As COP 27 begins, what’s happening locally to help save our beautiful little planet from doom?
Well, Horsham District Council held a Climate Action Day on 20th October to help prepare the parish councillors for what lies ahead for all of us.
Two thirds of the 32 parish councils in HD were represented, with 11 parishes not attending. So what progress has been made?
Is the climate broken? Should the Government be doing more about it? Can ordinary citizens do anything? How will things look for our children and grandchildren?
To find out what the people of Horsham think, we spent a recent lunchtime patrolling the busy streets around the Swan Walk Shopping Centre.
Going plastic free for a whole 31 days does sound pretty daunting, some would argue impossible, but it’s a great opportunity to get a little creative, learn something new and hopefully pick up a couple of new habits you can stick to. It’s like diet and exercise, if you’re not enjoying it and it doesn’t fit in with your lifestyle you’re unlikely to carry on with it.
Soaring temperatures have left Sussex residents sweltering after an extreme heat warning raised the question whether this week has been the hottest on record in the region and what we should be doing to tackle climate change.
The national emergency came only a day after Sussex Green Living’s CEO Carrie Cort, her son and the charity’s Youth Eco Forum leader Tash Barns joined ‘Zero Hour’, a coalition of UK campaigners, world-leading scientists, academics and members of the public in Victoria Tower Garden next to the House of Lords in Westminster.
I have been blessed to spend 20 years working in the Ecuadorian Amazon and Choco cloud forest, a world away from my home in Pulborough.
It has been like having parallel lives.
The UK has one of lowest levels of tree cover in Europe at 13%, globally ranking 136th out of 189 countries. Looking down from a plane over our green desert fields, we can see how few trees there really are with only tiny patches of ancient woodland remaining, maybe unaware that here in England our level of biodiversity is painfully low. Although the woodland cover has doubled in the last 100 years this is mainly with non-native conifer plantations, where very little diversity can exist.