Marlborough Council Tackles Next Stage Of Climate Action

Wednesday, 19 March 2025, 7:02 pm
Article: Maia Hart - Local Democracy Reporter

A new draft action plan for Marlborough on climate change has been created, more than two years after a climate-focused council subcommittee was formed.

The draft plan replaces one approved in 2020, and follows work by a cross-council working group of staff from the environmental policy team, assets and services, environmental science and others.

Marlborough District Council strategic planner Jamie Sigmund told the environment and planning committee on March 13 the new draft action plan looked at future climate threats and impacts, and how to become more resilient.

The action plan showed how the council responded to national direction, while also expressing regional leadership on climate and natural hazard issues specific to Marlborough, a report prepared by Sigmund for the meeting said.

It showed how the council had worked collaboratively to implement the action plan, while ensuring council decisions considered the impacts of climate change and natural hazards, now and for future generations, the report said.

There were more than 80 actions listed in the draft plan.

“We've got four years of action, targeted towards the climate change and resilience strategy in the future,” Sigmund said.

The first phase of the work, which had already started, would focus on information collection through the climate change working group.

“We've really prioritised which climate factors we need to understand a little bit better,” Sigmund said.

“You'll see sea level rise, flooding, rising groundwater, drought and wildfire, coastal erosion, all sit there as big climate change factors that we don't really know a lot about now.

“So we're collecting information and ways that we're doing that work is through analysis, it's through research, and it's through modelling.”

The next phase would be an impact assessment.

“Really it's about what does this start to mean for Marlborough, and we look at things like physical economic, societal and environmental impacts.”

Sigmund said they would need financial support to do this, so an application would be made to the 2025/26 annual plan.

From 2026, the work would start to look at “what and when”, and begin work on spatial planning, Sigmund said.

This would consider what climate change meant for the community from an infrastructure perspective and an environmental perspective, Sigmund said.

By 2027, which was a long-term plan adoption year, a proposed climate change and resilience strategy was to be put forward.

“We're actually figuring out where things financially need to fit, as well as operationally, and we're actually trying to set a bit of scene for where we're going for the next 100 years,” he said.

“When we're in that phase, we're still making sure that the community is at the heart of what we're trying to do as well, so it’s managing those financial expectations around what we can actually support, what we can actually deliver, trying to be realistic.”

He said the programme was being built by a lot of different people and they did not have any dedicated staff for the work.

“They juggle their own workloads, they have high workloads,” he said.

It meant there was a risk that they would not be properly resourced and he wanted to signal this early.

Marlborough Sounds ward councillor Barbara Faulls said it was important to keep a line of communication with the community so they understood what resources the council had, and what resources the community could contribute to the plan.

The committee approved the draft plan, which was subject to full council approval on April 3.

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