Climate and Environment
Staffordshire Moorlands Green Party campaigned for SMDC to declare a Climate Emergency in 2019. Our street stalls and petitions led to the community group Moorlands Climate Action – a coalition of concerned citizens. We worked with councillors to get our campaign on the council agenda and the Green Party now has a seat on the Climate Change Working Party.
Both Staffordshire County Council and Staffordshire Moorlands District Council have made formal commitments to becoming ‘carbon neutral’ and have drawn up draft action plans towards this.
These ‘plans’ have not yet been shared with the wider public – the Green Party see it as essential that we have full public engagement and call for a Citizen’s Assembly to drive this forward
A key priority for our local party is to ensure the action plan remains on track to meet the target dates and is strengthened. Time is not on our side.
As your local Green Party, we will:
- Ensure that improving the local environment remains a top priority for both the district and county councils.
- Make constructive suggestions as to how our councils achieve carbon neutrality in their operations quickly.
- Promote and encourage low carbon development.
- Design measures to improve resilience and adaptation to climate change.
- Support schemes to improve energy efficiency in homes across the district, with a priority for older housing.
- Promote low carbon travel – cycling and walking in particular. Encourage greater use of our railways in Staffordshire. Additionally, support new investment in electric vehicles (including public buses and refuse/recycling freighters) and more local car-sharing clubs.
- Campaign for our councils to establish and run electric bike loan schemes to encourage more people (including their own staff) to make cycling their principal mode of transport.
- Press our district council to work with local businesses in supporting the transition to greater energy-efficiency in both the domestic and business sectors through the provision of free energy audits and grants for environmentally sustainable projects.
- Press for increased domestic recycling by introducing separate weekly food waste collection services and by providing better information to residents about what can and cannot be placed in their recycling bins.
- Support the work of Moorlands Climate Action, and other community groups to promote projects around sustainability.
- Work with the district and county councils to produce a biodiversity strategy that will ‘make more space for nature’, for example, by creating more pollinator sites, wetlands, woodland, and wildflower meadows. Concomitantly, this will contribute to capturing and storing carbon. We will support plans to preserve and enhance our precious peatlands.