In this week's episode I'm chatting to William Eccles from The Commitment.
The Commitment is a campaign asking us to commit to voting for a healthy planet. You do this by heading to their website, hitting the "make the commitment" button, and ticking the box that says “ I commit to vote only for politicians who work for urgent action on the climate and nature.”.
We discuss in the episode just why that is so important, and the really clever ways that they’re using your commitment to engage with MPs and give them a mandate to be braver in their calls and support for action on climate and nature.
As you’ll hear in the episode, when I came across the Commitment earlier this year, I stopped what I was doing and did just that. And then I shared it on social media asking other people to do the same. And the team at the Commitment were able to track the fact that me sharing meant other people stopped what they were doing and made their own commitment. But they know that lots of people get distracted in between hearing about something and actually doing it, so that number could have been so much higher.
I would LOVE it if this episode resulted in another 'mini surge' of commitments. There’s a point in the podcast where William invites you to pause the podcast and go and do it.
Last time I shared they had 27 people sign up – let’s see if we can smash that!
Enjoy!

Advertising.
It's all around us. Persuading us to buy stuff we didn't know we wanted, telling us how much happier/more popular/better our lives will be with the latest/newest whatever it is.
Most of think that we're immune to it, but studies show just how insidious and manipulative it is, and how it influences our brains at a deep level. Which perhaps wouldn't really matter if we weren't in the grips of climate and ecological emergencies driven by our consumption of the very stuff being advertised to us.
Leo Murray is the co-founder and director of innovation at climate charity Possible, and the co-author of Badvertising - a book that is "raising the alarm on an industry that is making us both unhealthy and unhappy, and that is driving the planet to the precipice of environmental collapse in the process."
I've only read the first chapter of the book but already it's eye opening and shocking - Jeremy Vine's review of the book says "..if you thought your brain was being gently warmed by the advertising industry, read this book and you'll realise it's being fried'.
Leo is amazing and there is so much I wanted to chat to him about, as you can probably tell from the interview! We veered from chatting about some of the work that Possible is doing, to Badvertising and back again, so apologies in advance for my inability to keep on track - I hope you'll find it all interesting stuff! 

Climate and play might not be two things that we naturally put together. And even less so, climate and 'playfulness'. Climate change is a huge, overwhelming, complext issue and i couldn't be more important. So we need to take this seriously and absolutely need to be bringing our best game, there's no room for messing around, right?
Maybe not!
I loved this chat with the brilliant Lucy Hawthorne, founder of Climate Play who is "making it safe, light and fun to face climate change". Lucy runs a range of workshops and programmes that help people work through emotions, information and actions associated with climate change. In this episode we discuss playfulness as a mindset and why that's so important when it comes to tackling big, serious issues like climate change.
You might think that Climate Play workshops, especially ones involving Lego are aimed at children, but that's very much not the case here - Lucy's workshops are for grown ups, and often grown ups working in proper grown up jobs in proper grown up companies. We talk about the importance of play, especially for adults - how it expands our minds, and puts us into a great, positive frame of mind, meaning we're at our best when attempting to tackle such big and complex issues as climate change. 
There was a phrase that Lucy used at one point during the conversation - something like using play to 'put a softer edges on things to be able to have the harder conversations' that really struck me. I know that I can get very caught up in the importance of this work and the pressure I put on myself to get it right, because so much is at stake. That can mean that I'm potentially pretty intense when I attempt any conversations around climate change and climate action! Allowing ourselves (myself) to experiment and be more playful with what works and what doesn't, letting go of a fear of failure, because we can't fail as we're just experimenting and trying some stuff out, is such an important mindset shift, and one that I'm going to try and embrace. Along with the idea of embracing and doing more of the things that bring us joy, and thinking about how we can do more of what we do with a (genuine!) smile on our faces. 
And speaking of big mindset shifts, look out for the brilliant one right at the end, where Lucy shares the power of simply swapping one simple word in our vocabulary, and how that can make us "more motivated, more likely to carry on doing it (climate action), and more likely to be smiling while I'm doing it."

This week we're talking schools and climate action!
I'm chatting to Jo Pettifer who part of a growing team of Climate Action Advisors from climate charity Let's Go Zero, which is working to help schools in the UK to take climate action, with the ambitious goal of becoming carbon zero by 2030.

Jo shares in our chat that apparently around 45% of UK household's have a school aged person within them, meaning that there's huge scope for schools to not only educate our young people about how the world around them is changing around them and why, along with inspiring them about the roles they play in transitioning to a greener, cleaner, fairer future, schools are also able to have a much wider influence on parents and carers and on their local communities. 

There are a LOT of resources out there for schools wanting to start to take climate action - I've linked in the shownotes to episodes of the podcast with Eco-Schools, the Ministry of Eco Education and Energy Sparks, and that really is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to brilliant resources and initiatives providing schools with the information that they need. What I love about this new project from Let's Go Zero with the Climate Action Advisors, is that they've recognised that schools don't need more info, they need help putting that information into action in their particular setting. The Climate Action Advisors are being rolled out across the country with the aim of being able to provide much needed 1:1 support for school leaders and sustainability leads, to start to take action, from helping them to figure out where they should start through to identifying funding sources, they're hopefully going to be able to help schools move from good intentions to a clear, well-structured plan and the all important actions that then follow on!

This week we’re diving into all things digital with Matt and Will from an organisation called Carbon Fingerprint.

