Climate Distress

As more people are learning about the climate crisis and becoming involved in action for change, we are meeting more and more people who are distressed and anxious about the future. Rosemary Randall has been speaking about the issue and has recently been interviewed  by Joshi Gottlieb at Ecosia. Listen to it here.

Success in the Netherlands

Manu from Klimaatgesprekken in the Netherlands sends us news.
"Recently we have had our 1.000 th participant enlisting for our carbon conversations workshops. We are currently active in more than 50 places in Holland with over a 100 facilitators.

We are also contributing to the public debate and awareness by pointing out to the importance of psychology and a holistic/realistic human approach.

We have received a lot of media opportunities, enough for the media to really see us as one of the organizations they call whenever they want to do something ‘about the climate, and human behaviour’. I am personally proud that we introduced a few words in Holland that play a role in understanding and sharing and acknowledging. For example the debate was always about the ‘energy transition’ and we consistently started using ’the climate transition’ (from an understanding that it’s also about  food, travel, consumption, etc). We also introduced ’klimaatspagaat’ which means the dilemma people face when they have to desires that conflict. They both want to do something (reduce climate  impact), but also have difficulty facing up to that choice. 

We also moved from ‘facilitator’ to ‘groupcoach’ in the early stages, to ‘climate coaches’ now, which seems to become a role now that now gets recognized in government policy: a lot of the changes that are needed will have to Be done by people and just like you can have ‘mechanics’ ‘engineers’ in the climate transition, there is a growing awareness that we will need climate coaches. "

Climate, Psychology, Conversation

Rosemary Randall was very pleased to be invited to deliver one of the lectures in this year’s Cambridge Climate Lecture Series.

She says "It was a big departure for CCLS to include something other than science in the series and I was delighted to be made so welcome." The title was ‘Climate, Psychology, Conversation: the unconscious dynamics of how we talk about climate change’. You can view the lecture here.
The talk draws on the material in the chapter "Talking with Friends, Family and Colleagues" from In Time for Tomorrow" (Chapter 6 or Chapter 3  of the international carbon conversations handbook; both still available to download) as well as recent research and writing.
 Rosemary also ran a related workshop for local Sixth-Formers called ‘Finding your Voice’ about climate change.
She is hoping she can offer both these workshops to more audiences in the future. See her blog for more information and news of more of Rosemary's activities

Morgen begint nu

"In Time for Tomorrow" comes out in Dutch.

Manu from KlimaatGesprekken says
"We had the translation and new design done by 2 professionals who we were
able to pay by a local sustainability fund. We added some of the personal
stories and did some of the Dutch carbon footprint numbers and examples
by a panel of volunteer experts that we organised...
Probably about 10-15 volunteers worked on it for about a year, in several
sprints of an afternoon of co-working etc."

"The book has generated new interest and ambassadors, [and is distributed] always coupled with a workshop experience. Which, funny enough, also makes it a bit more exclusive to have."

We think it looks fantastic. KlimaatGesprekken have done an amazing job - we love the design and illustrations. Congratulations to everyone involved.

The text KlimaatGesprekken used is "ITFT international" , available on the materials section of the ClimateConversations RiseUp list website. 

Climate Change Games Nights

A number of Climate Change groups are using the Carbon Conversations games to engage local people in the issues of carbon reduction.

Facilitators Training in Leeds

Leeds Carbon Conversations is running a Facilitators Training Course supported by The Surefoot Effect on 15th to 17th October in central Leeds. 

Following a Partnership Citu (a housing developer building incredibly energy efficient homes in Leeds Climate Innovation District) and University of Leeds (through Milena Buchs - see previous article) 4 members of Citu staff are participating and plan to roll out Carbon Conversations to all employees. The University will evaluate the impact of the groups they run on staff carbon footprints before and after.  

Other places are open to anyone wishing to train to run Carbon Conversations in the Leeds or West Yorkshire area. There are only a few places left so please contact us as soon as possible if you are interested in attending. leedsconversations@gmail.com.

Can interviews with the carbon calculator reduce people's footprints?

New research by Milena Buchs of Leeds University and author of previous research on Carbon Conversations has been exploring the effectiveness of our carbon calculator.

You may know that Carbon Conversations grew out of a project that conducted interviews with the public using the Centre for Alternative Technology's carbon calculator as a way of raising people's awareness of climate change.