Questions from Melodie and Tony Winch
ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION REGULATIONS REQUEST – EIR428 [answered 8th February 2011]
The Council indicates in several places that the Local Development Framework will ‘contribute to reducing the county’s carbon footprint’ (for example, in the Vision cited in the Hereford Preferred Option, Para 2.4).
The Climate Change Act 2008 introduced legally binding carbon reduction targets to ensure that the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions are 80% lower in 2050 than they were in 1990. These targets are to be achieved through 5-year carbon budgets. The Committee on Climate Change indicates that by 2020 emissions should be between 34%-42% lower than 1990 levels.
• What is the county’s current carbon footprint?
The most up to date carbon figures are for 2008: see figures below from the DECC website. Figures are generally released each September.
http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/Statistics/climate_change/localAuthorityCO2/460-ni186-per-capita-co2-emissions.xls
• What was its carbon footprint in 1990?
The current national data set broken down to county level only dates back to 2005. So we do not have Herefordshire figures for 1990.
• What will the county’s carbon footprint be in 2026 if the projected levels of growth in population, housing, retail and traffic go ahead?
• What will be the contribution of each of the three major elements of the Preferred Option for Hereford, that is the projected housing, the expansion of retail, the proposed Western Relief Road and the resulting traffic?
The information to answer these two questions is not currently held by Herefordshire Council. However, the council will be using Vantage Point software to model expected carbon emission in 2026 if current trends continue. As the recession and other factors such as commodity price changes will impact on these trends there will be considerable uncertainty in this projection. The council will also look to modelling the impacts of the emerging Local Development Framework policies and proposals as part of this work.
