The Community Scrutiny Committee of Shropshire Council were told that climate change means a 27% increase in flooding by 2050, overwhelming defences for Shrewsbury and Ludlow amongst other towns.

Green Councillor Duncan Kerr told the Committee that whilst the Council could and should be more to defend properties and alert communities we could never hope to alleviate the problem until Shropshire took climate change seriously and reduced its own emissions of carbon.

He said:

"If we don’t act now we will see hundreds of properties subject to such frequent flooding that they will become unihabitable. The costs of defending this land would break the Council and even if we built high walls we would simply push the problem down-stream. There are many measures to mitigate climate change, for example having a household waste minimisation strategy as I proposed in May and the Conservative administration completely rejected. The National Infrastructure Commission has recently reported that rising household waste rates could threaten to undo all the other good work we are doing as a nation to reduce emissions. The embedded carbon needed to build the relief road or dual the A5 to Oswestry are more steps in precisely the wrong direction. What will our children say?”

An article about the National Infrastructure Report can be found here.