Question

Recommendation 7 of the Climate Emergency Task and Finish Group calls on the Council to include progress of measures aimed at reducing Consumption Emissions coming into the Borough. Other than asking residents to buy less, what can be done to reduce emissions that seem to me to sit outside of the Council's control?

Question

Recommendation 7 of the Climate Emergency Task and Finish Group calls on the Council to include progress of measures aimed at reducing Consumption Emissions coming into the Borough. Other than asking residents to buy less, what can be done to reduce emissions that seem to me to sit outside of the Council's control?

Answer

Communities consume thousands of different types of products and services every day and the emissions associated with these are affected by the numerous decisions that we also make every day.   

A study made in 2018 by the University of Leeds, University of New South Wales, and Arup revealed that individual consumption-based Green House Gas emissions are highest in Europe, North America and Oceania, between 10 and 25 tCO2e/capita. Household consumption categories include capital, utilities and bills, food, transport, clothing, furnishings and household equipment, restaurants, hotels, recreation and culture.

Although, through understanding these supply chains, businesses and residents can potentially influence their carbon emissions, the scale and complexity of measuring and monitoring consumption emissions is considerable. Going beyond the Council’s sphere of influence and our available resources.

Wokingham Borough Council believes residents have great insight into the challenges presented by addressing these emissions and understand that the way to address this is through making informed purchasing decisions.   The role of the Council should be to focus on educating communities and businesses about the impact of consumption emissions and encourage by making decisions that will reduce these emissions.

Therefore, the Council wants to bring together residents, in the form of a number of Citizen’s Assemblies, to investigate, discuss and make recommendations to Wokingham Borough Council on how to respond to consumption emissions and other areas of our Climate Emergency Action Plan and in particular what needs to be done to change current behaviours.

We believe that these Citizen’s Assemblies will significantly strengthen our Climate Emergency Action Plan and our efforts to promote behavioural change and promote new lifestyle choices. 

Supplementary Question

It is really good to hear that Wokingham Borough Council continue to show climate change leadership by deciding to run Citizen’s Assemblies.  So I guess the question I have is how can we ensure that the recommendations remain objective and not politically or ideology based?

Supplementary Answer

That is a great question and one that has been at the centre of the discussions that we have been having about Citizen’s Assemblies for a couple of months now.

The reality is that Citizen’s Assemblies are advisory bodies.  They are a group of citizens that listen to evidence from experts and make recommendations and give advice to the Council in terms of what our future actions should be.  In that what I would really like to see is that we have a demographically balanced group of individuals.  I want to make sure that there is no real political bias within that group so as part of setting them up we will look to make sure that the people that are involved in it are not well known political activists.  Similarly we want to make sure that the people that are on these are not hugely environmental activists or climate change deniers.  We want to make sure that the people who are going into it are doing so in such a way that they do not already have preconceived ideas of what should be happening.

I would like to make it so that actually all of the attendees are anonymous so that going forward any time we take a decision based on their recommendations there can be no recriminations for people that make those recommendations because some of them are likely to be unpopular with some elements of our community.

I would also like to make sure that those Citizen’s Assemblies include a vast number of our school children.  They are the people that are going to inherit our community in the future and we should be making decisions that are in the best interests of their future lives and for me that means involving them in the decisions that we should be taking.