On Saturday 1st October 2005 I attended the launch of Cheltenham’s Climate Change Strategy at the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham. The strategy has been drawn up by the Cheltenham Climate Change Board which is a collection of 20 local organisations working alongside the Borough Council (CBC). The Board was set up in 2002 with the purpose of planning a strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change and it incorporates groups such as Cheltenham Friends of the Earth, the Environment Agency, local construction firms, Severn Trent Water & many other interested organisations from private, public and voluntary sectors.

The Strategy has been published as a 50 page document and was presented to us at the summit by Marie Fallon, CBC’s Director of Environment. It covers a whole range of issues from examining how the town currently contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, to how those emissions can be reduced, and it attempts to anticipate how climate change might affect the area in the future and how to adapt to it. Its overarching aim is to make Cheltenham a carbon neutral borough and my initial impression was that they are making a very serious, and impressive, attempt to do just that.

In the time since the Board first convened, extensive work has been carried out to determine current levels emissions from council activities, local businesses and private residents in order to define the benchmark against which they can define their targets and these figures are spelled out in detail in the strategy. The key targets are to reduce greenhouse gases from all activities in the town by 20% and from council activities by 50% in the short term and ultimately to become carbon neutral. It would be fair to say, however that the bulk of the document is, unsurprisingly, taken up with describing how those targets are to be achieved. Some of those key objectives are:

• Reducing emissions from energy use in buildings – e.g. improving energy efficiency in the home and in businesses, promoting the use of renewable sources of electricity.
• Reducing emissions due to transport, waste and purchasing – e.g. buying local goods, energy efficient products, reducing packaging etc.
• Promoting sustainable construction

The remainder of the strategy concentrates on predicting the unavoidable effects of climate change such as changes to air quality, flood risk etc. It also considers the problems of raising awareness of the issues since it recognises that without public support very little is achievable.

Despite the seriousness of its content, the document itself is surprising readable, with each chapter highlighting key improvement measures and illustrated by ‘Fact Boxes’ which catch your eye if you try to skim through it too quickly! E.g. ‘A medium sized petrol car produces its own weight in CO2 every 6000 miles’ and ‘In 2002 the average person in the UK consumed 18 tonnes of materials’. It’s well worth a look and I do have spare copies if anyone would like to see one.

Marie Fallon was also able to provide up to date information on progress made so far including:

• The creation of a sustainable construction group for new buildings.
• 44% of Climate Change Board members are now using renewable energy sources
• Implementation of a procurement strategy – the first evidence of which is the appearance of solar powered parking meters. (I bet they’re popular!)
• 57% of local residents now claim to be buying some locally produced food (though we weren’t told how much!)

As ever on these occasions, the question and answer session was very illuminating, particularly for someone like myself who is not a Cheltenham resident. The biggest sticking points appeared to centre around the issues that overlap the grey area between Gloucestershire County Council and CBC and the perennial problems of improving public transport in a historic town that’s gridlocked by private traffic for half the day. If they could crack that problem, they’d find half the towns & cities in the land queuing up for the solution!

The summit itself was rounded off with a talk from Martin Williams of Friends of the Earth about ‘The Big Ask’, Foe’s Climate Change Bill which aims to introduce annual targets for reducing carbon emissions. This was followed by workshops to discuss the ways in which the council, businesses and individuals could help. All in all, it was a very interesting and encouraging event that left me with a glimmer of hope that perhaps attempts to tackle climate change were not too little or too late.

Angie

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