The world’s climate emergency has been obvious to some for many years with widespread scientific acceptance that we had a real climate problem from the Rio Summit in 1992 onwards.
It took some time for this to make much of an impact in Hounslow. Prominent councillors, even up to late 2010s, did not know the difference between Nitrogen Dioxide (air pollution) and Carbon Dioxide (a greenhouse gas causing climate change).
In the late 2010s in the UK, we started to have a much more robust dialogue about the dangers we faced with the rising profiles of Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and the rise of Climate Emergency motions in different tiers of government.
As part of this, the London Green Assembly member, Caroline Russell, proposed a London Assembly motion to urge the mayor to declare a climate emergency in late 2018.
This inspired the Hounslow Green Party to petition Hounslow Council to also declare a Climate Emergency. We started to organise to do this at the start of 2019. This involved an amount of activism to ensure that we had a suitably worded petition and that we had many signatures to this petition. We successfully did this and our petition was then eligible for time to be presented at a full council meeting in mid 2019.
Just prior to the full council meeting, the Labour group on the council proposed a motion to declare a Climate Emergency in Hounslow council. So the Climate Emergency petition and the Labour motion were presented at the same council meeting. The motion was passed and a Climate Emergency was thus declared for the borough of Hounslow.
This was the start of the work with the council writing a Climate Emergency Plan. The Hounslow Green Party engaged in the consultation for this plan, but even at the early stage, the plan was clearly getting watered down from what the Hounslow Green Party had envisaged as being the appropriate level of response to the emergency.
Subsequently Hounslow Council has published yearly reports on progress on initiatives to address the Climate Emergency. While there were many actions and activity, it was not clear that these actions were actually having much impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Hounslow or reducing the climate impacts of consumption of people in Hounslow. The reports indicated reductions in the region of 2% per year, when 10% reductions per year were initially called for.
In early 2025, it became clear to Hounslow Council that they were not going to meet their climate ambition as envisaged in 2019. In particular, an intermediate target for 2026 was abandoned and a target for zero emissions from social housing in 2030, originally included in 2019 was excluded.
This lack of progress in reducing emissions and the scope of ambition for 2030 is deeply disappointing for Hounslow Greens. As time has passed since 2019, the science has become clearer that there are even lower limits to the climate stress we should put on the planet, and time has passed with insufficient action. Both these reasons require more climate action than envisaged in 2019, rather than less.
Please help the Hounslow Green Party to continue campaigning on this.
Tony Firkins
30 May 2025