Yesterday, a meeting of our full Council looked at whether or not Wrexham should declare a climate emergency, in line with other national and regional authorities.
We’ve carried out a lot of work to fulfil our environmental obligations and limit our use of fossil fuels in the past 10 years, including:
- Installing more than 2,600 solar panels on council houses;
- Designing, installing and maintaining Wales’ first council-owned 2.64 MW solar farm;
- Installing solar PV on two council offices and 17 schools;
- The installation of a large-scale biomass boiler within one of our large office sites
- Internal lighting upgrades in more than 30 schools and offices.
- Electric vehicle charging points in five public car parks, and workplace charging in two office car parks – as well as the addition of five electric “pool” vehicles into the Council’s fleet
- Continuing to embrace digital technologies and reducing the in-house reliance on paper documents
- Setting up a project group to reduce single use plastic across all buildings and schools
- Replacing 4,000 lights, with another 8,000 set to be completed in 16 months, saving energy while cutting down on carbon and reducing maintenance costs
- Ensuring corporate energy supply to offices is supplied by renewable providers
Cllr David A Bithell, Lead Member for Environment and Transport, said: “While our record shows that we will work hard as an authority to tackle the issues rising from climate change and fossil fuel use, we’re well aware of the fact that many more challenges will need to be faced in future.
“We also know that this is an issue of public concern regionally, nationally and globally. As well as ongoing international campaigns by environmental groups, the Welsh Government recently declared Climate Emergency in Wales, which highlighted ambitious plans for Wales to be carbon neutral by 2030
“With that in mind, we want to look at a way forward, and how in declaring a Climate and Ecological Emergency we can build on our commitment to develop our decarbonisation action plan, which was agreed unanimously at full Council in May this year.”
Council Leader Cllr Mark Pritchard said: “We have a well-established record in working to limit our environmental impact as an authority, and know that there are further challenges on the way.
“We have a number of established commitments in line with these goals, including reducing our emissions and focusing on the environmental sustainability of our buildings, transport, land use and procedures and conventions around how we procure our services.
“These are well-established priority areas for Welsh Government and the majority of Welsh local authorities, including those who have already declared climate emergencies.
“We are also keen that our plans and commitments be revisited, and as such we will – after full development and scrutiny – review our decarbonisation action plan in May next year.”
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