Wellington Regional Council position on climate change

Below is some info from paul bruce about a response to climate change from the wellington regional council and it sounds like now would be a good time to make our voices heard in the council. Anyone have energy for this?

cheers,
Joshua

http://gw.govt.nz/assets/council-reports/Report_PDFs/2009_634_2_Att...

Greater Wellington Regional Council has put together a document, with input from some local Councils and community groups. This has been passed to District and City Councils, and will be considered for approval by Greater Wellington 11th November next. You may remember that we held a "Pathways to Resilient Communities Forum" at Te Papa in March earlier this year bringing together 26 Councillors and Mayors, Transition Towns and other community groups. This was useful in widening the debate and drawing medium and long term vulnerabilities to the attention of local body politicians.... (see http://www.resilientpathways.org.nz, http://intersect.ning.com/group/resilientcommunities) and this report now calls for a bi-yearly local government Councillor forum.

I am pushing that it include a one day forum with community groups, in addition and proceeding the regional local government forum already included. This will provide further opportunities for discussion on progress with the Plan, and should address the implications of new climate change information. This is meant to be a collaborative approach to climate change, while also allowing for individual local approaches.

The Plan proposes
• principles to guide climate change decision-making in the region
• emissions goals for the region expressed as percentage reductions to be achieved through the combined efforts of central and local government, business and the community
• key objectives and measures which will provide proxy measures for the success of local government’s emissions reduction efforts in the region. These have been developed with ease of measurement and minimal additional effort in mind.
• early actions relating to adaptation which will lay the groundwork for future local authority responses to climate change
• longer term strategic actions which will assist with the reduction of emissions and with planning adaptive responses
• a regular climate change forum for all politicians in the region, to discuss latest climate change information and address its implications for the region

I would welcome your feedback...

Paul Bruce
Paul.Bruce@greens.org.nz
Tel 021 02719370, 04 972 8699

"A new economic world requires new institutions and new thinking. These will take a while to emerge. We can lay the conceptual groundwork now (as the ecological economists and localists have been doing for some time), but implementation will require cool heads and collective effort..."
- Richard Heinberg