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My Climate Challenge
We welcome the Climate
Challenge website and campaign from Defra (the Department of
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). In the Get
Involved section, you can comment
or add your own Bright
Ideas.  You
are also welcome to comment and add your own Climate Challenge
ideas here. Follow the link to the Globalfootprint
blog, look
for Comments at the bottom of each post, then click
on this link and a new screen will open. Read any comments already
there and add your own in the box (moderated).
Some Climate Challenge
ideas:
First, for individuals:
- One Warm Room - heating a whole house or
building is a luxury we can't afford. Instead of central heating, when
it's cold try heating and using one central room in your home.
- Do It In Daylight - our modern 24 hour
lifestyles are unsustainable, especially during the winter months with
their longer hours of darkness. Rethink and reorganise your time. If
you can't (eg. because of outside constraints such as night working
etc), think about how you would manage if 24 hour resources were not
available to you.
- Stickers For Stick-In-The-Muds - attach
stickers to (or place information leaflets near) items which still use
excessive and unsustainable resources (high food miles, unnecessary
plastic packaging etc).
- Put That Light Out! If you live near an office
or public building which leaves lights and computers on all night,
call and leave messages, or give out leaflets outside the building,
asking them to switch off and save energy.
- Lower Income, Lower Emissions - the richer you
are, the more emissions you create and the more resources you use up -
check
your local authority's ecological footprint* against the highest
and lowest in the country (Highest include Kensington &
Chelsea, Guildford, Epsom & Ewell at 6.5+ global hectares per
person; Lowest include Merthyr Tydfil,
Blaenau Gwent* at less than 5 gha per person). A good reason to be proud if you're not among the
country's 'top' people. Whatever your rating, lobby your council to
reduce its footprint even more.
*source:
Stockholm Environment Institute York, REAP website
(free but requires registration)
- Don't Borrow Tomorrow's Resources for Today -
reduce your debt, don't borrow for today's pleasures from the
resources you or your children will need tomorrow.
And an important challenge for the Government:
- Economic Growth Is For Dummies - we urgently
need to rethink how we judge economic success: to be sustainable and
to combat climate change we need to measure success and progress on sustainability,
stability and social cohesion instead of on financial and economic
growth alone.
Click for some resources
and for more comment and ideas.
Contact us if you want to add a link
to your website.
Some ways to calculate your
ecological footprint:
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