West Sussex County Council has been awarded a Carbon Literate Organisation Bronze Award as part of its drive towards becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
The Carbon Literacy Project is a unique training scheme to help organisations and individual employees understand the carbon impacts of their everyday actions and help them make informed choices to address climate change and reduce carbon emissions.
The award means the county council has shown it is serious about maintaining a ‘low carbon culture’ by becoming one of just 52 carbon literate organisations in the UK and Ireland. The council is one of 10 local authorities to have achieve the award.
Some staff have undertaken Carbon Literacy training already and are now implementing carbon savings in their day to day work. The county council has plans to roll the training out to many more staff in the next few years to increase awareness of the issues and challenges and the action which is needed.
Deborah Urquhart, West Sussex County Council Cabinet Member for Environment and Climate Change, said: “Climate Change is one of the biggest challenges we will ever face in our county. Global warming is damaging lives, infrastructure, and our environment – the effects of which are already being felt by communities across West Sussex.
“One of the aims of our Climate Change Strategy, published last year, was to mitigate the effects of climate change by reducing carbon emissions and we’ve set an ambitious target to be carbon neutral by 2030.
“This accreditation and training will help us to achieve this by ensuring all of our services have an understanding of their carbon footprint, and what is needed to do to reduce it.”
The county council’s carbon emissions for 2020/21 were down 13 per cent compared to the previous year, largely due to the effects of Covid-19. In particular travel related carbon emissions went down by 60 per cent, representing a 5 per cent reduction in the total county council carbon footprint.
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