Monday, September 27, 2010

Churches responding to Climate Change


The EcoCongregation journey has taken me, via co-ordinating Reading Christian Ecology Link, onto the Reading Climate Change Partnership (part of the LSP, involving reps from the council, business, university, NHS etc as well as voluntary sector) so I attended my first meeting of that earlier this month. It was very much a finding my bearings meeting for me, lots of acronyms and other stuff to learn although, as this week my family hand back the car we've been borrowing for holidays this summer, I did volunteer to join a sub-group responding to the Local Transport Plan.

The following week several of the same people were present for the Green City and Open Spaces Forum at which I gave a presentation on what churches in Reading are doing to respond to climate change. I'm hoping we'll have a RCEL website sorted by Christmas and I'll put the full report on there, but the highlights included Park URC's exciting plans for a biomass boiler and pv panels, the Quaker meeting's very impressive carbon emissions reductions and involvment with 10:10 (2008-9 emissions were 30% lower than 2004-5 and they expect to be down another 10% this year) and a growing number of churches involved in the EcoCongregation programme. I also mentioned Sir John Houghton's well-attended talk at Wargrave which can now be downloaded from their website.

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