Climate emergency
Climate change is one of the most serious threats facing the world. We are committed to tackling this issue, and we declared a climate emergency in February 2019.
Leicester’s climate emergency strategy documents
Our Climate Emergency Strategy and Action Plan 2020 to 2023 has been produced following extensive public consultation and engagement. The comments and ideas from the public and extensive research by us has contributed to our new strategy and action plan to address climate emergency in Leicester. The strategy provides some high-level detail explaining what actions we need to take and presents a three-year strategy for addressing the emergency, along with a three-year action plan.
This strategy provides details of our response to climate emergency for the city. This document is currently being updated for accessibility.
This plan presents actions to be undertaken by us to implement our Climate Emergency Strategy 2020-2023, in response to the climate emergency we declared on 1 February 2019.
Please send us an email to marketing-operations@leicester.gov.uk if you have problems accessing or viewing the documents above.
What is the climate emergency?
Human activity produces greenhouses gases, particularly carbon dioxide. These gases cause climate change, raising the average temperature of the world. This is already causing extreme weather, sea level rise and damage to nature. If we don’t take urgent action these impacts will get much worse.
Declaring a climate emergency means we are prepared to play our part. Alongside other cities around the world, we are committed to taking the action needed to prevent climate change becoming much worse.
What are we doing about it?
We have been working to reduce the city’s carbon dioxide emissions for many years. You can read more about our work so far on our sustainability action plan page.
Over the last year we’ve worked on a range of projects including:
- Securing funding to converting the Park and Ride service at Birstall to use electric buses.
- Installing more solar PV panels on our buildings, including Euston Street Museum Store, to generate clean electricity.
- Investing over £340,000 to improve the energy efficiency of 269 homes of for vulnerable people through the Health Through Warmth scheme.
- Continuing to transform cycling and walking infrastructure in the city through the Connecting Leicester programme and setting up a bike hire scheme.
- Launching a second phase of the Green BELLE energy efficiency grant for local small and medium-sized businesses.
- Providing our award-winning eco-schools programme for thousands of children from over 100 schools across the city.
Leicester's Climate Emergency Conversation
We’ve recently finished running Leicester’s Climate Emergency Conversation, in which we asked for the public’s views on what we should do about the climate emergency. We’re really grateful for the hundreds of useful and interesting responses we received from people, groups and organisations across Leicester.
The conversation included two climate assemblies for city residents and young people, a conversation pack for local groups and organisations and an online discussion forum. We also received lots of direct responses by letter and email. Reports on the results of all of these conversation methods are available on this page.
We also carried out a consultation on our Consultation Hub, and a report on those results is available on the Consultation Hub website.
Contact us
If you have a question about our work on the climate emergency, please use the contact methods below to get in touch or keep up-to-date.
Send us an email: sustainability@leicester.gov.uk
Ring us: 0116 454 2110
Follow us on Twitter (@GreenerLeic)