By Cllr Sarah Kerr
When it comes to tackling both climate change and air pollution, it’s important to be pragmatic, particularly when you’re a local authority.
There is a lot that can be done for both these serious issues, but some of them are outside
of the council’s control.
That said, there are a lot of changes that can be made and the Liberal Democrats want to see some urgency in those actions.
The Climate Emergency Action Plan (CEAP) has been talked about and worked on for over
a year now.
While it is and always will be a working document, it’s not yet achieved an acceptable base level, and progress to ensure that there is a clear roadmap to carbon neutrality needs to happen rapidly.
Alongside the development of this roadmap, action needs to happen now.
The longer we wait, the more carbon emissions we are putting into the atmosphere and whilst the goal of carbon neutrality is important, the speed at which we get there is equally important.
As a priority we want to see the development of plans to retrofit properties to increase energy efficiency and decrease our reliance on fossil fuels.
With the impact of Covid meaning more people are working from home, we will be emitting more carbon emissions from the heating of our homes, particularly as we approach the autumn and winter months.
We need to act quickly as this is already one of the largest areas of carbon emissions and it’s only set to increase.
During lockdown we saw a huge decrease in the number of private vehicles on the roads and an increase in those walking and cycling.
This was hugely positive, but we have since regressed to higher levels of traffic once again and lower levels of cycling.
Time and time again we are told by residents that the thing prohibiting cycling is the lack
of infrastructure.
While we are very supportive of the greenways network being implemented in the borough, these are typically more leisure routes. We want to see greater investment in utility routes i.e. routes that actually get people to where they need to go, so there is a choice of leaving your car at home, and the associated infrastructure to go with that.
The Liberal Democrats also want to see more focus put on tackling air pollution.
Our motions on developing a low emission transport network and creating no-idling zones and monitoring of dangerous pollutants have pushed this further up the council agenda.
It’s a shame that it took our intervention to do this, but we will continue to push to ensure that this is dealt with seriously.
Public buy-in is crucial and we want this council to work much more closely with residents to tackle both these issues.
Too often this council does things to residents rather than with them.
We want to see this attitude change because the issues of climate change and air pollution require all of us to be involved in the solution.
Cllr Sarah Kerr is the Liberal Democrat spokesperson for arts, culture and libraries on Wokingham Borough Council
