Get Serious about CO2 Leicester

This campaign began in 2009 and continues through our work with Leicester City Council. The 'Big Ask' campaign demanded legislation which would place a legal duty on the Government to achieve big cuts in the UK's greenhouse gas emissions. This was successful and the Climate Change Act was born. Following this success, Friends of the Earth ran a campaign to ask local authorities to 'Get Serious about CO2'. We called for them to agree a target of achieving a 40% cut in their area's CO2 emissions by 2020 and to adopt the necessary policies to achieve this.

Leicester City Council have already adopted an ambitious target to reduce their CO2 emissions by 50% by 2025, but in many areas not enough is being done to meet this. A target without the necessary action is useless.

We drew up a 'Green Manifesto' which set out more detailed proposals for policies that we would like to see adopted locally, which included asking the Council to help people save energy at home and make it easier to install renewable energy, make our streets safer for cycling and introduce bus tickets that can be used on buses run by any company. We collected signatures in a petition in support of our Green Manifesto and submitted it to Leicester City Council in 2010.

Since then, we have become more involved in responding to Council consultations for developing new policies. We contributed to the consultation for the new Local Transport Plan in early 2011 and we were pleased to see that the policy the City Council eventually adopted was signficantly greener than their first proposals. We responded to the City Council's 'Greener Leicester' consultation during the Spring and Summer of 2012 which led to the creation of a Low Carbon Transition Plan for Leicester. Most recently, we have responded to the City Council's 'Connecting Leicester' consultation.