Southampton City Carbon Roadmap

Published in the run up to COP26

Next week, in Glasgow, world leaders will be attending the UN Climate Summit - Conference of Parties (COP26) to work towards accelerating climate change action. It is more important than ever that the decisions reached at these events translates into direct local action.

Ahead of COP26, Southampton City Council has published the Southampton City Carbon Roadmap. This roadmap reveals significant challenges ahead for the city if it is to meet targets established at previous COP meetings and adopted in UK policy, including reducing existing city emissions by more than 60% by 2025. There are cost-effective actions which can close the gap and offer significant benefits to our economy on the way. The roadmap also shows more challenging options will need to be pursued to reach net zero by 2050. To achieve this, we have proposed establishing a Climate Commission to enable citywide collaboration on how to tackle climate change. We attended the Business Leaders’ Summit and The Big Sustainability Expo on Thursday 28 October with the roadmap to start the conversation.

Councillor Daniel Fitzhenry, Leader of Southampton City Council said: “In our city we are committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050, creating new jobs and opportunities in a sustainable way. We have made great progress to date by reducing our carbon emissions by 50% since 2005 and The Big Sustainability Expo is about showcasing the viable options for businesses to take to help with our city’s carbon challenge and to be able to celebrate, learn and share in success as we move forward collaboratively to solve this together. Other parts of the UK are trying to achieve this with a Climate Commission, and we want to explore how this could work for Southampton by asking city stakeholders to offer their opinions.”

You can find out more and express your views about a Climate Commission for Southampton online on our Climate Change pages and watch our social media channels for more information in the coming weeks.