Following pressure from Green Party councillors, the West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) has formally announced a climate emergency, calling for urgent action in the region to tackle climate breakdown.
Earlier this month, all of the Green Party councillors from across the council areas covered by WYCA signed a letter (included below) demanding more action by the authority.
Councillor Andrew Cooper from Kirklees Council has said
“My colleagues in here in Kirklees, Bradford, York, and Leeds have all been instrumental in encouraging their local councils to take bold action to reduce their contribution to the climate crisis and it’s great that the West Yorkshire Combined Authority has also listened to our call.
“We want to see meaningful change in our region so we can start doing more to avoid climate catastrophe.
“We are especially interested to see how WYCA can justify spending the hundreds of millions of pounds on road building schemes such as the Leeds-Bradford Airport Link Road or the newly proposed South East Bradford Access Road through the Tong Valley.
“Currently we have not been shown any meaningful assessment of the environmental impact of the schemes the authority is funding and we want WYCA to go back and review the environmental impact of these schemes
“My colleagues and I say, and the state of the planet demands, that a full climate impact assessment should be produced for each project before decisions are made to proceed with them or not.”
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that we have only 11 years to bring our greenhouse gas emissions down to levels that will keep the global temperature rise to a survivable 1.5%.