Our vision is for Shropshire Council to become carbon net-neutral by 2030 and assist in the ambition for Shropshire as a whole to become carbon net-neutral in the same year.

We declared a climate emergency in May 2019 and agreed a strategy framework in December 2019, which established the objective of net-zero corporate carbon performance by 2030.

In December 2020 a new Corporate Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan was adopted. The documents outline a strategy to reduce our corporate carbon footprint and promote adaptation measures to increase the resilience of our services.

Measures to reduce our carbon footprint and adapt service delivery to address the impacts of extreme weather events will significantly reduce financial risk and generate very real savings to the public finances in the medium to long term, as well as delivering on our corporate responsibilities to the environment and our communities. Placing the initial focus on our corporate performance allows us to lead by example, using our direct and indirect influence to foster a positive response to the challenge of the climate emergency from other public and private sector organisations.

Preparation of the strategy has drawn on both community engagement and in-house expertise, initially through our quarterly Sustainability Forum and latterly via the Shropshire Climate Action Partnership and our ‘Climate Officers Group’. The strategy summarises the best available information about our current direct and indirect carbon emissions, and identifies the scale of reductions and residual offsetting which will be required to reach our objective of net-zero performance by 2030. The action plan element of the document reflects the findings of a community engagement workshop held in February 2020, and identifies a range of potential actions and a pipeline of specific projects to help deliver progress.

This is a fast-moving area of work, and information about climate change, carbon performance and management technologies are changing all the time. We're treating the strategy as a ‘live’ document, and invite comments and suggestions for amendments which can be taken into account as part of an annual monitoring and review process.

The adopted strategy and action plan are linked on the right hand side of this page.

The following sections of this website also relate to climate change:

• Planning policy
• Environment
• Natural Shropshire
• Drainage and flooding