Shropshire Climate Action
Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin's
emissions
We often get questions about whether the county is making progress on reducing its Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. While GHG savings can be measured for say a household or an organisation (using carbon footprinting tools), and there are some general estimates available of the impacts of particular actions (e.g. not driving a petrol car) based on academic research, there is no easy way of calculating a figure for the county bottom-up.
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However, we can use the data provided by the Department for Energy and Net Zero which are calculated top-down, with Shropshire and Telford & Wrekin apportioned a percentage of the UK emissions based on its geography and characteristics.
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Below is a progress chart for Green House Gas emissions for Shropshire, Telford& Wrekin. To keep within our carbon budget and to around 1.5C of warming, we need to get to an average of approx
2.5t CO2 emissions per individual in the UK by 2030 so are not currently on track to do that.​​​​
Shropshire's emissions
According to the Impact community carbon calculator*, Shropshire’s residents are responsible for emitting 3,467,883 tonnes of CO2e per annum.** This pie chart shows the relative impact of the Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHGs) across the sectors represented in the South Shropshire Climate Action “Next Steps” report.
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* The Impact tool has been developed by the Centre for Sustainable Energy and Exeter University as a data visualisation tool which allows you to look at household emissions within geographical boundaries (parishes, local authority areas, etc).
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​**(CO2e stands for Carbon Dioxide equivalent; the warming impacts of any GHG can be measured relative to that of a molecule of CO2, the standard unit of measurement).
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A note on data
There are many carbon calculators and each measures greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in different ways. Comparing the results from different calculators can lead to misunderstandings or false conclusions. Please read this even if, or especially if, data is not your thing.
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When South Shropshire Climate Action wrote the Next Steps report transport’s contribution to Shropshire’s GHGs was assessed at 37%. This was based on the most accurate published data at the time from the UK government, but the government data did not include any assessment for the two most significant agricultural GHGs, methane and nitrous oxide. In more recent published data sets these two GHGs have been added, and this changes the percentage contributions from other sources, such as transport. Thus, the Impact Calculator assesses agriculture as 27% and transport as 32%.
It is important to understand that the apparent reduction in transport’s contribution to Shropshire’s GHG emissions is not because there has been a decrease in transport emissions, but reflects that agricultural emissions were significantly under stated in older published datasets. The two most significant sectors for GHGs in Shropshire remain as agriculture and transport, and both need to be addressed if we are to reach net zero.