Group Set Up & Activities

Earlier this year, following a discussion about climate change at Thursley Parish Council, a working group of three Councillors and four invited parishioners was formed.  The group’s aim is to develop ideas and initiatives to help Thursley parish to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and become greener, more biodiverse and more sustainable.  We will be launching this online on Thursley Parish Council website together with individual sheets which summarise the current status of the initiatives.  Some are ready to go right now – we will need your support – and others require some more work before we are ready to launch them. 

I’m sure you’ll have heard about our Government and Surrey County Council’s commitment to be “net-zero” for greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and also that Waverley Borough Council is seeking to achieve a similar target by 2030.  Achieving these targets will require a reduction of 89% of greenhouse gas emissions (from 2017 basis) for our country. 

As a community, we will all need to make changes to our lifestyle to achieve these targets.  It’s also generally accepted that our lifestyle is unsustainable and we need to make changes to reduce our consumption of the world’s resources and support biodiversity.   Some of these will require technological developments to be implemented, but there are many changes we can easily make to reduce our energy consumption or shift to more sustainable sources.  Although these challenges may seem daunting and that we are just a small part in a global problem, every step we take towards eco-friendly living is one that helps us, our community, our country and the world.

The group has been working on a number of initiatives which are summarised below:

Improving Recycling opportunities in the village;

Thursley Tree Planting Initiative;

Thursley Solar PV Initiative;

Looking at Transport options;

Parish Magazine/web Articles and (possibly) Community “experts”.

We plan to write a regular article for the Parish Magazine (this is the first one) and to post these on the Thursley PC website which will go into more detail on the various themes of: energy reduction, low carbon energy use and generation, carbon offsetting, reducing transport/travel emissions, reduce-reuse-recycle, food and drink, water, household chemicals, biodiversity.  Each of these articles will give you ideas of how to easily make changes to your lifestyle.  We are also hoping to provide a resource of local “experts” to help implement the changes but are still looking for suitable volunteers.

If this has inspired you, or you want to support our activities, please contact jdswift.thursleypc@btinternet.com.