A G McIver•5 years ago Areas that Stirling Council's Alive with Nature plan ought to, but doesn't fully address:
Incentivising and adequately supporting the transition to sustainable travel.
Promoting and supporting neighbourhood energy initiatives.
Supporting and enabling local food growing projects
Setting up and supporting recycling, repair and shared resources initiatives
Planting lots of trees and creating peatland is great, it pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere. But we need to reduce our emissions and consumption of the earth's resources as well. We also need to make our environment safer and more accessible and more self-sufficientItem 1. Sustainable travel will require disincentives for CO2 emitting transport modes and much, much more than the three active travel routes that have been proposed . Driving a car into Stirling city is quick, cheap and the most convenient way to get into the city. However, fossil-fuelled cars are much less energy efficient than public transport and are vastly less efficient than active travel (they use x20 - x40 more energy) . . . consequently they emit much more CO2. Despite the problems they cause, we actively incentivize and support car-use and CO2 emission by providing lots of connected-up roads flowing seamlessly from everyone's home to every location they might want to go to. No amount of trees, green leafy areas or active travel routes will negate this incentive. To limit the CO2 emissions, noise pollution, particulates and hazard that cars introduce into our environment, car use must become less attractive. Car travel in built-up areas should be made slow, cost more than other travel modes and become inconvenient and restricted. The cheapest and most rational way to implement this is to close lanes to cars and make roads that access the city one-way (as in Copenhagen). The lane that has been freed up can then be used for public transport (making it faster) and active travel (making it safer and more direct). For the city centre, Zones that prohibit car use altogether except for those with disabilities, should be implemented. 2 Energy Initiatives. Most of the area's domestic energy is powered by CO2 emitting gas or oil boilers. The council should identify neighbourhoods suitable for low-carbon energy schemes such as solar, ground-source heat pump, bio-mass, hydro, and wind and encourage and support their implementation.3 Food production and its transportation requires energy. Stirling is fortunate to be surrounded by large areas of fertile land however, most of the food residents consume comes from elsewhere, some of it from very far away.4 Recycling, repair and share. Energy is used in the sourcing, processing and distribution of all the materials we use. Repair rather than replacement and recycling of materials significantly reduces the need for that energy. Shared use of items such as machines and tools that are used intermittently or occasionally reduces the energy required in their production. This is already familiar in some contexts. We have libraries, we have the Next bike and e-bike schemes but shared use should be extended to other areas such as electric cars, garden equipment, tools etc.To Sum up:The CO2 that is driving climate change is largely split between transport, manufacturing, food production and heating. Stirling Council is putting a lot of its focus on absorbing CO2 by growing trees in what is a mopping up approach. Tree-planting is an effective short to mid-term strategy but cannot be ramped up indefinitely. Stirling Council really needs to look at reducing the excessive production of CO2, not just its subsequent removal.
