Tuesday 10 August 2021

UN climate change report sounds ‘code red for humanity’

"The alarm bells are deafening," warns UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

 
How is this urgency reflected in UK planning? On 20 July 2021, a new version of the National Planning Policy Framework was released. We posted about it here. The NPPF sets out the government’s planning policies for England and how these are expected to be applied. 

According to this article, the term "climate change" appears three more times than the predecessor document published two years before. The NPPF has not been updated to reflect the UK’s 2050 net zero obligation approved by Parliament in 2019. The section on "planning for climate change" still reads: 
152. The planning system should support the transition to a low carbon future in a changing climate, taking full account of flood risk and coastal change. It should help to: shape places in ways that contribute to radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, minimise vulnerability and improve resilience; encourage the reuse of existing resources, including the conversion of existing buildings; and support renewable and low carbon energy and associated infrastructure. 
However, reference to the UN’s 17 Global Goals for Sustainable Development has been added to the NPPF, and the paragraph which defines sustainable development in more detail has been toughened up with "much more binding" language about protecting and enhancing the environment: 


Nevertheless, it seems a meagre response to the crisis we now find ourselves in. This editorial argues: 
Without an accelerated reduction in greenhouse gases during the next decade, the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit global heating to 1.5C will not be met. The price of failure will be a world vulnerable to irreversible and exponential effects of global heating: there will be worse floods more often, more terrible and frequent heatwaves and devastating and repeated droughts. 

The science is irrefutable. Less certain is the strength of political will to act upon it. An awesome burden of responsibility now rests upon this generation of leaders as humanity finds itself at a fork in the road. The actions taken or foregone during the next 10 years will define the parameters of the possible for future generations. A step-change is required, but across the world green rhetoric continues to translate into policymaking at a pace which is fatally slow.

How has Holcim, the world's largest cement producer responded to this dire warning, given that cement is responsible for about 8% of CO2 emissions? Just as if it has played no part at all:
 

This of course is the same company that in 2020 alone pumped out 146 million tonnes of those greenhouse gas emissions choking our planet, the same company that would ultimately profit from the multi-million-mile-CO2-belching-haulage-scheme planned for Straitgate Farm. The hypocrisy.
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