Sustainable tourism key to Cumbria’s new carbon impartial plan | Inexperienced journey

over Cumbria Local communities, businesses and grassroots organizations are being mobilized to identify ways they hope will help make the UK the first carbon neutral county. The county has set a goal of decarbonizing by 2037, a target originally backed by £ 2.5m national lottery funding awarded last August and for the next five years from this month onwards is supplied with drip food. Tourism will be a focus. next to housing, transport and agriculture.

“National lottery funding is an injection of adrenaline at the beginning of a long journey,” said Karen Mitchell, CEO of Cumbria Action for Sustainability (Cafes). Funding was secured through the Zero Carbon Cumbria Partnership, founded by Cafs in 2019 with help from the County Council. The partnership has 68 members who are charged with driving emission reductions, including the Lake District National Park Agency.

The UK government has one legal obligation to achieve net CO2 emissions from zero by 2050However, last month an additional target was announced to cut CO2 emissions by 68% by the end of this decade. British water companies launched last November an industry-wide commitment to net zero by 2030and a handful of cities including BristolGlasgow and Leeds have also committed to becoming carbon neutral by that date.

“We’re not ruling out that we can do it sooner,” said Cafs’ Mitchell. “This is a climate emergency and we should throw everything on it.”

Tarn Hows, Lake District National Park

Achieving decarbonization poses challenges for a county that was visited by 48 million people in 2019. Visitors contribute £ 3.13 billion to Cumbria’s economy and support 65,500 jobs. The impact of tourism on its carbon footprint is largely related to transport. The partnership was commissioned in February 2020 A carbon baseline for Cumbria, produced by Professor Mike Berners-Lee, a carbon footprint expert who also happens to live in Kendal.

The report found that Cumbrian visitors’ driving emissions are three times the UK average. Their emissions from restaurants and leisure activities are also higher than those of residents. They account for 49% of Cumbria’s greenhouse gas emissions based on consumption, although 36% of those emissions come from travel to and from Cumbria.

“Tourism brings with it significant challenges [to decarbonising]but it’s a big part of the local economy, ”said Chris Hodgson, owner of Haven Cottage B&B in Ambleside, who is now working towards gold certification with the Green Tourism Accreditation Body. He believes that carbon neutrality offers new opportunities for local tourism, but also that this does not have to mean reducing visitor numbers. “You just have to find ways in which people can come to visit more sustainably,” he said.

This could mean increasing public transport, the number of bike rentals and bike lanes, and exploring the pedestrian zone. Hodgson is a member of the Ambleside to Zero Action Group, which is working with Cafs on some of these challenges.

A walker near Watendlath, Borrowdale

The Lake District National Park Authority is about publish a new management plan This addresses traffic, one of the biggest causes of emissions in the world cultural heritage. In addition to highlighting the public transport available in the park, active travel days that can be carried out without a car are encouraged.

We’ll need every store and home in Cumbria to get on board with zero ambitions. Jonathan Kaye, Cedar Manor Hotel

“Three quarters of visitors are already walking while they are here,” said Emma Moody, a sustainable transport consultant for the National Park Authority. “It’s about getting them to do more and getting them to think about stepping out of the door of their abode instead of feeling like they have to jump in the car every morning.” Essentially, it’s about convincing visitors to experience the Land of Wordsworth the way the poet would have.

Charging stations for electric vehicles and electric buses are also on the agenda. The national park has already installed charging stations in many of its parking garages and is working with cafes and other partners to determine the demand hotspots and the potential volume that will be required to supply visitors in the future. Electric buses are a more complicated challenge, according to Moody, because the technology needed to make the trips required in the Lake District is missing. The region has many electricity-draining hills and relatively long distances between the charging points.

A low carbon food program is another area the Zero Carbon Cumbria Partnership seeks to bring tourists on board. Restaurants are encouraged to decarbonise their menus by lowering food miles while showing the impact of food choices by highlighting the carbon footprint of each item listed in the menu. The concept was borrowed from the Sticklebarn Pub in the National Trust in Langdale, which in 2019 was one of the first in the UK to list carbon calculations for its dishes.

Cedar Manor Hotel in Windermere that holds Green Tourism Gold Accreditation

A portion of the £ 2.5 million budget will be used to set up a ‘grow local, eat local’ program by encouraging Cumbrian ranchers to provide land for growing fruits, vegetables and grains. Currently, according to Cafs, local agriculture is geared towards lamb and dairy products, which leaves huge gaps for restaurant decarbonization.

“We’re going to need every business and apartment in Cumbria to come on board with zero ambitions,” said Jonathan Kaye of Cedar Manor in Windermere, one of Cumbria’s leading green hotels, which has already received Green Gold accreditation Tourism owns. “It took us more than 12 years to get where we are and we are nowhere near carbon neutral,” he said.

“The plans are not too ambitious, they are imperative, but it will take time and money to get there and it doesn’t make sense to work from 2035. Let’s be completely honest – we have to get on with it now.”