Urban Tree Challenge Fund Success 

South Hams District Council and Kingsbridge Town Council will both provide match funding towards this significant scheme. They will each provide their own arboriculture and grounds’ team support to plant and maintain the trees.

As part of the Urban Tree Challenge Fund project, 300 trees will be planted at 15 sites in early 2022 and a further 300 will follow early in 2023 at another 15 sites.

There are so many reasons to plant urban trees. They can reduce temperatures by providing shade, help to remove air pollutants, reduce noise pollution and overall are recognised to improve health and wellbeing. They are known to increase property values due to their beauty, as well providing vital habitats for urban wildlife.

The scheme is a positive step in the Council’s biodiversity aims as part of its Climate Change and Biodiversity Action Plan.

With a wide range of large native species included, such as the classics people know and love, like; the oak, sweet and horse chestnut, together with some much loved park varieties such as the small leaved lime and hornbeam, amongst others.

On the smaller sites and verges, there are smaller flowering trees, which will be especially good for wildlife habitats, the old favourites; the crab apple, wild cherry, and the rowan.

Let’s not forget the orchards, of which there are a few in the mix too, where the Council, working in partnership with community groups, look to get local species to plant. The Council hope to continue this collaborative approach in future years to support the trees’ management.

If that is not enough to whet the appetite for what is to come, at some sites the appeal will be more ornamental with a focus purely on the ‘wow’ effect and the changing colours through the season. What a beautiful show will be given by the field maple, liquidambar and acer varieties. Something to look forward to.

Notice of Motion

At the November 25 Council meeting, councillors passed a motion to make a public statement:

South Hams District Council will use its power as a planning authority to require all new homes to be net zero as soon as Central Government regulations allow for this. Developers should consider this as fair warning and the beginning of a grace period to prepare for this change. South Hams District Council urges house builders to cease the installation of fossil fuel burning boilers and pay great attention to achieving very high standards of insulation.

This is in recognition that it is likely that most fossil fuel boilers installed from today will eventually need to be replaced (or converted) with cleaner tech such as heat pumps or hydrogen boilers, locking future home owners into costly upgrades as the UK moves towards its net-zero target.

Furthermore, continued reliance on gas for heating will continue to detrimentally effect air quality, particularly emitting dangerous PM2.5 particulates which are especially dangerous to human health because they bypass many of our body's defences and can therefore impact on life expectancy through harm to our circulatory and respiratory systems.

To act on this, South Hams District Council will lobby Central Government to bring forward policy that requires new homes to be net zero carbon.
In addition the Council will request the government to bring forward policy to ban the installation of fossil fuel burning boilers in any new builds prior to the proposed Government ban in 2025.

On behalf of the South West Energy Hub and Devon County Council, Regen is carrying out a study into householder attitudes to energy efficient home improvement, and would like your help via their online survey.

Currently our homes use 35% of all the energy in the UK and emit 20% of the carbon dioxide emissions, and 19% of Devon’s total emissions. For the UK government and Devon to deliver their targets of a 68% emissions reduction by 2030, and net zero by 2050, household emissions need to be addressed.

In partnership with expert home-retrofit analysts Parity Projects, Regen have identified the likely cost and improvements required to reduce carbon emissions from the housing stock in rural Devon.

This building-by-building research has been incorporated into the survey to show the typical ‘retrofit plan’ (measures and costs) for the 12 most common housing types present in rural Devon.

In order to inform the development of the market for retrofit in Devon, Regen are looking to understand householder attitudes to these plans by surveying an identified group of households.

They are also making their survey available online and inviting widespread participation; it should take less than five minutes to complete.

You can complete the survey by clicking here.

Love to Ride Devon Winter Wheelers

Winter Wheelers is a cold-busting campaign designed to make bike riding a year-round activity!

Throughout December, Love to Ride is challenging you to 'wrap up and roll out' to win some great prizes.

All you have to do is register for Winter Wheelers and log your rides, that’s it! 

Every day you ride is a chance to get a dose of fresh air and fun and you could even win a brand new bike on Christmas Day.

To find out more, click here.

Tool launched to help small to medium businesses to measure their own direct emissions.

CDP and the SME Climate Hub have launched a new framework to help SMEs measure, report and reduce their climate impacts. The tool is called the SME Climate Disclosure Framework and will help SMEs in all sectors to measure and report their own direct (Scope 1), power-related (Scope 2) and indirect (Scope 3) emissions.

The tool is modular, meaning that you can complete as many or as few sections as you want. 

To find out more and to access the tool, click here.

The Glasgow Climate Pact is a UN deal reached at the end of COP26 last month reiterating the urgency of the climate emergency, and stressing the importance of ramping up climate mitigation and adaptation efforts.

The key policies include;

• Countries must accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, as coal is to be 'phased down'
• Calls for climate adaptation to be integrated into local, national and regional planning
• Asks that parties strengthen 2030 commitments
• Urges countries in the Global North to help developing countries by providing climate finance, technology-transfer, and helping them adapt to climate change
• Commits to achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement

You can read the full document by clicking here.

Research carried out by a team from 17 countries and published in the journal, Nature Climate Change, reveals that limiting global heating as agreed in the Paris Agreement requires "demand-side climate solutions", primarily aimed at the consumption of energy in private households.

The potential is often overlooked but the emissions savings are large and can vary between 40 and 80 percent in the buildings, transport, food and consumer products sectors.

Furthermore, the demand-side solutions do not require suffering or hardship and often improve quality life. The study also tackles the belief that demand-side climate solutions ultimately depend on the individual’s personal initiative. Instead, policymakers are just as challenged here as they are on the supply side with the expansion of renewable energies for instance. Behavioural changes depend very much on infrastructure and new services.

To read the article in full, click here.

A new analysis of the latest climate science shows that future extreme rainfall could be more extreme than previously thought.  

The calculations used the latest UKCP Local projections which were funded by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

This is the first time national climate scenarios have been provided at a resolution on a par with weather forecast models. The UKCP Local projections provide new capability – allowing us to look at changes in local weather extremes over the coming decades.

Met Office climate scientist, Professor Lizzie Kendon, said: “Recent developments in high resolution climate projections are letting us examine changes in future extreme rainfall in unprecedented detail. We’re seeing that extreme rainfall events are being made both more frequent and more intense as a consequence of human induced climate change.

Recent flooding events around the world show the devastation that intense rainfall can cause. By reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, the worst impacts can be avoided, but organisations and individuals need to be resilient to the changes in our weather that we’re already committed to.”

To read more, click here.

according to a new report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) The growth of the world’s capacity to generate electricity from solar panels, wind turbines and other renewable technologies is on course to accelerate over the coming years, with 2021 expected to set a fresh all-time record for new installations.

Despite the rising costs of key materials to make solar and wind turbines, the additional renewable energy capacity of this year is expected to rise to 290 gigawatts. “The growth of renewables in India is outstanding, supporting the government’s newly announced goal of reaching 500 GW of renewable power capacity by 2030 and highlighting India’s broader potential to accelerate its clean energy transition,” said Dr Birol. “China continues to demonstrate its clean energy strengths, with the expansion of renewables suggesting the country could well achieve a peak in its CO2 emissions well before 2030.”

To read the report in more detail, click here.