As COP 27 begins, what’s happening locally to help save our beautiful little planet from doom?
Well, Horsham District Council held a Climate Action Day on 20th October to help prepare the parish councillors for what lies ahead for all of us.
Two thirds of the 32 parish councils in HD were represented, with 11 parishes not attending. So what progress has been made?
The E-Hive, Eastbourne’s latest pop-up Climate Emergency Centre, is now open in The Beacon shopping centre. It is a crucial part of the campaign to deliver a carbon neutral Eastbourne by 2030, as mandated by the Climate Emergency declaration passed unanimously by Eastbourne councillors in July 2019.
Sixty years ago, things were very different. Big science and technology dominated everything. Problem with insects munching your crops? Destroy them with DDT! Want to get to the shops faster? Try our new ’59 saloon with fuel consumption lower than the Dead Sea! Everything was going to be newer, shinier, faster, bigger-and largely made of plastic.
Is the climate broken? Should the Government be doing more about it? Can ordinary citizens do anything? How will things look for our children and grandchildren?
To find out what the people of Horsham think, we spent a recent lunchtime patrolling the busy streets around the Swan Walk Shopping Centre.
A surprise from a zoom I attended last week was that many people are unaware that we have a real water crisis here in Horsham District, the first ever in the UK on this scale. The huge water shortfall means that all building work is now on hold while solutions are sought.
Southern Water provide drinking water for over a million properties, and remove and recycle the waste water of almost five million people. Quite a task!
Although we have 205 reservoirs, this provides only 7% of our water. The majority comes from underground aquifers, with around 25% being taken from rivers.
The cost of this service from 2020-2025 is around £1,000 per property, with improvements ranging from digitisation, artificial intelligence and machine learning to re-vamping the 3,500 pumping stations and 40,000 kilometres of sewers. Over a thousand options are being modelled including banning non-essential water use and building a desalination plant at Shoreham.
Going plastic free for a whole 31 days does sound pretty daunting, some would argue impossible, but it’s a great opportunity to get a little creative, learn something new and hopefully pick up a couple of new habits you can stick to. It’s like diet and exercise, if you’re not enjoying it and it doesn’t fit in with your lifestyle you’re unlikely to carry on with it.
Why the UK Energy Price Hikes and Energy Shortages? Its our reliance on imported fuels, rather than developing the huge tidal and wind resources we have around this island. Most UK homes are still heated by gas and many are woefully under insulated.
Multiple factors are behind the gas price increases. Geopolitical pressures, including high demand for gas from Asia and low supply from Russia, as well as last year’s cold winter, which left gas stocks low, are among the main reasons.
Other countries, such as Norway and Germany, have done a much better job of moving away from gas-fired heating and adopting electric heat pumps, meaning consumers are less exposed to price leaps. Many energy companies have gone bust in recent months and new suppliers have had to purchase gas and electricity on the wholesale market. Britain’s entire energy market needs modernising. Read more
Soaring temperatures have left Sussex residents sweltering after an extreme heat warning raised the question whether this week has been the hottest on record in the region and what we should be doing to tackle climate change.
The national emergency came only a day after Sussex Green Living’s CEO Carrie Cort, her son and the charity’s Youth Eco Forum leader Tash Barns joined ‘Zero Hour’, a coalition of UK campaigners, world-leading scientists, academics and members of the public in Victoria Tower Garden next to the House of Lords in Westminster.
I have been blessed to spend 20 years working in the Ecuadorian Amazon and Choco cloud forest, a world away from my home in Pulborough.
It has been like having parallel lives.
The UK has one of lowest levels of tree cover in Europe at 13%, globally ranking 136th out of 189 countries. Looking down from a plane over our green desert fields, we can see how few trees there really are with only tiny patches of ancient woodland remaining, maybe unaware that here in England our level of biodiversity is painfully low. Although the woodland cover has doubled in the last 100 years this is mainly with non-native conifer plantations, where very little diversity can exist.
We’re slowly moving towards creating a more permanent Green Hub for Horsham, inspired by the excellent Zero at Guildford. One of the many things we’d love, alongside a Community Fridge, a Seed Bank, and a Library of Things (such as ladders or tents) is a Green Book Library.
There are countless wonderful books available, some written by children, such as Greta Thunberg’s tiny motivational book, ‘No-one is too small to make a difference’. Even her inspirational title is clearly intended to change people’s lives for the better. When Greta has been asked “What can we do?” her reply has been, “Educate yourself””
What better way to start, then, than by borrowing a book from a Green Library?
The White House
Coolham Lane
Coneyhurst
RH14 9DH
