MCFly 36- Bury Council statement

A MCFly reader received this email from Bury Council, which we publish un-edited.

Like Harrogate, Bury Council is very serious about reducing carbon emissions and in May 2009 we were accepted onto the Carbon Trust’s Local Authority Carbon Management Plan.
Over a ten months period we will now work closely with the Carbon Trust within their tried and tested framework to produce an Action Plan and to integrate carbon management firmly into the processes and procedures of the council.

We have set ourselves an aspirational target of a 35% reduction in our carbon emissions in the next 5 years and our plan will set out the measures that will be taken towards this target and will progress carbon reduction at the council into the future. The idea of setting such a demanding target is that this will push us to identify as many carbon saving actions as we can and to continue to look for opportunities as we progress.

The Carbon Trust have a wealth of experience and expertise in relation to carbon reduction and under the Carbon Management Programme they will provide technical and change management support and guidance to help us to realise practical carbon emissions savings. The main focus is to reduce emissions under the council’s control such as buildings, street lighting, and business transport.

So far we have established our 2008/09 baseline which basically describes where our carbon emissions come from. We now know that most of our emissions come from our buildings and that just under half of the buildings emissions come from our schools.

We are now in the processs of identifying the actions for our Action Plan. These will include actions that are already being implemented and proposed alongside new projects from a wide area of the council operation including : - energy efficiency of our buildings, energy efficiency of our schools, streetlighting, transport measures, awareness raising campaigns, procurement and wider opportunities for combined heat and power and district heating.

We will have our Action Plan completed by April 2010 and then from then we will continue to implement the measure identified and carefully monitor progress.

The Government have recently introduced National Indicator 185 which requires the council to report on percentage carbon dioxide reductions from its own operations each year. Bury Council have designated this indicator in our Local Area Agreement which means that if we don't reduce our carbon emissions we recieve less money in our performance reward grant

Chris Horth
Unit Manager - Environment