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Community Environment Associates

Chris Church

Jan McHarry

Current Work

Training & Facilitation

Climate Change & Communities

Sustainable Consumption & Production

Environmental Justice, Equality & Diversity

Sustainable Communities

Sustainable Tower Blocks Initiative

Why the White Horse

Hackney

Previous Work

Documents

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Links

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Climate Change and Communities

CEA work extensively on climate change issues. This work has included two reports and currently focuses on training.This includes a very popular course on "Climate Change - Effective Communication", delivered through Talk Action, and other courses with Climate Outreach Information Network (COIN).

Chris Church is now working on projects which look at ways to develop local activity through networked support and to evaluate the effectiveness of local action. Given the changes that will come in 2010 with the Carbon Reduction Commitment and Feed-in Tariffs, this is going to be an important work area for the future.

Chris is also a trustee of the national Low-Carbon Communities Network and helping establish a new London Low-Carbon Communities Network.

Training

The training is being delivered with COIN and Talk Action . It focuses on climate change communication and speaking in public on climate change. We deliver these courses in various places around the country but can also work with any local organisation to run one which meets your specific needs. See the Training page for more details of what is on offer or check the websites for these organisations.

Climate and communities

Chris is looking closely at the engagement of Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations with climate change. Chris is currently working (January 2010) with The Green Alliance on a report for the Ministerial Task Force on Climate Change and the Third Sector.

What do we mean by VCS organisations? These are primarily local community organisations who are not focused on a specific issue, but tend to work more on a local area basis (though this is not always the case). VCS groups include tenant and resident groups, faith organisations, councils for voluntary service (CVSs), as well as sports clubs, women's organisations, anti-poverty groups and many more. There are up to 750,000 such groups across the UK.

Chris has been developing a framework for assessing such activity - this is currently under discussion so if you're interested, please email us and we will send you the most recent version

The original work on this is summarised in a 2006 report, downloadable here, entitled "Local Action, Global Impact" .

Reports

• Thirty-three ways forward? Climate change in London: Action by local government A survey of local councils by the London 21 network January 2008

  This report looks at what local councils in London are doing (or not doing) on these issues and makes a set of recommendations on what councils and voluntary sector bodies should be doing to build engagement and activity in London.

  These recommendations can be accessed in a shorter document here.

• Action on Climate Change: From a Divided Europe to a Common Purpose

  Chris wrote this with Tamara Malkova, Director of the excellent Ukraine NGO Green Dossier . It looks at the role of NGOs in tackling climate change across Europe with a special focus on the eastern regions out to Tadjikistan (which is already suffering serious climate-related problems due to glacier retreat and water shortages). The report highlights the need for a well-supported programme to build "climate literacy" in both East and West and the role that NGOs can play in this work. You can download the report here.