The coming end of the year is always a good excuse to look back at what we’ve achieved over the last 12 months.
Our home energy team has covered the length and breadth of Cumbria, giving free advice at events and visiting nearly 900 homes to install free energy saving measures. In this way we’ve helped households be warmer and save tens of £thousands. We’ve also inspired around 100 people to become trained ‘energy champions’ – helping friends, colleagues and neighbours save energy at home.
Earlier this year, we ran several events to support households thinking of renovating and retrofitting their homes, and now the cold months are upon us, our trained volunteer groups are doing free thermal imaging surveys to help homeowners identify areas of heat loss, and consider insulation and draughtproofing. We’ve been able to expand our Solar Made Easy project to new areas of Cumbria, and ran an EV Made Easy project, to expose and dispel the many myths around electric vehicles.
Our Westmorland & Furness Green Enterprise Hub has enabled us, along with several partner organisations, to support 217 businesses to decarbonise through energy audits, specialist advice, events and training and grants.
We’ve delivered 27 climate and carbon literacy courses reaching 299 attendees, giving us a five year total of nearly 2,000 participants. Climate FRESK courses were a new addition this year; a fast paced, thought provoking three hour session that has participants working in small groups, with the support of an expert facilitator, to piece together the causes and effects of climate change.
As the lead partner of the Zero Carbon Cumbria Partnership, we conceived and delivered the inaugural Zero Carbon Cumbria Summit – and are now planning the second Summit for next year. We’ve run numerous events to help individuals, organisations and communities make the transition from high carbon to low carbon lifestyles, from webinars for educators, to training on communication skills. It has been particularly encouraging to see stakeholders across Cumbria make commitments to reduce emissions from our shared priority areas of land use, waste and consumption, buildings and transport.
The Cumbria Sustainability Network goes from strength to strength. With the help of funding from the National Lottery we’ve been able to distribute £91,000 of Community Climate Grants to local groups for projects focused on reducing carbon emissions and building resilience, and £7,600 for Great Big Green Week events, and were proud to find that as a result Cumbria held more events during that week than any other part of the country.
Closer to home, we’ve recently recruited four trustees and four associate trustees, who will help us to steer our action on climate change with fresh expertise. We’ve also launched our Business Supporter Network and have been delighted by the number of businesses signing up for membership.
To read more about our achievements, read our Annual Report 2023-2024.
Thank you to all who contributed to these successes, from local businesses and schools to volunteers and community groups. When I look at our joint achievements it never fails to lift my spirits.
Yet there is clearly still much to be done. We know that 2024 is, yet again, the hottest year on record globally. If organisations have New Year’s resolutions, then CAfS’ is to do absolutely everything in our power to protect Cumbria from climate change.
