Our commitment to reducing our carbon footprint
We’re committed to decarbonising our network and reducing our impact on climate change. Our work includes:
- Electrifying 172km of track.
- Introducing new rolling stock.
- Encouraging more sustainable modes of travel.
- Helping to build better, more accessible active travel routes with our partners.
Creating a climate-resilient network
We’re creating a climate-resilient network that is future-proofed for the years to come. We'll:
- Ensure climate change resilience is embedded in everything that we do.
- Assess climate change risks across all our networks and operations.
- Design and implement solutions that reduce the impacts from future climate change.
- Enable timely recovery from the impacts of adverse weather.
- Collaborate with external partners to reduce our vulnerability to cascading futures.
Climate resilience and adaptation plan
We’re developing our climate resilience and adaptation plan. This is guided by the requirement of the Welsh Government to:
“Ensure all TfW operations delivered on behalf of the Welsh Ministers are designed and delivered based upon the latest data on climate change risk and impacts and robust climate change adaptation plans are in place”.
- The plan is informed by
- The UK Climate Change Act (2008)
- Net Zero Wales (2021)
- Llwybr Newydd – The Wales Transport Strategy (2021)
- Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015
- The Active Travel (Wales) Act 2013
- along with various other policies including the Environment (Wales) Act.
Adverse weather
Adverse weather impacts our rail network every year with high winds and storms causing delays and cancellations. Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events on our network with storms getting more severe, winters being wetter and summers seeing hotter temperatures.
We’re preparing our infrastructure and operations for the effects of our changing climate so that we can minimise the disruption that adverse weather conditions have on our services.
Reducing our supply chain emissions
We’re working closely with our supply chain to help reduce emissions where possible.
Ongoing analysis of our supply chain emissions means that we’re establishing an accurate representation of the carbon footprint from the goods and services we buy. We’re then working to identify opportunities to reduce emissions as part of our decarbonisation targets.