The draft London Environment Strategy is an important document to shape policy in the built environment.
Objectives of the consultation
The draft Environment Strategy aims to bring together approaches to respond to a host of environmental issues which affect the health and wellbeing of Londoners, including air pollution, noise, green spaces, and climate change. It aims to ensure that London is greener, cleaner and ready for the future.
The draft Environment Strategy is divided into the following areas, covering a wide range of issues where built environment professionals can and should have a significant impact:
- Air quality
- Green infrastructure
- Waste
- Climate change mitigation and energy
- Adapting to climate change
- Ambient noise
- Transition to a low carbon circular economy.
The draft Environment Strategy includes a number of targets for 2050, including:
- “London will be a zero carbon city – with a zero emission transport network and zero carbon buildings”
- “London and Londoners will be resilient to severe weather and longer-term climate change impacts, such as flooding, heat risk and drought”
- “London will have the best air quality of any major world city, going beyond the legal requirements to protect human health and minimise inequalities”.
The draft Environment Strategy also proposes policies in order to help achieve these targets, including:
- Continuing to tighten requirements on carbon emissions from new buildings, and drive carbon reductions on existing buildings
- Considering policies that encourage developers to carry out overheating modelling against extreme weather scenarios
- Implementing new, tighter air quality targets, meeting World Health Organisation (WHO) health-based guidelines by 2030 to transition to a zero emission London.
The draft Environment Strategy consultation closed on 17 November 2017.
Supporting papers
To download the consultation document, please follow the link below:
CIBSE response
CIBSE broadly welcomes and agrees with the targets and proposals of the draft London Environment Strategy, subject to the caveats and comments detailed in the responses to the individual chapters.
CIBSE is also very supportive of the approach including: seeking solutions that bring co-benefits between various environmental and health and wellbeing issues; aiming to develop a strategy that is evidence-based; seeking collaboration between the public and private sectors and between local and national actors; and implementing pilots for innovative or challenging proposals, with leadership by example from the public sector.
To read the full CIBSE response please follow the link below.