'Monumental effort' needed across Cardiff to hit ambitious carbon neutral target

Published date14 October 2021
Publication titleWalesOnline (Wales)
A major push to change public behaviour will take place over the next few years to get people in Cardiff to play their part in cutting carbon emissions.

Driving less, eating less meat, and heating homes differently are all seen as critical in hitting the city’s ambitious targets to tackle climate change.

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Cardiff council’s cabinet signed off its One Planet Cardiff strategy on Thursday, October 14, setting out a wide-ranging action plan to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

Council leader Huw Thomas said: “There is no denying the huge scale of the challenge ahead of us. We will need not just the council to respond to this challenge, but also governments and the city’s residents as well. But from what I see looking at other cities, Cardiff is playing a leading role.”

The goal is to reduce the city’s carbon emissions—currently more than 1.6 million tonnes a year—to net zero. Much of that reduction is planned to come from changing how people travel around the city. Council experts estimate the transport white paper would remove more than 300,000 tonnes of carbon emissions, mostly from people choosing not to drive.

The transport white paper, revealed at the start of last year, includes building new tram-train lines as part of the South Wales Metro project; potentially introducing a road user charge of £2 a day for drivers coming into Cardiff; installing a huge network of segregated cycle lanes; and giving more priority to buses on the road network and possibly capping bus fares.

Another major push coming up will be a council campaign to get individuals to change their behaviour. This could mean a “fundamental change in lifestyle” and the council is planning to work with local schools in encouraging young people to drive forward behaviour changes.

According to the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation, the top actions individuals can take to reduce their carbon footprint are: living car-free; shifting to electric vehicles or public transport; flying less often; using renewable energy; retrofitting homes with better insulation and replacing gas boilers with heat pumps; and eating less meat.

Since the draft One Planet Cardiff strategy was published in October last year, experts have analysed the current carbon footprint of the city and the council. Details of this analysis and future plans to cut carbon emissions were revealed in a recent cabinet report.

The...

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