A warming look back at our Community-to-Community Workshop with Swaffham Prior Heat Network

What does it take for a rural village to ditch heating oil? At Carbon Copy’s third Community-to-Community Workshop, Sharing the Warmth, host Roy Kareem spoke with Ros Hathorn, a Cambridgeshire county councillor, and Nicola Young, Head of Complex Infrastructure at Cambridgeshire County Council, about Swaffham Prior — home to the UK’s first rural district heating network. 

It’s a story that runs from a Community Land Trust‘s early ambitions through boreholes, electric boilers and eight years of careful community relationship-building. Here’s what Ros and Nicola shared, in their own words. 

What is the Swaffham Prior Heat Network? 

Swaffham Prior is a village of around 300 homes that, like many rural communities, was never connected to the gas grid. For decades, that meant relying on heating oil — expensive, carbon-intensive, and increasingly unpredictable in price. Today, the village is instead served by a district heat network: a shared, council-owned system that generates heat centrally and pipes it directly into people’s homes. 

Ros described the appeal simply: the village needed “a way to take those houses off a carbon-based fuel,” and the chosen solution was a heat network built around a network of ground source heat pumps. It’s the first rural place in the UK to successfully implement a district heating system — which makes it worth paying close attention to. 

From Community Land Trust to County Council 

Ros’s connection to the project predates her time as a councillor. Years earlier, her own village invited a member of Swaffham Prior’s Community Land Trust (CLT) to talk about the project — someone Ros remembers as an “absolute source of energy.” The idea stuck with her long before she became chair of the council’s Environment and Green Investment Committee, the body the heat network now sits under. 

The CLT’s ambitions started smaller: first building affordable housing for the village, then, having proved they could deliver, turning to an even bigger question — what next? The timing helped. As Ros put it, “there was a time when there was a bit more financial capacity in local authorities,” and the CLT had both the determination and the knowledge that similar schemes had worked elsewhere. They brought together five partners to drive the idea forward, and the county council stepped in when it was able to commit support and access grant funding to get the project moving. 

Inside the energy centre: how the warmth is made 

At the heart of the system is an energy centre combining three renewable technologies. Air source heat pumps work alongside a field of 108 closed-loop boreholes — effectively a giant ground source heat pump running underneath the land behind the centre. Four electric boilers provide backup for colder periods or emergencies, and even they run on genuinely renewable power, connected directly to the county council’s own solar farm near Soham. 

From there, highly insulated underground pipes carry hot water through the village streets to each connected property. Inside every home sits a heat interface unit — the point where the network’s hot water transfers its heat into the house’s own radiators and taps, delivering, as Nicola put it, “a really nice constant temperature of hot water” without residents needing to think about boilers, tanks or oil deliveries ever again. 

Winning hearts (and homes) 

Getting local residents comfortable with having their driveways dug up and their heating systems replaced took more than a leaflet drop. The Community Land Trust’s early, direct relationships in the village built the first wave of trust and excitement. From there, the council kept a team member based in the village for face-to-face conversations, ran regular drop-in sessions at the village hall, and answered questions through the village newsletter — building relationships that, by the time of the workshop, stretched back roughly eight years. 

That patience mattered because concerns varied enormously: some residents worried about driveway reinstatement, others about whether the new system would really be cheaper or as reliable as oil. Roy offered a neat illustration of why communication itself can matter as much as the technology: when London buses first displayed real-time arrival countdowns, passenger satisfaction jumped — even though the buses weren’t arriving any faster. Just knowing what was happening, and when, gave people back a sense of control. Being a trusted, transparent partner, rather than a perfect one, is what keeps people on side. 

No cost barrier: making it fair for everyone 

Equity was built into the scheme from day one. “It was about achieving 100% carbon reduction for heating, but also that there would be no cost barrier to join,” Nicola explained — one of the project’s founding principles. Connecting to the network is free, and the main factor determining whether a property can join isn’t income or tenure, but simply its distance from the energy centre. The network now serves a genuine mix of private homeowners, renters and social housing tenants. 

For rented and social housing, the heat supply agreement sits with whoever occupies the property at the time, and the council works with social landlords to brief incoming tenants when they move in. Ros also floated an idea worth borrowing elsewhere: using pricing creatively as an incentive, such as offering free connection periods on specific streets to encourage early sign-ups — treating low or zero-cost entry as a genuine recruitment tool, not just a fairness box to tick. 

