Building a low carbon Winchester... - TrustNews December 09
Winchester has been a centre of learning and culture for hundreds of years, and what happens here is important. Will we use our collective curiosity, creativity and courage to face up to the unprecedented opportunity and threat of human-caused climate change? Or will we hide behind our laziness and diffidence – and that of others – and, basking in an exaggerated sense of entitlement, fail to face up to the great challenge of our time?
Make no mistake – the logic of the greenhouse effect is rock solid, and there is an overwhelming consensus among well-informed climate scientists that human activity is cooking the planet. Early in 2009 two academics at the University of Illinois, Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman, published their survey of the attitudes to global warming of 3,146 scientists. They found that 97 per cent of expert climate scientists (those that published peer-reviewed papers on the subject) took the view that human activity has caused, and is causing, climate change.
The choice is between effective action in the next decade or the catastrophes of ‘runaway’ climate change.
So what should we be doing in Winchester? Winchester Action on Climate Change (WinACC) was deliberately set up as a coalition of organisations and citizens willing to pledge to reduce their carbon footprints. The target of a one-third reduction in the carbon footprint of Winchester by December 2015 is both ambitious and realistic. The immediate aim must be a 10 per cent reduction in emissions – from every household, business and organisation – in 2010. There is no shortage of websites – including http://www.winacc.org.uk - providing advice about the action that needs to be taken.
The next ten years are crucially important. WinACC is more interested in ‘climate change: the opportunity’ than ‘climate change: the threat’. With good leadership and a compelling vision, Winchester in 2020 could be a model of a beautiful low carbon city. Skilling and re-skilling society for the ‘smart complexity’ and ‘elegant simplicity’ needed in a civilised sustainable society should be a top priority for government at every level. ‘Smart complexity’ will be needed, for example in food production, transport, and the way we organise business life; ‘elegant simplicity’ could help call a halt to the ‘affluenza’ of rampant consumerism.
Well- informed judgements are needed in every area – in urban design and architecture; in technology choice, particularly in investment decisions on renewable energy; in creating a society in which once again it becomes normal to walk, cycle or use public transport; and in tackling the crucial question of food security. How we increase the energy efficiency of old buildings is just as important – in the short term probably more important - as how we design the new ones. WinACC is exploring the feasibility of a project which will aim to insulate the entire housing stock of Winchester district as cost-effectively as possible by 2015.
The decisions that the City Council has to take on new housing developments, and on how best to develop the potentially lucrative renewable energy economy in the area, call for considerable understanding of best practice elsewhere. Do the local authorities have adequate technical and design expertise at their disposal? Are they learning all that they should be learning from other cities in Europe? It would be surprising if most Trust members answered positively to either of these questions.
Human-caused climate change provides us with the opportunity to re-think the values of our society – and to work collaboratively as never before to provide a decent quality of life for all with whom we share the planet. You do not have to be a Christian to believe that the Archbishop of Canterbury is providing the kind of leadership on climate change that is needed from politicians as well as religious leaders. In a recent speech Dr Rowan Williams said: ‘Our response to the crisis needs to be, in the most basic sense, a reality check, a reacquaintance with the facts of our interdependence within the material world and a rediscovery of our responsibility for it...When we believe in transformation at the local and personal level, we are laying the surest foundations for change at the national and international level’.
All members of the City of Winchester Trust are asked to make a pledge to reduce their carbon footprints – and thereby to join WinACC.