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Climate Change
Introduction The world is facing a great challenge in tackling climate change. The Climate Change Act 2008 commits the UK to an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2050. This is a challenging target, made even more urgent by the latest evidence and climate forecasts. There is now a global commitment to tackle climate change: the Paris Climate Change Agreement (December 2018), with 196 signatory countries around the world, should commit all levels of the English planning system hierarchy (including Neighbourhoods) to take action on climate change. This was reinforced by the Glasgow Climate Change Conference in October-November 2021 at which Nations took a range of decisions in the collective effort to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. The NPPF, particularly sections 9 and 14 and the Blaby Core Strategy (especially Policy CS21) deals with measures for reducing global temperature rise and mitigating the forecasted effects of climate change. All of these documents give more weight to meeting the challenge of climate change than previous equivalents. They do this by requiring development plan documents to include policies which deliver a contribution to climate change mitigation and adaptation, both immediately and by taking account of the effects (on infrastructure and flood risk, particularly) of unavoidable environmental changes that are widely predicted to occur within the next few decades. In this context, at the most devolved level in English planning policymaking, neighbourhood plans provide an opportunity for communities to highlight the issue and to contribute towards meeting global targets. This Plan adds local detail to these global aspirations, but particularly to the national and local planning documents by including policies to deliver incremental mitigating action against the climate change challenge at a level at which the community of Glenfield can make meaningful contributions. This chapter brings together a set of policies which, robustly implemented, will provide a local and effective response to the climate change challenge. There are policies elsewhere within this Plan that contribute towards this ambition but bringing specific policies together in this chapter helps to focus attention on the issue and to highlight the measures taken as a whole. The chapter aims to be proactive and site-specific in policy areas of relevance to climate change.
Flood risk resilience Even if international cooperation and national strategies and policies eventually succeed in halting the human and industrial contributions towards climate change, the effects of recent and current warming on weather events will be likely to persist for decades. It is therefore desirable to plan for a mediumterm future, in which weather events will continue to become more extreme, by putting in place 48