What they’d do differently 

Nicola was candid about what she’d approach differently with hindsight. One is the connection strategy: rather than signing up houses in whatever order people applied, grouping new connections by geography makes the disruptive civil works — digging up streets — far more efficient to deliver in batches. 

Another is right-sizing the system to actual demand. The energy centre was built to serve up to 300 properties, roughly 90% of the village, but with around 112 connected so far, the team is now looking at adjustments to make the plant run efficiently at current, lower volumes rather than at its full designed capacity. 

The last, and perhaps most important, lesson was about honesty when things slow down. Large infrastructure projects inevitably take longer than hoped, and enthusiasm from the early days can fade if delays go unexplained. “Being really clear and transparent… really helps to bring people on the journey with you,” Nicola said, “because we’re all learning as we have developed this fantastic scheme.” 

Is this replicable? 

Nicola isn’t aware of another council currently delivering a rural heat network quite like this one, though enquiries come in regularly from other local authorities, community energy groups and academics keen to learn from Swaffham Prior’s experience. Audience members in the workshop mentioned similar ambitions taking shape in North Yorkshire and Devon — interest that we predict will only grow after this session!

Ros was clear that copying Swaffham Prior doesn’t mean building an identical heat network everywhere. “It’s not replicating the same thing,” she said. “It’s using the essential core principles — what we learned — and where there’s an opportunity, applying those in a way that’s most appropriate to that opportunity.” She pointed to a very different project already borrowing those lessons: a new Cambridge development pairing solar panels with charging infrastructure for electric waste disposal vehicles — a project that still starts from the same questions of who the customer is and what they actually need. 

The biggest barrier beyond any single council’s control is instability in national energy policy. Local government reorganisation and shifting national decisions, Ros noted, make it harder for councils to take the long view that infrastructure like this requires — meaning projects succeed partly by learning to move within a bigger system they can’t control. 

Get involved 

Huge thanks to Ros Hathorn and Nicola Young for sharing such an honest, detailed picture of what it actually takes to deliver infrastructure like this — the vision, the patience, and the years of relationship-building behind a project most residents simply experience as a warm, reliable home. 

Watch the full event recording below, and keep an eye out for the upcoming Carbon Copy Podcast episode featuring Ros, Nicola and others involved with the heat network.

How did Hull become the first place in the UK with a legal Right to Grow? 

What does it actually take to turn a community campaign into a legal right? At Carbon Copy’s second Community-to-Community Workshop, Space to Grow, host Roy Kareem sat down with Amie Watson and Darren Squires of Hull Food Partnership to find out.  

Hull made headlines as the first place in the UK to turn “Right to Grow” from a nice idea into an enforceable policy — giving residents a genuine, workable route to growing food, and other plants, on unused council land. 

It’s a story about community organising; slow and steady council progress, and the surprising power of food to bring people together across every political divide. Here’s what Amie and Darren shared, in their own words. 

What is Hull Food Partnership? 

“Food partnerships, in a nutshell, are exactly what they say in the title,” Amie explained. “It’s about bringing together the people that can help make change in that area.” Every food partnership is place-based, shaped by its own local context, but most are guided by the national Sustainable Food Places network and work to become a Sustainable Food Place in their own right. 

Hull’s version began life years ago as Good Food Hull — a group simply enthusiastic about good food in the city. A council initiative later asked the organisation to formalise into a food partnership and apply for the Bronze Award; the first official recognition of a city committed to good food. That’s when, as Darren put it, the work “stopped being people sitting around talking about how great good food is,” and they “got the opportunity to start doing something about it.” Today, Amie works as Community Food Support Officer and Darren as Campaigns and Projects Officer, working across the city’s many food-related strands at once. 

How Amie and Darren ended up working in food 

Neither Amie nor Darren set out to build a career in food. Amie previously worked in fashion and textiles. “I hated the fashion industry,” she said plainly. “I hated the way that the industry was destroying everything.” During lockdown, as food co-operatives started springing up, she got drawn into saving surplus food from the bin — and then, more importantly, getting it to the people who needed it. “I didn’t particularly choose to go into food, but it sort of chose me,” she said. 

Darren’s route was even more unlikely. Short on video projects during lockdown, he started making content about the importance of vegetables — and ended up interviewing someone from Hull Food Partnership for one of his videos. Months later, a chance meeting at a community event led to a job offer doing, in person, much the same thing he’d been doing to camera.

