Peterborough will ‘march forth’ for the environment

You might remember that back in July, Peterborough City Council declared a climate emergency and committed to reducing its carbon emissions to zero by 2030. Since then we’ve had a cross party working group looking at different activities, projects and awareness raising events that could help us achieve this.

Our Climate Action Day event is something the whole city can take part in. It’s held on March 4 and we are calling it – yep, you’ve guessed it – March Forth for the environment.

As part of March Forth we are asking residents to make a personal pledge to change one aspect of their daily routine for a full 24 hours to reduce their carbon emissions.

This could be going vegan for the day, walking to work or making a pledge to use zero plastic.

By challenging people to ‘have a go’ at reducing their climate emissions for just 24 hours, we hope to show just how easy it is and hopefully inspire some of you to continue your challenges either long-term or for a couple of days a week over the next year.

There will be lots of prominent city residents and businesses taking part, such as city firefighters, the police, Peterborough United, Peterborough Civic Society and of course, journalists from the Peterborough Telegraph.

And I strongly urge you all to make your own personal pledges for the day and to share updates on how you are getting on using the #MarchForth hashtag throughout the day.

I’ll be going vegan for the day and while I think it will be fairly easy for lunch and dinner, I’m struggling at the moment to think about how to replace my morning cereal and milk.

I know there’s various dairy free milks out there at the moment, but there’s so many it’s confusing and I have no idea which ones go well with fruit and fibre bran flakes. If you have any suggestions, please let me know!

Peterborough is one stage further to having the largest smart city-wide energy system in the UK. Thanks to a Government grant, we are able to start planning the design of a pipeline which aims to pump locally produced green electricity direct to homes in Peterborough.

The project is one of only five to receive government funding and involved in the design will be a mix of private investors and green technology experts, including SSE Enterprise, Element Energy, Cranfield University, Smarter Grid Solutions and Sweco UK.

There’s still a long way to go before it’s delivered, but the funding announced last week is a landmark step in our aim to be carbon-neutral by 2030. It’s set to be the most exciting and innovative clean, green energy project the city and indeed the country has ever seen.

Last week I received a letter from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government thanking the city council for exceeding its target for homebuilding over the past three years.

As you may know, the Government has set an ambitious target to deliver 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s to relieve the current housing crisis and the East of England is a key expansion area.

In Peterborough we had a target of 2,673 homes to build between 2016-19 and I’m pleased to say we were successful in delivering 3,039 - that’s 366 extra homes.

And of these homes, 632 were located in the city centre, as we recognise these residents generate less carbon emissions as they are more likely to walk, cycle and use public transport.

This is thanks in part to our Local Plan, a document we must produce every five years which designates areas of the city for future housing developments to make sure that homes are being built in the right place and at the right time, with the right infrastructure to support them.

I’d like to thank our planning teams for producing a first-class Local Plan.