North Shropshire's Green candidate says county must do more to fight climate change
Shropshire has to take climate change seriously and reduce its own emissions of carbon, the North Shropshire Green Party candidate has warned.
Duncan Kerr, a Shropshire Councillor, told a meeting of the Community Scrutiny Committee that the council could to more to help combat climate change including changing its household waste strategy.
The committee was told that climate change could lead to a 27p per cent increase in flooding by 2050, overwhelming defences for Shrewsbury and Ludlow amongst other towns.
"Whilst the council could and should be doing more to defend properties and alert communities we can never hope to alleviate the problem until it takes climate change seriously and reduces its own emissions of carbon" said Councillor Kerr.
"If we don’t act now we will see hundreds of properties subject to such frequent flooding that they will become uninhabitable. The costs of defending this land would break the council and even if we built high walls we would simply push the problem down-stream.
"There are many measures to mitigate climate change, for example having a household waste minimisation strategy, as I proposed in May and the Conservative administration completely rejected. The National Infrastructure Commission has recently reported that rising household waste rates could threaten to undo all the other good work we are doing as a nation to reduce emissions."
He also said that the embedded carbon needed to build the North West relief road or dual the A5 to Oswestry represented "steps in the wrong direction".