Why food is the great connector 

One theme ran through the whole conversation: food has a rare ability to bring people together across divides that usually keep them apart. “As soon as you mention there’s going to be food at the event, everybody wants to come,” Amie said. “We all need to eat — there’s no mistaking that.” 

Darren has seen this play out in surprising ways. “I think one of the reasons why it’s politically neutral is because it feeds into anybody’s political philosophy; everything from the rugged individual to collective action,” he said. When Hull’s Right to Grow policy hit the media, it was covered by Dutch TV and by a wide range of YouTube channels; commentators who, by their own politics, were “the last people” you’d expect to champion a policy brought in by councillors they’d never vote for. And yet, he said, “they thought it was a fantastic idea.” 

On how to turn that goodwill into action, Amie is a firm believer in showing rather than telling. “The more you try and get people revved up to try and do something, the less likely they are to do it,” she said. Instead, she focuses on demonstrating what’s possible: a growing project, a community fridge, a cafe, so people can see change happening in front of them. “If you can see something happening and changing before you… you can believe that it’s possible.” 

From protest to policy: the birth of Right to Grow 

Right to Grow is, in Darren’s words, “a presumption on council land that if it’s not being used for anything else and it’s suitable, you should be able to get a licence to grow on there.” Hull wasn’t the first place to have a Right to Grow on paper — but theirs was the first that actually worked, because community groups kept pushing for something that was genuinely deliverable. 

The breakthrough came at a food hustings event, where a councillor told the community growers campaigning for change: write the motion, and I’ll bring it to council. A councillor from a different, ruling party then offered to second it and Darren credits Incredible Edible, the national movement behind the original community Right to Grow campaign, for bringing their know-how in from outside the city. The motion passed unanimously, a rare event in local politics. 

But a vote alone changes nothing. “Any council resolution that doesn’t have a mechanism for delivery is just a resolution,” Darren warned, comparing it to Sheffield’s old “nuclear free zone” declaration — symbolically nice, legally meaningless. Hull’s community groups understood that passing the motion was only step one. 

Making it real: Six months to build a legal mechanism 

The early plan was to map every plot of available council land in advance. In reality, this was simply not feasible. Darren described chasing a mythical master map (“nobody knew quite where it was”) which, in the end, turned out not to exist. Mapping land to the granularity needed (some applicants wanted to grow on as little as four square feet) would have been prohibitively expensive and complex for a compact city like Hull with no suburbs. 

So they built something simpler: a legal presumption in favour of growing, with a case-by-case licence process instead of a pre-approved map. Over six months, Hull brought together council officers, councillors, co-opted members and expert witnesses to work out exactly how the policy would function in practice — consulting the legal team on liability, highways on sight-lines and road safety, and health and safety on soil testing. The result is a process any resident can start today: identify a plot of apparent council land, submit photos through the council website, and work with a named council officer who checks ownership and resolves any snags until an applicant ends up with a licence spelling out exactly what they can and can’t do. 

Where Right to Grow stands today 

Around 18 months after the system went live, roughly 14 groups have applied. A couple of plots turned out not to be council land after all and are being redirected to alternatives; the rest are working through the process, including the neighbourly diplomacy of informing nearby residents — not everyone is thrilled to see a patch of lawn turned into wildflowers and vegetables. Two sites are now well and truly up and running, and Darren is hopeful that this will have extended to around a dozen by the end of the growing season. 

His advice to anyone expecting instant results: don’t. “Don’t expect it to be a quick process if it’s going to be done properly,” he said. “What you need to do is spend as long as it takes to get it through the council as a mechanism, and then when people start applying it, it goes at a pace — and it will speed up.” The slowness isn’t obstruction, he’s keen to stress, just the ordinary pace of council working through something genuinely new. 

What’s replicable: lessons for other communities 

Asked what other communities could realistically copy, Amie and Darren were careful to say not everything translates directly — but several principles clearly do: 

• Find or build a food partnership. “If you haven’t got a food partnership, I would look to get one,” Darren said, to bridge the gap between community groups and council officers who might otherwise never hear each other. 

• Build real community backing first. Darren described a cautionary case elsewhere where a council officer picked a site for a community garden without telling the community who’d be using it — it went nowhere. “You can’t impose it.” 

• Work with the council, not just at it. “We’ve had a Right to Grow that hasn’t worked, and we’ve got a Right to Grow that does,” Darren said. “The difference: we worked with the council to make it work.” 

