The Bristol region’s leaders have approved a new climate and ecological action plan after going back to the drawing board to make it more ambitious. But a series of tough targets in the document reveals the “daunting” scale of urgent change needed, with warnings of imminent “irreversible damage”, emission levels posing a threat to life and an admission that 2030 net zero goals are currently nowhere near being achieved.
In fact one of the strategy’s main aims – getting people out of cars and onto public transport – demonstrates just how unlikely it is, with a required target of 40 per cent less car mileage by the end of the decade. Yet only last week, city mayor Marvin Rees outlined the timetable for a proposed mass transit system and said diggers would only move into place by 2029/30.
The climate report – approved by the West of England Combined Authority (Weca) committee, comprising the leaders of Bristol, South Gloucestershire and Bath & North East Somerset councils and metro mayor Dan Norris – also says 250,000 homes and 8,000 other properties need to be retrofitted in the next eight years to meet carbon neutral ambitions. But this will cost £5billion and needs 40,000 heat pumps installed or connections to heat networks every year, when the current annual rate for the whole of the UK is 30,000, it says.