For many of us, the planetary impact of our online lives maybe isn’t something that we give much thought to – the cloud is this ethereal thing that none of us quite understand, and I personally can’t even begin to get my head around how the internet works, so have to assume it’s some kind of magic. And surely magic can’t be bad for the planet right?
Wrong. Sadly. Again.
‘The internet’ – all of our devices and computers; the infrastructure, so the cables, the data centres etc; and the combined energy usage of all of that already has a carbon footprint greater than that of the aviation industry (which for reference is around 2-5% of global emissions) and that is set to at least double in the next 10 years!
If pushed, most of us might think about the electricity that’s used when we charge our phones and laptops, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg – did you know it takes 800kg of resources to make a 2kg laptop. I learned that on a Digital Collage workshop a couple of weeks ago and it absolutely blew my mind!
And it’s not just the planetary impacts of our internet usage that we need to be aware of , there are other impacts on our mental health, our physical health, and our connectedness with people and nature. Many of us use our phones more than we actually want to, and are aware that we can spend hours of our days doom scrolling, ending up feeling worse. Social media is deliberately designed to be addictive and has done a very good job of keeping us hooked, and indeed polarising society.
That all sounds very doom and gloom, and as someone who runs an online business and uses the internet to hopefully try and spread some good around the world, I’m aware that there are also huge benefits to it, so as with everything, I guess it’s around making sure that we use it more thoughtfully and consciously, being mindful of it’s impact both on the planet and on our own well-being.

Matt, Will and two other friends have set up Carbon fingerprint with this exact dual purpose – they want to raise awareness of the impact of our internet usage, provide tips, ideas and resources for us all to help us to use it more mindfully, and provide a way for anyone who wants to, to meaningfully remove the carbon emissions produced by our internet usage from the atmosphere.
If you’re anything like me, this might be an area of your life you haven’t given much thought to before, but once you start digging, it’s fascinating and terrifying! We’ve been doing a ‘digital detox’ in The Sustainable(ish) Clubhouse, with people committing to simple but impactful things like swapping the 10 mins (and it’s never just 10mins is it?!) doom scroll before bed for reading, or going for a walk without their phone!

I’d love to know your thoughts on this one, and on your own relationship to your phone – do you often find yourself doom scrolling? Are you concerned about how much time your or your kids spend online? Is this additional knowledge about the planetary impact of that time spent an added incentive to try and take back control?!
Let me know!

"If you own a tent you can be a member of Tentshare. If you don't own a tent, you can be a member of Tentshare."
Love this quote from Rebecca Heaps, founder of Tentshare -'the Air BnB for tents'!

On the surface, camping feels like a pretty eco-friendly option for a cheaper holiday. And it is. However it does involved quite a lot of 'stuff' - the tent, the sleeping mats, the sleeping bags, the camping stove, and on the list goes. All of this stuff might only be used once a year and the rest of the time it sits in our sheds or garages gathering dust. 
And for anyone who wants to have a go at camping, all of that stuff is a big outlay when you're not even sure if you're going to like it and want to do it again.

Which is where Tentshare comes in! Tentshare matches up people with tents, with people who want them. Not only is this such a brilliantly simple idea for camping, but also for festivals. Figures from 2018 estimate that 250,000 tents go into landfill each year in the UK, which is a LOT of resources and energy going to waste.

Rebecca shares the story of how she got started, and some of positive benefits of sharing camping equipment above and beyond the environmental ones - the connection, the joy, getting people outdoors appreciating nature, to name a few!

I hope you enjoy this episode! Do go and check out the Tentshare website - if you own a tent, popping it on Tentshare is a great way to support the sharing economy and contribute a mini nudge towards a less capitalist society! And if you're thinking of having a go at camping for the first time, save yourself a heap of money, and get yourself some great camping advice by using Tentshare!

Podcast episode wise it was only 7 episodes ago, but time wise, almost a year has passed since I chatted to Annie Pickering from Climate Emergency UK about their Council Climate Scorecards.
In that chat we talked about why climate action from Local Authorities are important,. The operational carbon footprint of most local authroties might not be huge, but their sphere of influence over their local area is pretty big, and in fact of up to around a third of the UK’s emissions are under the influence of local authorities.

For most of us, we probably only interact with our local authority when we pay our council tax or we want to complain about bins or potholes, but there’s a whole lot more we can do to encourage and support our councils taking climate action.
When I spoke to Annie last year, we discussed the Plan scorecards, which were published in 2022 and looked at Local Authorities Climate Action Plans. We also started to talk about the plans that Climate Emergency UK had to produce a whole new set of scorecards for Actions. And this is what we’re talking about today! We dive into how the new scorecards were produced, how the results differ for councils from their plans to their actions, and the role of the scorecards in driving further action from local authorities and how we can use them to help us engage with our local councils.
There’s also a shout out for the Climate Emergency crowdfunder which is live at the moment, which is raising funds to help them get the scorecards out there being used in the most effective way possible, supporting the team at Climate Emergency to work with campaigners, councils and other organisations to use the Scorecards as an effective campaign tool to push for change, and to track this progress over time by publishing future editions of the Action Scorecards. Aviva Community Fun are providing match funding for the campaign until the 22^nd November, which means that any donation you make until then will be matched by Aviva. I know that times are tough right now, and that the expense of Christmas is looming, but if you do have any spare pennies, this is a great climate cause to donate to!

I thought this episode was fascinating. Let’s face it, Local Authorities are never going to be the sexy and exciting end of climate action, but they have huge scope for really positive impact, not just in terms of emissions reductions, but also in terms of engagement from local communities.
I really hope you enjoy it – do let me know if you go and check out the scorecards, if they prompt you to get in touch with your local authority or to think about what’s happening and what could be happening in your local area!