PLANT is delighted to have received £22,876 additional funding from Scottish Government’s Climate Challenge Fund starting this April. Over the next two years, the money will support development of Tayport Carbon Conversations – a new project adding to the existing Tayport Community Garden’s carbon footprint reduction and climate change awareness work.
Starting this summer, we are inviting Tayport residents to join a Carbon Conversations programme aimed at helping to reduce household carbon footprints from home energy, travel, diet, and general consumption. Through this series of informal small group sessions our trained facilitators will offer information, mutual encouragement and practical support to participants in reducing their carbon emissions. If you are concerned about the environment and would like to take action but don’t know where to start, Carbon Conversations can help. Please fill in our online expressions of interest form to let us know that you are interested and to help with the programme design here. You can also get in touch with Kaska, our Blog Coordinator and project lead, with any questions at blog@tayportgarden.org or 0744 6231073.
To reach a wider audience, we will also expand our learning activities at the Garden to include more on climate change awareness and practical carbon-cutting action. Our Garden visitors and Primary School will be able to take advantage of the new hands-on Climate Change Conversation activity box for children, workshops for adults, and an interactive digital Carbon Conversation trail for all ages.
Our Carbon Conversations are one of 110 community-led projects awarded a total of £15.3 million in the 24th round of grants from the Scottish Government’s Climate Challenge Fund, administered by Keep Scotland Beautiful. First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, announced the news last Friday, 16th of March 2018. The full listing of the recipients from the 2018-2020 CCF can be viewed on the Scottish Government’s website.
Since 2016, thanks to the CCF funding, Tayport Community Garden and its green army of enthusiastic volunteers, helped cut Tayport’s carbon emissions by 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide. This was achieved by growing 2 tonnes of food locally, saving 1.7 tonnes of apples from going to waste in private gardens to produce 1,000 litres of juice, and by installing a rainwater harvesting and solar-powered irrigation system at the Garden. We hope more Tayport households will be inspired by this work to take individual action on climate change too.
Jessie Roberts, PLANT Committee member and Administrator, said:
“PLANT is delighted to receive further funding from the Climate Challenge Fund to support our Carbon Conversations project. This will bring local people together to understand climate change and to find practical ways of reducing their carbon footprints. We are very excited about this development for Tayport Community Garden over the next two years.“
Kaska Hempel, PLANT Blog Co-ordinator and project lead, said:
“Tayport’s community action on reducing our carbon emission seems particularly timely, considering how often climate change effects on the planet are in the news these days. This year alone we have heard of 2017 being most recent in a streak of warmest years globally since records began and Arctic ice melting at an alarming rate this winter. Even the Beast of the East blizzards battering Scotland right now can have something to do with disturbances in the Northern Hemisphere climate systems. We are very proud to be a part of the solution!”
David Gunn, Climate Challenge Fund Manager at Keep Scotland Beautiful said:
“We congratulate PLANT for securing funding from the Scottish Government’s Climate Challenge Fund and encourage the local community to take advantage of support available through the Tayport Carbon Conversations.”
“We look forward to supporting PLANT as they implement their project and empowering many more communities to take action on climate change. We see it as part of our work to make Scotland clean, green and sustainable.”
