I attended the SEERA (South East England Regional Assembly) Climate Change Conference 30th March 07 in Brighton which delivered a clear message that climate change is happening and we all need to do something about it.
Their published figures of what we can expect in the SE by the 2050s are:
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avg summer temperature around 3 degrees warmer
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avg summer rainfall decrease by around 40%
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avg winter rainfall increase by up to 20%
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sea level rise by up to 40cm
Most of the conference reiterated topics of which we are well aware – sign up to Nottingham, look at Woking and their individual route to innovation in this area. Brighton and Hove and Southampton are making names for themselves in the ‘sustainability’ stakes and Brighton in particular are notable in what they are requiring from development in terms of build quality and renewable power (e.g new One Planet Living Development of 170 flats, aiming at zero waste, allotments on the roof and CHP in the basement).
In answer to several questions from the floor as to why not all councils were as fast moving in the area of climate change, I asked my own question as to why we in Wealden seemed to be frustrated at every turn to implement policies for more sustainable building along the lines of Merton etc. Was it just that the timing of our LDP and LDF was lousy or that we had more reticent Planning Inspectors.. or.. or.?? The answer from a senior chap in the Planning Inspectorate was that we should be getting more consistent messages from Planning Inspectors but also that national regulations were rising so fast (particularly with regard to carbon neutral new build by 2016 and 45% improvement in build efficiency by I think he said 2013) that most planning authorities should just keep in step with national requirements for build quality and use National Standards to describe them. A large element of his approach was around ‘taking the general population with us’. Note also however that one of the recommendations from the summit was that National standards needed to rise faster.
This Senior Planning inspector did however indicate that we as an authority might like to look into renewable power generation as clearly we would have developers doing significant development and needing to access different carbon neutral power sources. Very interesting.
Clearly the Wealden social housing team who are looking into CHP woodchip boilers for replacement boilers for some of our housing stock are on the right track.You can view all the presentations and the guide that the Assembly launched at the Summit aimed at planners, local councils, developers, regulators and service providers via this link:http://www.southeast-ra.gov.uk/southeastplan/key/climate_change.html
