
The Environment Agency has published a report entitled: The State of the Urban Environment. The report shows that disadvantaged communities face more air pollution, flood risk and poor water quality. The impact of our changing climate will only serve to widen the inequalities gap in future. We need to work together to clean up, green up, and level up our environment:
- To ‘clean up’ we need to continue the fight against pollution, especially in the face of new pollutants and new pressures of population growth and the climate emergency;
- to ‘green up’ we need local authorities, developers and city planners to create a fairer proportion of green and blue spaces in cities – this could include creating local parks, improving urban waterways, planting trees around buildings, reducing flooding and providing other pockets of nature for people to enjoy;
- To ‘level up’ we need to understand the importance of environment inequalities in tackling social injustices. This means paying better attention to fixing environmental problems where poorer urban communities live – because those problems tend to be worse and more harmful.