Sheffield climate change protesters ‘drowning in promises’ call for faster council action

Groups including South Yorkshire Climate Alliance, Sheffield XR, Sheffield Climate Vigil and Sheffield Greenpeace gathered outside the Town Hall ahead of a full council meeting to tell councillors that progress has been too slow on the fourth anniversary of the city declaring a climate emergency.

Sheffield XR’s samba band performed and campaigners wore life jackets to symbolise that they were ‘drowning in promises”.’

Speakers included Dr Mike Tomson from Greener Practice, Green councillor Christine Gilligan, Richard Teasdale from Sheffield Greenpeace and Martin Mayer from Sheffield TUC.

Joan Miller from the climate alliance said: “We’ve been lobbying the council all year and in total we’ve been lobbying for 15 to 20 years. It’s the fourth anniversary of the climate emergency, followed by the nature emergency.

“They set up a Green Commission and a Green City Partnership, then they closed it. They said they would create teams of people taking action that we would participate in,” she added.

Frustrated

Joan said that partnerships could be created with organisations such as the two city universities, Voluntary Action Sheffield and trade unions. “We just think we could do more if we could do it together,” she added.

Activists are frustrated that the council is meant to be coming up with ‘route maps’ to becoming net zero carbon by 2030, outlining action in seven different areas. This is based on recommendations made in a report by consultants Arup but the work is not yet complete.

Joan said that the council is planning to upgrade homes in the Gleadless Valley. Work to combat the cost-of-living crisis and the climate emergency could take place at the same time, she said.

Local people could be trained up to work on making people’s homes warmer and more energy-efficient, for instance.

In his speech, Richard Teasdale said that Manchester is training up a retrofit workforce that will create 55,000 jobs by 2040 and North East Derbyshire is retrofitting council homes with heat pumps and insulation.

After the protest, Geoff Cox from South Yorkshire Climate Alliance presented a petition at the meeting, calling on the city council to accelerate its response.

‘Concrete actions’

He told councillors: “We have seen how the city responded to an emergency in the case of the Covid pandemic and that is the scale and pace of the response needed now.

“We fully recognise that the national government has failed to produce the policies, the infrastructure and the funding needed to allow Sheffield and other councils to properly play their part in the national climate emergency effort,”said Mr Cox. But, having said this, we also need to point out that other councils facing the same kind of financial difficulties have done more than Sheffield, and Sheffield can learn from them.”

He added: “The petition ends by calling on this city council to accelerate its response to the climate emergency – and that response needs to be in the form of concrete actions, not just promises.”

Coun Mazher Iqbal replied: “I absolutely agree that we must work together as a city to have a chance of rising to the scale and pace of the challenge and the wide range of mitigation and adaptation actions the council is taking.

“I acknowledge the frustration people feel about the slow rate of progress. We’re working to produce the decarbonisation route map. The first meeting took place just two weeks ago.”

He said that work is taking place cross-party but the council’s resources are stretched.

“There is support for taking climate action from a huge range of the city. We need to harness that enthusiasm and expertise,” added Coun Iqbal.

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