EFFORTS to combat climate change have again been evaluated by Climate Emergency UK, a not-for-profit organisation who assess all the UK’s local councils and their climate change initiatives.
This year’s scorecards focused on the actions councils have taken towards achieving net zero emissions so far.
Although scores were down across the board, Solihull Council achieved a higher than average score compared to other UK local authorities.
The Council has also been ranked as the second highest performing council when compared to the constituent authorities of the West Midlands Combined Authority.
Solihull Council scored particularly well in the categories of ‘collaboration and engagement’ and ‘biodiversity’.
Coun Andy Mackiewicz, cabinet portfolio holder for climate change and planning, said: “I’m grateful to Climate Emergency UK for undertaking this nationwide assessment of local authorities’ progress on tackling climate change and appreciate the sheer scale involved in such a task.
“Whilst we don’t fully agree with some of the scoring and methodology used, we acknowledge that this is a very hard process to get right, and the feedback still helps to show us where our efforts should be focused going forwards.
“We feel more credit should be given to our low landfill rates and our waste to energy plant which reduces CO2 emissions by replacing fossil fuel for energy generation.
“We have also recently started to send our recycling to a new state of the art material recycling facility, which means more of the material collected at the kerbside will be recycled.
“As a Council, we’d like to work more closely with Climate Emergency UK in the future to ensure all the great climate action taking place in Solihull is properly captured by the volunteer markers when assessing our progress.”
