District Dispatch - 10 June 2025
This week marks Great Big Green Week, the UK's biggest ever celebration of community action to tackle climate change and to protect nature. From festivals to football matches, litter picks to letter writing, the week encourages as many people as possible to participate in projects that help to care for our environment.
We are so lucky to have so many amazing individuals and groups committed to making a difference, and we'd like to thank everyone who is involved in helping to tackle this issue. There are so many ways — big or small — that we can all do our bit.
One of the biggest ways that we can reduce our carbon footprint is to make our homes more energy efficient. Not only does this help our local environment, but it also makes our homes warmer and saves us money on energy bills. However, it's not always easy to know the best place to start. That's why, we've launched a free online tool called 'Energy Saving Plan Builder', which allows you to explore and customise the energy efficiency improvements that could be most appropriate for your home.
Simply visit 'Energy Saving Plan Builder' (opens new window), type in your postcode, and select your property. Once you've checked your property information is correct, the tool will create a summary of energy-efficient improvement ideas for your home. This isn't a substitute for professional advice but will give you estimated costs and savings of each measure and will start you on your home improvement journey.
You can customise the recommendations by setting different goals or budget options and by selecting different combinations of measures, to find out how these could reduce your bills and carbon footprint. By registering a free account, you can log back in to edit your plan or have it emailed to you.
You can find more advice about making your home more energy efficient,on our 'home energy efficiency' page. If you want to find out if you are eligible for any grants, the Citizens' Advice Energy Team can help — call 0800 145 6879 or you can visit the Citizens' Advice Energy web page (opens new window).
As a council we are committed to working with you to tackle climate change at a local level. Your feedback in our recent climate change consultation has helped us develop our new Climate Emergency Action Plan. This sets out the climate change projects that we will take forward and deliver between 2025 and 2030. The plan has been approved by the council's Environment Panel and will now be considered by Overview and Scrutiny Committee, before being presented to Cabinet and Full Council in July.
Since declaring a climate emergency in 2019 and adopting our first Climate Emergency Action Plan in 2020, the council has been working on a number of major projects to reduce its carbon footprint and to help people and organisations in the district to reduce their carbon footprints too.
Just a couple of examples include our incredibly successful Tree Chichester District scheme, which has seen nearly 65,000 trees planted across the district at over 210 sites, and our work to safeguard and enhance the district's seven strategic wildlife corridors. These corridors help create joined up habitats that allow different species to move and migrate for food and to breed in response to the changing climate.
A huge amount has been achieved but we are committed to doing much more and working with you to build on this. For more information on this, please visit the Climate Change section of our website.
If you haven't already, make sure you sign up to our climate change email newsletter to keep up-to-date on climate change projects and initiatives.
Best Wishes
Cllr Jonathan Brown
Deputy Leader and Cabinet Member for Environmental Strategy at Chichester District Council
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