What is Darlington Borough Council doing about Climate Change?

There have been target reduction levels set at international, national and local level.

International

In 1997 the Kyoto treaty was set up to consider what could be done to reduce Global warming. The treaty was established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) involving most world countries with the exception of America. The attempt to reach a new international settlement on greenhouse gas emissions to follow on from the Kyoto Protocol is seen as the single most important issue within the field of international climate change politics.

National

The UK Climate Change Act of 2008 is the world’s first long-term legally binding framework to tackle the dangers of climate change and sets a target of an 80% reduction in GHG by 2050. There are 2 purposes of the Act:

  1. to improve carbon management, helping the transition towards a low-carbon economy in the UK
  2. to demonstrate UK leadership internationally, signalling that we are committed to taking our share of responsibility for reducing global emissions in the context of developing negotiations on a post-2012 global agreement at Copenhagen in December 2009

We signed the EU Covenant of Mayors in 2008, committing to reduce carbon emissions in the whole Borough by at least 20% by 2020.

Local

Darlington's Climate Change Strategy [pdf document]

Tees Valley Climate Change Strategy [pdf document]

We work with businesses, schools and residents to encourage everyone to reduce the carbon they produce from heating homes and offices and using cars and buses.

In June 2010, we adopted our first Carbon Management Plan [pdf document, 1.9mb] This plan sets out our ambition for reducing our own carbon emissions by 25% over the next 4 years and outlines the actions needed to be undertaken to achieve this target.

Our carbon footprint has been calculated as part of the process to develop the Carbon Management Plan. This captures emissions from all of the Council operations including operational buildings (Town Hall, Dolphin Centre, Civic Theatre, Central House and many more), each of the schools, employee travel and fleet vehicles.

The carbon footprint provides us with a baseline to set reduction actions against and then monitor progress against the target over the next 4 years.

The Carbon Management Plan outlines physical measures that can be implemented to improve fuel use of the fleet vehicles, improve the energy efficiency of the Council’s operational buildings.