The city council has today published an extensive environmental strategy document, after months of intense preparation.
The council releases an environmental strategy every five years, comprising all major campaigns and priorities for the forthcoming period and highlighting recent progress.
The latest strategy – covering the years between 2020 and 2025 – has been formally published this week, having been accepted by the council’s Climate and Environment Emergency Executive Panel (CEEEP) in June. The document also ties into the ‘Climate Change and the Green Economy’ theme of the council’s Covid19 Recovery Plan, which was finalised in the same month.
A new action programme and target to make the city council's operational carbon emissions net zero by 2030 are among the pathways introduced within the strategy to continue the council’s positive trend of environmental improvement.
Councillor Kevin Maguire, chair of CEEEP and cabinet member for safe and sustainable city environment, said: “We are very pleased to be able to publish this strategy, one which we have spent a great deal of time perfecting over the past few months.
“Our Norwich 2040 City Vision commits us to maintaining a liveable city for future generations, and so we have actively sought out a range of opinions to make it as strategic and wide-reaching as possible.
“We have achieved great success in this field over recent years, and we must continue to press on with our ambitious programme.”
Since the publication of the last environmental strategy the council has delivered a wide-ranging set of actions to improve sustainability in the city and there have been some noticeable achievements: improved cycling and walking rates, decreased domestic waste, better recycling rates, increase domestic energy efficiency, a 60% fall in operational C02 emissions and a 45% fall in CO2 emissions from the entire city.
The strategy will build on a string of recent successes for the city council, which have been recognised by a number of awards and recommendations over recent years. These include the RIBA Stirling Prize and Edie Carbon Reduction Award in 2019 and a shortlisting for the Global Good Awards in 2020. The city council has also recently been recognised as one of the top performing councils in the country by Friends of the Earth, for our response to the climate change emergency.
You can read the Environmental Strategy in full.
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