Beverley’s beautiful Westwood area is a huge, open space for locals and visitors to take advantage of and is a beautiful spot during the summer. And now, residents want to use the space for the good of the planet.
Petitioning on Change.org, local residents are now campaigning to plant more trees in the area – a move that could help with the current climate change crisis and help as a ‘flood defence’.
Paul Thomas, the man behind the campaign, states on the petition that planting more trees in the space would ‘help the UK meet the Paris target to keep global warming below 2°c, set out in the Paris Agreement in Article 2 Subsection A’. He also goes on to say that the UK signed the agreement back in 2015 and ‘so far the government and councils have done nothing to meet the agreement’.
The Paris agreement is an agreement with the UN, which aims to tackle climate change and keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius this century. The agreement means that all countries involved must use their best efforts to help, through “nationally determined contributions” and also requires involved parties to report regularly on their current emissions and efforts to reduce these.
So far, the petition has received 213 signatures of its target of 500, and is continuing to grow as it circulates the community.
Tree planting is reportedly a great, cost-effective effort in helping combat the effects of climate change, with research from ETH Zürich university showing they have the ability to capture a huge amount of carbon dioxide.
[Featured image: Beverley Westwood IMG 1338/Paul Lakin/web.archive.org/licensed under CC BY 3.0]
