Climate change is a large-scale, long-term shift in the planet’s average temperature and weather caused by greenhouse gases stopping heat from the sun escaping the Earth’s atmosphere.

Greenhouse gases allow sunlight to pass through but prevent the heat from escaping back out into space - similar to glass in a greenhouse, warming the planet as a result. Although there are different types of greenhouse gases, the most prevalent one and the one driving global warming is carbon dioxide. 

Humans are increasing the amount of these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, intensive agricultural practice, producing waste and changing our landscapes. The warming effect that these gases produce is thereby increased.

Everyone will be impacted by a changing climate. The planet is generally getting hotter, but in some regions and during some seasons it can at times be temporarily cooler. There will be longer seasons in some areas, while others may experience concentrated bursts of extreme weather. Both our natural environment and human health and well-being are impacted by all of these changes.

In Worcestershire, we will have to adapt our way of life to deal with more extreme weather events, hotter and drier summers and wetter and warmer winters. Extreme weather events, like the floods that areas of Worcestershire suffer will only become more frequent if we do not work to combat climate change.

Carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, and the planet takes a while to respond. The longer that temperatures are high, the harder it is to reverse the damage. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, then by 2070, UK winters are forecasted to be between 0.6 and 3.8°C warmer and up to 39% wetter compared to our climate in 1990.

We understand that the County Council has a large part to play in reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and since 2009 to 2010 we have reduced the Council's own net GHG emissions by 41%.

Read the latest GHG emissions report:  

• Worcestershire County Council Greenhouse gas Emissions Report 2024 to 2025 (PDF)

Sustainability West Midlands (SWM) are an independent sustainability advisor for the leaders of the West Midlands. They produce an annual benchmarking report to assess progress on the 2030 Sustainability Roadmap. 

We engage with this process and the SWM benchmarking process helps the council to identify areas that we are doing well in, and also areas for further focus. We then use the positive feedback as a stimulus to further improve and build on our successes.

Read more:

• West Midlands Local Authority Sustainability Benchmark 2024

Climate Emergency UK assessed all UK councils on action taken towards net zero since 2019. They use a mixture of FOI requests and publicly available documents for the scoring process and some nationally available data.

• Worcestershire County Council Climate Action Scorecard | Council Climate Scorecards