Street lights should not be installed in rural areas where people could use a torch instead, an influential climate adviser said.

Lord Deben chairs the Climate Change Committee, which advises the government on emissions targets.

He also said councils should not allow housing developments where residents would commute by car.

Lord Deben said local authorities “must be looking at everything they do” to tackle climate change.

Giving evidence to Parliament’s Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, Lord Deben said: “The pressures to urbanise the countryside are largely antagonistic to dealing with climate change.”

He said street lighting in rural areas was unnecessary, adding: “When people move into the countryside you just have to say to them, ‘this is not the town, we do not have street lighting in this village, you have a torch, that’s just how we do it’.”

But Lord Deben, who was environment minister under John Major and Suffolk Coastal MP until 2010, said street lighting was important in towns where it can make people feel safer and more likely to walk.

It tells us: “Light pollution can have positive effects on wildlife by helping migratory birds find more food at night, a new study has shown, contrasting with previous research which has emphasised the negative effects of artificial light. A team from the University of Exeter studied how electrical lighting and gas flares affected the feeding habits of the common redshank (Tringa totanus) in the Forth estuary, eastern Scotland. The estuary’s salt marsh and mudflats are home to hundreds of thousands of birds that migrate from the Arctic each winter, but is also a heavily industrialised area where Grangemouth oil refinery and Longannet power station are located.

The study found that at night, birds in areas that were continuously illuminated foraged for longer, and were able to locate food by sight, rather than touch, compared with those under darker night skies. This meant they could stock up on more food to fuel their spring flight.”