Climate campaigners will be outside Huddersfield Town Hall tonight (Wednesday) ahead of a full meeting of Kirklees Council.

The campaigners will be calling on the council to respond to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on the climate crisis in February 2022 which warns that the world is facing devastating and cascading risks from the worsening climate crisis.

The IPCC report says: “The scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human wellbeing and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a liveable future.”

Kirklees Council recently scored 0% on the Climate Emergency UK climate scorecards because it does not yet have a climate action plan.

In response to the IPCC report Huddersfield Friends of the Earth and other local environmental campaigners are demanding that Kirklees Council shows strong climate leadership.

In particular they are calling for the rapid creation and implementation of a Climate Action Plan and the cancellation of new road expansion schemes, such as the A629 Halifax Road (phase 5).

Save the Trees campaigners in Halifax Road

Chayley Collis, of Huddersfield Friends of the Earth, said: “Despite calling a Climate Emergency three years ago Kirklees Council is not in ‘emergency mode’ and is failing to respond to the warnings of the IPCC’s global climate scientists.

“With the third anniversary of the Kirklees climate emergency declaration, we are asking what has actually been achieved as the climate clock has ticked down through those three years.

“How will it be possible to tackle the climate crisis and achieve the enormous scale of annual emissions reductions required in the 2020s if Kirklees takes this long just to prepare its Climate Action Plan?

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“Increasing highway capacity around the district is also likely to encourage more road emissions in the 2020s.

“Cutting down trees as part of these road expansion plans adds insult to injury. The council’s policies should be supporting our response to climate emergency, not undermining it.”

The council meeting starts at 5.30pm.