to the more ambitious target of being carbon neutral by 2030.
Lib Dem councillor Gareth Kane called on the council to make green infrastructure more of a priority, highlighting a lack of cycling provision in road upgrade projects at Barras Bridge and roundabouts think climate change is nothing to in the outer west. do with them.
He said: “You have to give people He added: “It is very difficult to a green option to take before you know what the impact of our activities encourage them to take it.” are in terms of climate change. Labour’s Rob Higgins said “10 years ago, we did not have a that young people’s response great understanding about what calories to the climate emergency in are in food – you looked closely Newcastle had been “very if you were particularly interested or powerful” and they needed had a particular condition, but there to be involved in the process was not a great public awareness. of delivering changes. “I think we need to go on a similar Coun Forbes journey around carbon and our carbon said that the footprint.” climate The climate change committee is change committee one of three new bodies being established had as part of a city-wide Climate to engage Change Convention, alongside a the entire ‘net zero taskforce’ and a citizens’ city in its assembly. mission, The committee will open a call for including evidence next month to gather ideas from the public and organisations people across the city, before delivering a who report next March.