Activists seeking to combat climate change in a meeting held at Islington Town Hall on Monday evening to discuss potential strategies to reduce the main causes of this global problem. The group Fossil Free Islington is seeking to get the council to pull investments from fossil fuels.
The activists said the council had already divested to some extent but there was still work to be done. Labour councillor Claudia Webbe spoke of the importance of a cleaner environment and how pollution tends to “affect the poorer residents of Islington disproportionately”. Webbe discussed how progress could be made, suggesting that access to certain roads during peak hours should be restricted to low-emission vehicles and advocating the expansion of cycle routes. One attendee, a representative of Strata Enviro is working on placing air pollution controllers at select points in Islington to reduce the amount of air pollution in public spaces.
While there was talk of progress being made, the recent news on climate change cast a long shadow over the meeting; with the latest report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicating that the world has only 12 years to prevent a climate change ‘catastrophe’.
