One Planet Cardiff is the Council’s plan to become a green and sustainable city over the next ten years and to become carbon neutral by 2030, in answer to the climate emergency. More can be read here – Cardiff residents called on to join the ‘One Planet’ challenge (cardiffnewsroom.co.uk)
Cardiff Youth Council (CYC) has 2 members who sit on the One Planet Cardiff Steering board which is chaired by the leader of the council, Cllr Huw Thomas. A draft strategy has been created and can be seen here – OPC vision document 2020 ENGLISH.pdf (oneplanetcardiff.co.uk).
In order to support the members of CYC that sit on the One Planet Cardiff board and to ensure the young people have the opportunity to shape the strategy, a working group was formed by other members from CYC. This group undertook an exercise where they discussed what they believed are the important issues to young people and set out the topics and challenges into a table which was then cross referenced to the draft strategy (see above). They identified a number of things that were not in the draft strategy and the primary one, according to the group, was that there is nothing in the current draft strategy about education. The young people felt it was essential that procedures were put in place that ensured that children, young people, adults and businesses all received education around the topic of carbon reduction and climate change, especially what they can do to mitigate it.
In addition to looking at the strategy from a young person’s perspective and identifying what changes they believe need to be put in place to make Cardiff a carbon neutral city by 2030, the group also ran a consultation with other young people across Cardiff, in the form of a questionnaire on Microsoft Forms. The questionnaire was sent out to CYC members, youth groups, local schools, EOTAS provision and shared with the Council’s Education Department in order to garner a wide range of a responses. The group have created a report of the work they have undertaken and the report can be downloaded below.