Shropshire Climate Action Conference

Land & Biodiversity

Farmers are the wardens of our land. In their hands lies both great potential and great challenges – feeding a growing population whilst also restoring ecological health. Land use is crucial to achieve a net zero carbon future as the land represents a significant sink in which to store carbon.

Many Shropshire farmers are pioneering new methods of agricultural production and the industry as a whole has committed to achieve a net zero carbon future. How do we capture the lessons being learned and share best practice?

The climate crisis will test our food supply chains and there will be a need to build local food resilience and local food networks.

The aim of the Conference is to introduce some of the things that are already happening locally, to challenge the status quo and to explore the potential for farmers and rural communities to respond to the climate and ecological emergency.

Photographs by Rhian Pinches, South Shropshire Farmer

Energy & Buildings

Our current buildings – homes, businesses and community buildings – are not fit for a carbon-zero purpose. We need to find new ways to make them so.  In addition we also need to be generating much more of our energy from renewable sources. We do not underestimate the difficulty of doing this, and know that others are finding ways forward. We want to learn from this work and think seriously about how we apply it to south Shropshire, and at what scale. 

We also recognise the huge potential it offers in stimulating new investment, creating warmer homes, improving health, lowering energy bills, generating our own power, creating local skilled jobs, as well as lowering carbon. 

Through this theme we will look at current best practice around retrofit, new build and renewable energy. This will include both our homes and businesses. We will consider and explore best practice around retrofit – finance, installers, projects, delivery models; and new build – performance gap, embodied energy, new homes as community makers. We will also look at energy generation at building, community and Constituency-level and consider technological developments around hydrogen, energy storage and smart grid applications such as peer-to-peer energy trading. 

To do this we hope to create 6 or so working groups to consider each area, and then to bring this work together as an Energy & Buildings theme to create a compelling vision. We also hope to see some really practical project ideas emerge – both big and small – that we can subsequently develop.

Transport

Fossil-fuelled single-owner cars are obviously damaging to our carbon output and to our air quality while the spread of roads and massive transport white elephants like HS2 and the 3rd runway at Heathrow, are damaging not only to our climate, but to our biosphere at a point when maintaining the species diversity of an ancient woodland is our gift to future generations.

The role of the TRANSPORT thread and the working group that grows out of it will be to explore the many ways that people can retain the independence of easy transport in ways that are regenerative and keep us within the necessarily tight carbon budgets that will keep us safe.

Transport is also an important public health issue. Health experts recommend that rates of walking and cycling must go up as a contribution to reducing heart diseases, obesity and diabetes. This in turn requires a huge improvement in road safety which can be achieved if we follow the advice of the World Health Organisation and adopt 20mph as the speed limit on streets where cars, people and bikes mix.

Most trips are relatively short. In 2017, 24% of trips were under 1 mile, and 68% under 5 miles. Even in Shropshire there is huge potential to shift car trips to walk, cycle and bus.