Climate change threat to countryside

THE new chairman of the Countryside Charity in South Oxfordshire says the countryside is facing the biggest threat in its history.

Dr Geoff Botting, from Woodcote, said the threat came from unsympathetic development and climate change.

He said: “South Oxfordshire has still got some great areas of countryside. We’ve got a couple of Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty with a big chunk of the Chilterns and part of the North Wessex Downs and it’s important to keep those.

“It’s a local facility that we care about and we get people coming out here from London to appreciate the landscape.

“It’s not only that, though. It seems to me that preserving this landscape is an essential step in holding back climate change.

“Climate change is the one issue that’s really existential — if we get climate change wrong, you can forget about the rest of it.”

Dr Botting, a member of Woodcote Parish Council, said the Oxfordshire 2050 plan contained nothing about climate change.

He continued: “If you build 100,000 houses there’s no real understanding of what that’s going to do to carbon.

“And if you lose the climate, you lose the countryside, you lose everything. It’s the equivalent of putting three new Oxfords in the county. You cannot develop without taking up green land — there’s no point pretending you can do this on brownfield sites.

“It would mean the loss of a lot of countryside and the loss of biodiversity. Just in building and running these houses you are creating an enormous amount of carbon dioxide.

“Behind all this is the assumption that if we’ve got all these houses it’s going to create a lot of employment and a lot of low-cost housing. That’s not going to happen. Developers aren’t going to build cheap houses, they’re going to build to the value houses already are.

“I think there’s less of a housing crisis and more of an equality of opportunity crisis. In some parts of the country you have rows and rows of empty houses but no jobs. I don’t think we should be encouraging the depopulation of cities. Cities are a very efficient use of land.

“We should be looking at creating more efficient cities rather than spreading houses more evenly over what is a diminishing volume of countryside.”

The Countryside Charity, also known as the Campaign to Protect Rural England, is a nationwide charity which campaigns for the protection of the countryside.

Dr Botting said it had a lot of consultations it needed to respond to.

He said: “There’s the South Oxfordshire Design Guide, which should say more about climate and doesn’t, and they’re starting to work on a new local plan for South Oxfordshire and Vale of White Horse which has to take climate as its first priority. There’s the Oxfordshire local plan and the connectivity plan across South Oxfordshire which doesn’t talk about sustainable transport. We’ll be trying to respond to that.

“One thing I think the charity does very well is to respond after the event but I think what we’ve really got to try to do is get these planners and local authorities to listen to us.

“It’s quite clear that you cannot rely on local authorities to do the right thing around the climate crisis, you’ve got to get a push through the community and the CPRE is one of many ways of doing that.

“It has to come from people who are concerned about the kind of world their children and grandchildren are inheriting. If you have any doubt about climate change just look at what’s going on in Australia, America or look at the floods in Asia, it’s happening.

“Just think about what sea level rise does to this country — large parts of the coast underwater and mass population movement. We’ve got to take action now, it’s almost too late.”

Dr Botting has lived in Woodcote for 45 years and has been a parish councillor for a decade.

He came to the University of Reading as an undergraduate in 1964 and fell in love with the surrounding countryside.

On retiring from a career in the IT industry in 2011, he become involved in developing Woodcote’s neighbourhood plan.