London's recovery starts with you

Need to plant more large trees in the city within the congested zone. 

Place large tree planters or street gardens in the middle of the street to separate the lane. 

Make a policy or initiatives to encourage building owners to place larger tree planters or gardens on the roof of every buildings in the city. 

Make a policy to encourage, help and support companies or organisations to build garden walls outside their premises and buildings. 

One of the key improvement to London would be to shift transportation of goods from cars and vans (and mopeds) to cargo bikes. This would create many jobs in London and elsewhere and also improve road safety and reduce air and noise pollution.

In urban areas on average 51% of all motorised trips - associated with the transport of goods - could be shifted from car to the bicycle or cargo bicycle. About 1/3 of these motorised trips that could be shifted can be attributed to commercial transport, whereas private logistics (e.g. shopping and/or leisure transport) accounts for 2/3.

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/82815461.pdf

Increase requirements for the energy efficiency rating in households/assist in the transformation. Old buildings with single glazed, poorly fitted windows should be fixed.

To incentivise active transit and public transit, more dramatic financial incentives may help; for example, progressive carbon taxing / cordon charges / tolls.

Can we measure the air quality in the London tube train cars and stations? It feels like a festering ground. In the mid-term, normalising mask-wearing seems necessary and can help.

Cycling infrastructure is critical. I'd like to see a plan detailing the length/coverage of bike lanes, and their design-- too often they are simply a couple of meters of lines drawn on the road, eventually disappearing under parked cars. Let's make sure we are serious about bike lanes.

Public transport is a disaster and is unsafe for women at night! I do not wish to use it ever again. I want to be able to drive my electric car to work in central and don't have to deal with ridiculous fees! I am not rich so I can't afford to buy my own place anywhere close to work, not even in London and with working shifts ending late in the evening car is the only safe way of transport for me. Also, make living in London affordable and scrap all the nonsense about share to buy which is more expensive than buying your own place, which you wouldn't own even if you bought 100% of the property (having to rent the land), people on normal salaries. 

Critical to creating a green city is ensuring people live within cycling/walking distance to work. Currently, there are many empty apartments near my workplace at Bankside as wealthy owners have vacated to their other homes during the pandemic. We, the people who care for and live in London, are pushed to the outer zones by horrendous rents with no hope of owning a place. We are in locations which make it intimidating to cycle to work. I'm sure it's been mentioned, but cycling behind polluting buses, taxis, motorbikes etc is terribly offputting, not to mention all the drivers who don't see us!

Invest in community gardens. They bring so much to London with their community-oriented activities and education initiatives based around their amazing self-sustaining environmental initiatives. 

Please please please tax single-use plastic and discount fruit/veg without packaging. 

Recycling education needs improving in this city! Too many people don't know what can and can't be recycled. 

Pedestrianise more streets and significantly expand the cycle network, which will help reduce emissions and make highstreets "destinations" people want to visit rather than avoid.

A better cycling 'infrastructure' will encourage more people to cycle to work and keep fit, London is still too dangerous to cycle for most.

Increase the number of charging points for electric cars, again the infrastructure is holding London back and preventing people buying more green vehicles.

Laat-mile delivery consolidation will be vital to achieving this, there are too many delivery vans driving round, increasing congestion and pollution. Deliveries to homes and businesses should be by zero emission vehicle, or preferably cargo bike.

Improve cycling support. Be bold. Be drastic. Do it fast, the population will support it. We don't want our kids to be suffocated by pollution any more! Build on the strong community networks created in our amazing response to Covid to involve communities across the city in well-funded re-wilding programs. Fund a network of community climate spokespeople to have conversations with everyone. Listen to their climate concerns, connect and engage us and make us feel connected to local, borough and city-wide community of people making changes to improve our climate. Fund engaging community events. Work with platforms like nextdoor to make robust community connections.

Be bold, and be the city that sets records on taking action to tackle the climate crisis head-on, and make us proud to be Londoners :)

Firstly, 2030 and 2050 are both goals too far in the future. The climate emergency is happening right now - not in the next 10-30 years. There is a strong opportunity with the current recession to push for green growth and get unemployed people into green jobs. 
 

Secondly, as has already been pointed out, SUVs are a cancer to the streets of London. There is absolutely no need for having a car of that size in the city. 
 

Thirdly, if you want to encourage people to take public transport then the cost of travel should not be going up with inflation come January when many people are seeing real incomes decline. Especially when the service is gradually getting worse on top of this (to be fair, TFL is good - but most of the suppliers who feed into London are not). 

Fourth, parking should be made more difficult across the capital and for residents only. In Southwark you can drive in and park virtually anywhere as there are not many resident only roads. 
 

Fifth, London is a horrible city to cycle in. If you don't live near any of the superhighways then it is largely dangerous which puts off many people. The roads are extremely congested with cars, which seems to have gotten worse post-lockdown. Every main road in London should feature a cycle lane, with all A roads having a superhighway.  

How does a green new deal involve the Silvertown Tunnel? Which plans to put more HGVs in Greenwich and Newham’s already criminally polluted roads. How does this fit with Sadie Khan’s promises for clean air in London. 

We need real action not just lip service. We need huge airs of the city to be pedestrianised. We need proper law to hold cooperations accountable. Back the CEE bill, if you truly care about London. 

It would be great if recycling across the city included a broader range of materials and was consistent in all boroughs and types of housing, especially in public places to improve rates of recycling and reduce waste. 

If anything, 2030 and 2050 are not sufficient goals. We need actions with immediate change in mind. We need laws that shut down big polluters, and charge them for the harm they have caused the public. 

I hope that many of us have read the article in yesterday's Observer,  "The Observer view of the climate crisis facing Earth". If anybody missed it I would recommend it highly as they point out brilliantly how severe the climate crisis is and how urgent it is to act to try to avert the worst of it.

If we want to try to deal with this crisis we urgently need a green new deal and this needs to operate at all levels from individuals limiting their consumption and practicing a sustainable lifestyle to the city adapting to a green system. In this context, we need to move away from any ideas of GDP and give full consideration to the welfare of the people, thus the jobs in the green economy need to be local and not dependent on foreign banks or multinational corporations. London should be able to produce much of its own food and energy and many other commodities to meet our more modest demands and provide jobs for its people doing this.  We need to be aware that we can lead happy and fulfilling lives while consuming far less than we do currently and thus build a sustainable community with hope for the future.

As a Londoner, nothing is more important to me than this - air quality and improved urban ecology.

Living roofs (much better than sedum) with integrated pv should be mandatory for all new buildings without very good reason not to.

More effort should be made to plant large and diverse tree species in our streets and public realm.

Huge , flashy cars, SUVs and 4x4s are a cancer. There should be much greater taxes on the most polluting cars with the biggest engines. Unfortunately they seem to be the most fashionable thing to drive but they are the least progressive.

Keep improving cycle infrastructure and steadily make it more and more unpleasant to drive. That's what Copenhagen did 50 years ago...