Monthly Archives: January 2020

New Westminster Carbon Offset Fund Guidance

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Admin

January 2020: Since October 2016, Westminster City Council has been securing for carbon offsetting from new development through planning obligations to ensure that new development is acceptable in planning terms by fully addressing its associated carbon footprint.
In September 2019, Westminster City Council declared a Climate Emergency and set ambitious targets for the city to be carbon neutral by 2040. Carbon offset funds provide an important resource for helping to support Westminster’s carbon neutral ambitions. This guidance provides some background to Westminster’s carbon offset fund, outlining the process for collecting carbon offset funds and the City Council’s criteria for allocating funds to local carbon saving projects, in accordance with Greater London Authority (GLA) guidance and Westminster’s carbon reduction targets.

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Ealing Southall Climate Crisis Summit

Posted on January 7, 2020 by Admin

January 2020: Good to see Ealing Southall MP Vivendra Sharma is organising a climate change summit on the afternoon of Saturday 18 January at the Dominion Centre, Southhall. The summit will be “discussing why we need fundamental change and how we will achieve it. Across panel discussions, group activities and Q&A sessions, we will also be hearing from those climate campaigners who are leading the fight against the ecological disaster facing us.”

Ealing Council is one of the 26 London local authorities (to date) to declare a ‘Climate Emergency’ – which was agreed at the Council’s April 2019 meeting. A July 2019 council paper sets out some immediate priorities following the signing of the declaration (appendices to which are posted here), and further actions are also set out in a Cabinet meeting paper of October 2019).

Local community group, Ealing Transition, has been hugely successful by working with Schools Energy Co-op in deploying a number of solar projects on schools across the borough, details of which are set out in a presentation provided to Community Energy London in September 2019.

Full details and registration details of the Ealing Climate Crisis Summit event are on the following Eventbrite page.

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Waltham Forest the first Council to install the first permanent City Trees in London

Posted on January 6, 2020 by Admin

31 December 2019: Interesting story issued on the last day of the year from Waltham Forest Borough announcing that it is to be the first council to have “permanently installed two City Trees in Leytonstone. CityTree is a free-standing outdoor air cleaning system that uses the power of biotechnology to emulate the pollution-reduction benefits of 275 urban trees.”

The press release goes on to provide some further detail on the CityTree, which is apparently a “… self-sustaining structure that contains a water tank, with automatic irrigation and plant sensors all powered by on board solar panels and batteries. The different types of moss bind environmental toxins such as particulate matter and nitrogen oxides while at the same time producing oxygen. Cutting-edge integrated technology can deliver comprehensive information on air filtering performance and status as well as environmental data on the CityTree’s surroundings.”

There’s no image of what this technology look’s like on the news release – but Westminster Council ran a pilot earlier this year – which includes a picture of what the CityTree looks like – which can be seen on AirQuality News’s website here, which also states the “technology has previously been trialled in Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam and Oslo. It is being supplied in the UK by green technology firm Evergen Systems.”

A blog on the Evergen website sets out some pretty remarkable results of 2018 field tests undertaken in Delhi, where it has also been installed. There’s not much detailed data at the moment that I can find out on the CityTree, but I’m sure the recently appointed Waltham Forest Climate Emergency Committee, which I sit on, will be examining CityTree at a forthcoming meeting.

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