What can you do?

Part of how the UK is tackling climate change is through raising awareness and understanding of the issues involved. Many of these are aimed at individuals to make grassroots changes to the way they live their lives. These changes could be as simple as switching to energy saving light bulbs in the home or something more active such as joining forces with others in local and national campaigns.

International organisations like Friends of the Earth and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) are running campaigns encouraging people to get involved.  

The windiest country in Europe
The WWF Yes 2 Wind campaign promotes the use of wind power as a natural and clean power source to replace the use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas which are affecting the world’s climate. As the windiest country in Europe, Britain has excellent wind energy resources and opinion polls regularly produce results to support wind energy. However, not everyone likes to see the huge windmill like turbines turning on the horizon and projects to introduce new wind farms have met local resistance in some areas.

Juice
For those who don’t want to be active campaigners there are still lots of things that you can do to help as Greenpeace have proven by teaming up with the electricity supplier Npower to produce Juice. Juice is electricity generated by the UK’s first offshore wind farm so at no extra cost people living in the UK can make a positive step to protecting the planet.

Learning about climate change in Scotland
Climate change is being taught more and more in schools as part of the curriculum to raise children’s awareness of the serious impact fossil fuels have on the environment. Learning and Teaching Scotland has produced a website full of resources and games to complement the Scottish Executive’s Do a little change a lot campaign which again demonstrates that everybody can do their bit to help the environment.  

At a local level
There are plenty of local campaigns to join like the Rother Environmental Group in East Sussex which is a voluntary group that campaigns to protect their local environment with projects that look at and encourage recycling and using renewable energy.

Many of these campaigns and groups are run or supported by the local city or county council. In Scotland, for example, the city of Aberdeen runs the Aberdeen Eco-Challenge which encourages householders to be greener by making small changes to their lifestyles in the areas of waste, energy and transport.

Where do I start?
If you want to learn more about climate change and the little things you can do to make a big difference visit the Friends of the Earth website which is full of information. You can start by taking the Climate Challenge 2004 where you can pledge to make changes.