“Please could you itemise what progress has been made this year towards the goal of Carbon Neutrality for the Authority by 2030 and also indicate what progress is in the pipeline for the coming year towards the carbon neutral goal?”
Minutes:
“Please could you itemise what progress has been made this year towards the goal of Carbon Neutrality for the Authority by 2030 and also indicate what progress is in the pipeline for the coming year towards the carbon neutral goal?”
Response by Councillor Cefin Campbell, Executive Board Member for Communities and Rural Affairs:-
“Thank you very much Jane for the question. As you will be aware, two years ago we declared a climate emergency and a year ago, as promised, we drew up a net zero carbon plan and it’s our intention to report on progress made against the actions and targets in that plan annually. So, the action plan on this first year is going before the Environmental and Public protection Scrutiny Committee this coming Friday. The report and the details around progress is now in the public domain. If you want to look at those details, they are available on Carmarthenshire County Council’s website or, alternatively, one of the admin staff can send you a link to that particular report at the end of this meeting if you so wish. But just to give a little bit of detail around the report, let me just put this in context first of all. Let me say this last year, as we all know, has been unprecedented as Covid 19 has presented many challenges for us a Council. And, as a result, many of our staff have been redeployed to help the county’s response to the pandemic. So, it means the people who would have normally been working on the net zero carbon plan were pulled away from that work for obvious reasons to deal with the urgency of the pandemic. But, nevertheless, considerable progress has been made on several initiatives. Now, I could list you a whole range of actions that we have done work on but, I’m just going to pull up maybe one or two but the rest of the detail is in the plan on our website
I think the first thing I need to say is that the headline figure for 2019/20 is that our overall carbon footprint reduced by 2.9% compared to 2018/19. And, it won’t come as a surprise to you although, this isn’t in the report that early figures and data that we’ve had for this last calendar year has seen a marked reduction in carbon emissions in Carmarthenshire and also an increase in air quality. Now this obviously has come about because of the pandemic and fewer people travelling by car and so on. But this will be reported in next year’s action plan report.
Very briefly, If I can mention a few other projects in order to fulfil our net zero carbon ambition. We’ve delivered on the Re:fit Cymru project to achieve
Energy and carbon savings. Although, work was delayed due to Covid, work recommenced last September and now most Phase 1 projects on the 30 sites will be completed by the end of this month. So, this will result in overall carbon savings of about 675 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year and, added to that we’ve added additional LED lighting into some of the sites as well.
We’ve also got some outstanding works to be completed by September of this year on LED lighting in two care homes facilities plus two solar PV schemes – one at a care home, and the other large one, potentially, at Parc Dewi Sant and we are, finally, working on the Re-Fit Cymru Scheme on new build developments and we currently have 5 new build schemes which will provide 114 homes, with a further 21 developments in the pipeline. In these homes we are putting in high levels of insulation in place using the ‘Passivhaus’ principles and also will include modern technologies such as Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery, electrical vehicle charging points, plus solar panels and battery storage.
So, Jane, I could go on, but I think that gives you a sense of what we’ve managed to achieve in a very very challenging year. I hope that answers your question
There was no supplementary question