Speakers at WWF Cymru's conference
At a recent WWF Cymru conference in Cardiff, the Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development, John Griffiths AM, announced his personal commitment to propose new legislation to strengthen the Welsh Government’s duty on sustainable development and extend it to the public sector.
The Minister said: "The legislation we propose will help further our ambition for Wales to be a sustainable, one planet nation, and will build on the significant progress made by the last administration.
"The wording of the legislation will need careful attention, and we need people from across the sustainable development agenda to engage if we are to get it right.
"We are committed to taking forward the sustainable development agenda set out in One Wales: One Planet and the legislation we propose will be extremely important if we are to secure a better quality of life for the people of Wales now and in the future."
Anne Meikle. Head of WWF Cymru, welcomed the announcement. She said: “The message from our One Planet Wales conference was one of urgency to deal with the challenging agenda of reducing Wales’ carbon footprint and ensuring that sustainability is firmly established across all areas of government and the public sector. The speakers, which included world leaders in climate science and global resource trends, demonstrated that it is critical the Government delivers on this in the next five years.
“WWF Cymru welcomes the Minister’s commitment to creating a sustainable development bill for Wales as this would demonstrate leadership on sustainability.”
The Minister was speaking at WWF Cymru’s conference, which brought together leading experts such as climate scientist Sir John Houghton, Will Day, Peter Roderick, and Peter Davies, Commissioner for Sustainable Futures. The conference looked at the challenges of climate change and resource scarcity, and the opportunities to deliver sustainability in Wales.
WWF Cymru launched their report at the conference, Embedding the ‘One Planet’ Aspiration in Welsh Government 2011, which sets out how the Welsh Government can deliver a greener Wales. The report found that that the Welsh Government has made a ‘commendable start’ to tackling Wales ecological and carbon footprints through its One Wales: One Planet scheme. The One Wales agreement committed us to 3% pa reductions and the climate change strategy commits to the 40% by 2020 target but that the next five years are ‘crucial’ for new ministers to delivery on that aim.
In summary the report highlights –
• Welsh Government has a good overall vision and has made good progress on the short term actions required.
• However, there is a lack of consistent application to achieve the goal of a One Planet Wales, both across government and in its advice to the public sector.
• There is no plan, with key milestones, driving cross-government action in meeting the One Planet goals.
• There is a lack of assessment of the impact on carbon and ecological footprint of individual policies, programmes and expenditure and their cumulative impact. Therefore, it is impossible for Welsh government to know whether its plans and programmes are sufficient to achieve the goals.
Anne Meikle commented: “We need to bring all sections of society with us in making Wales a sustainable nation, not just the public sector. That is why we are urging the government to look again at their economic development plans to ensure they are focussed on supporting Welsh business to achieve a low carbon economy, and why we need to see energy efficient housing across the whole of Wales. The climate change challenge facing us is clear, and by taking action we can build a future where people and nature thrive.”
To read the full report, the summary and to view a short video of the Minister at WWF Cymru’s conference please visit www.wwf.org.uk/wales
The water footprint of specific food items for Wales