Climate change activists have piled the pressure on Wiltshire Council to move faster on meeting its carbon neutral targets by staging a demonstration outside County Hall in Trowbridge.
Members of the Wiltshire Climate Alliance staged a noisy but good-natured protest before Wiltshire Council’s full council meeting.
The two-hour demonstration was held before the county’s local authority met to set its budget and precept for the next financial year.
WCA spokesperson Richard Ecclestone, from Donhead St Mary in south west Wiltshire, said: “We were there today to mark the fifth anniversary of Wiltshire Council acknowledging the climate emergency.
“We like to think of ourselves as critical friends.
“We are not here just to point fingers. We want to help and we want to be part of the solution.”
Five years ago Wiltshire Council declared a climate emergency and committed to becoming a carbon-neutral council and county by 2030.
Around 40 WCA activists from across Wiltshire gathered outside County Hall on Tuesday (February 20) to question the council about its progress.
They were accompanied by drummers and waved banners and placards as they sought to get their message across to councillors filing in for the meeting.
Their questions follow five years of rising temperatures and floods affecting local lives and nature.
They wanted to know whether the local authority is meeting its targets for the council and the county after five years of setting policy, strategy planning and actions.
The WCA said: “Wiltshire Climate Alliance have been asking the council that very question every year since that commitment. Now we ask again.”
Mr Ecclestone added: “We just wanted to deliver the message to the council that there is so much more to do to ensure the council’s operations are carbon neutral by 2030.”
The WCA seeks to hold the council to account and make sure that it delivers on its commitments and carbon neutrality targets.
Its members were joined by Catherine Bryant, Lucy Brooks, Candy Verney and Francesca Rinaldi, of the Grandmothers for Climate Action group, which is calling for action on climate change targets.
The four are worried about what they see as the government's failure to show real commitment in meeting net zero targets by 2050.
Catherine said: “I thought it was as successful demonstration. It was really good to have people from the Wiltshire Climate Alliance and the Bradford on Avon Extinction Rebellion group and the drummers there.
“We are trying to encourage them and keep the urgency there. Wiltshire Council has done well in lots of areas, especially in-house stuff, but we want to put some urgency in and let people know how important it is and to make people prioritise the environment.
“There is going to be a general election this year and we want people to make the environment a priority and to prioritise it when they make that choice on who to vote for.”
Wiltshire Council leader Cllr Richard Clewer and Cllr Nick Holder, the council's cabinet member for the environment and climate change, addressed the demonstrators and answered their questions before the meeting began.
They revealed that Wiltshire Council has just been awarded a £4.5 million government grant to fund improvements for walkers and cyclists.
The pair were also asked questions about progress on transport and meeting the council's targets to retro-fit up to 500 council homes a year by 2030 to meet the latest EPC B targets for energy efficiency.
Currently, the council has retro-fitted 90 homes with property insulation, modern heating systems and renewable energy technologies such as solar panels.
Cllr Nick Holder, Wiltshire Council's cabinet member for climate change, said: “With the council’s impressive track record to date of decreasing emissions, there is real cause to celebrate the achievements we’ve made over the past five years.
"However, we’re not complacent and we know there is more to be done to achieve our pledge to become carbon neutral as an organisation by 2030, and to seek to make the rest of the county carbon neutral as well. We know this isn’t something we can do alone, and we’ll need to work collaboratively with residents and businesses across Wiltshire.
“Our achievements to date include but are not limited to, reducing the council’s greenhouse gas emissions by 85 per cent since 2014, switching to LED street lighting resulting in a huge reduction in energy consumption equivalent to 2000tonnes of CO2e, rolling out our new fleet of fully electric council vehicles, and over £10m invested in our Property Carbon Reduction Programme together with £5m secured in government grants to decarbonise the heat and power of our buildings by installing solar panels, heat pumps and LED lighting.
“We’re also increasing our delivery to support the rest of the county to become carbon neutral and we’ve made good progress already with schemes such as Solar Together to support household clean electricity generation and the Home Upgrade Grant (HUG) project which enables residents to access grants to improve energy efficiency in homes that are not connected to the gas grid.
“While we are absolutely focused on decarbonisation of both the council and the county, we must also acknowledge and plan for the current and future impacts of climate change.
"We’re doing this by updating our Climate Adaptation Plan to make sure we can keep on delivering our council services despite the changes to the climate and working in partnership with residents and organisations across the county to support emergency planning and response to help vulnerable people, nature and infrastructure be prepared and more resilient.”
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