Addressing Climate Change

Addressing Climate Change

Delivering projects and influencing behaviours to help meet climate action requirements

The climate emergency is brought into sharper focus each year. Following a review in January 2020, CAN’s Board added climate action as a key element to its mission. This will increasingly frame policy and funding frameworks in the future.

We are partners in the Going Green Together initiative by the VONNE Climate Action Alliance initiative. Its mission is to support organisations and communities in the North East to take climate action. If you're a VCSE based in the North East and you've done something about the climate crisis, please share your action.

Our activities to address climate change

CAN's current activities are aimed at addressing fuel poverty, reducing fuel bills and addressing the urgent need to take climate action including:

• Delivering information and advice through our network of Warm Hubs and the volunteers involved in each hub on energy efficiency, alternative energy sources, using slow cookers as a mechanism to reduce energy usage and bills as well as promoting healthy eating, advising on warm homes discount, energy tariffs and the Priority Services Register.

• Running ‘Rural Energy Roadshows’ at various locations, as funding permits, to promote energy efficiency and explain alternative sources of energy.

• Promoting the plight of households off the electricity grid and working with key strategic partners, including Northumberland County Council and Northumberland National Park, through the Northumberland Off-grid Taskforce

• Undertaking energy audits at village halls as funding permits and assisting with the implementation of their findings

• Utilising our own infrared camera to assist specific buildings to identify their key areas of heat loss.

• Managing our ‘OilCAN’ membership scheme helping people off-gas to obtain competitive prices for heating oil, LPG and coal and also providing a ready network for the promotion of alternative, non-fossil fuel heat sources and hybrid heat pump systems. 

• Produce the ‘CosyCAN’ newsletter each winter highlighting tips for staying warm and reducing energy bills.

• Our Community Energy Advisers project brings direct energy advice and support to households off the electricity and/or gas grid across rural Northumberland.

• Support applications to the Rural Community Energy Fund and other sources in Northumberland, helping communities to respond to the climate action agenda.

• Remain an active partner in the VONNE Climate Action Alliance.

• Facilitating cross-community projects to harness the growing desire of local communities to take climate action and enable strategic resources to be accessed.

• We will seek to develop our proposed Warm Hub Portal into an online resource for energy and carbon reduction information and support. Our aim is that this includes resources, training, webinars, ‘how to’ films and other information. We will also support Warm Hubs to become exemplars of energy efficiency and low carbon.

• We will support village halls to explore renewable energy options through schemes such as the Rural Community Energy Fund and, when established, the Energy Framework for the Borderlands Inclusive Growth programme. We will also support rural churches in a similar vein through the Rural Churches for Everyone project.

• We will aim to support individual communities keen to address climate action through our proposed Warm Hub Portal and also through direct support where funding allows.

• As Northumberland emerges from the covid-19 lockdown, we will support efforts to enable reductions in carbon emissions to be maintained through initiatives aimed at supporting improved transport options, enhanced broadband and mobile connectivity.