• Tell the story the council needs to hear. Whether it’s saving money, empowering residents, or building community, Darren’s view is simple: “all of those stories” are true at once — so tell whichever one lands. 

• Show, don’t tell. As Amie put it, demonstrating a working project persuades people far more effectively than trying to talk them into enthusiasm. 

Get involved 

For anyone wanting to go deeper, Carbon Copy is recording a podcast episode with Hull Food Partnership exploring the story further — including the day-to-day projects and partnerships that don’t always make it into a single conversation. 

Watch the full workshop recording below and keep your eyes and ear peeled for the podcast episode when it lands.

Circling back to our Community-to-Community Workshop with Circular Malton & Norton 

How long does it take to move people to act? Well, based on our recent experience as hosts of Closing the Loop, the first in our series of Community-to-Community Workshops – roughly 90 minutes! At the end of the session, an incredible two-thirds of attendees said they were ready to try something new with their project.  

Led by facilitator Roy Kareem, with guest speaker Sue Jefferson, co-founder and chair of Circular Malton & Norton, the session took place online on Tuesday 29 September. 

Over the course of the evening, Sue told the story of how a small group of volunteers in rural North Yorkshire set out to build a genuinely circular economy town — one with no waste, thriving local businesses, and a community that actually wants to get involved. It’s a story with real setbacks, a near-implosion, and more than one unconventional idea (jam jars, anyone?). Here’s what came out of the conversation, in Sue’s own words. 

What is Circular Malton & Norton? 

Circular Malton & Norton is a grassroots initiative working to turn two neighbouring market towns in rural North Yorkshire into what Sue simply calls “a circular town” — one with no waste, where businesses and communities are thriving because everyone’s saving money, and where good green jobs mean local young people don’t have to move away to build a career. 

Sue co-founded the organisation after a career in corporate strategy, marketing, innovation and manufacturing. “Kind of change management is my background,” she explained — and that transformation mindset is exactly what she turned towards climate action closer to home. 

From climate overwhelm to a town-wide experiment. 

Sue didn’t start out as a climate campaigner. She described feeling “really kind of upset and quite overwhelmed” by climate change, and “really helpless” about what she personally could do — until she came across the circular economy as a model that wasn’t exclusionary: not just for people who could afford it, and carrying social and economic benefits alongside the environmental ones. 

That reframing led to a simple, bold question: “What if we created a circular economy town in rural North Yorkshire?” Market towns like Malton and Norton, she explained, carry many of the same pressures as cities — declining high streets, low-paid jobs, empty shops — plus extra rural challenges like limited transport. 

Speaking to the “hesitant majority.” 

One of the most useful ideas Sue shared was the concept of the hesitant majority: people who, as she put it, are “wanting to do something but are not.” Not out of apathy, but because, as she suspected, “life gets in the way.” Reaching that group, she argued, means roughly 70% of people need a completely different kind of invitation than the one typical environmental messaging offers. 

The approach Circular Malton & Norton settled on was purposeful communication: no jargon, and often no mention of “the environment” at all, at least not at first. Conversations start with something more immediate instead — making a difference, saving money on energy bills, cutting down on waste — and letting people’s own curiosity do the rest. 

Crucially, that honesty extends to admitting imperfection. One of Sue’s go-to lines when meeting people is disarmingly simple: “It takes all my effort to wash my yoghurt pots and put it in the right recycle bin.” People’s “shoulders relax” when they hear it, she says — they’re not being preached at, they’re being met as equals. It turned out to be true inside the organisation too: when the volunteer group measured their own carbon footprints, Sue admitted, “we found we were all above average.” 

Turning a high street shop into a circular hub. 

Belonging to a place, Sue found, had to be built — it didn’t exist as a slogan. The turning point was “Ryedale Remakes”, an upcycling shop and studio inspired by BBC daytime TV’s Money for Nothing, where discarded items get turned into something desirable. It launched in “a very tiny place with no heating at all,” staffed by volunteers with upcycling skills Sue didn’t have herself — she simply put a call out to the town for anyone who did. 

Against the odds, it became a genuine destination. The project has since moved to premises on the high street, rebranded as a circular hub, deliberately avoiding the look of a typical environmental project. Instead, an eye-catching window of upcycled furniture and items does the work of drawing people in. As Sue put it: “It’s a bit like a spider’s web. Once they’re in, we kind of go, let us tell you a bit more.” 

Three strands of change: energy, enterprise and everyday habits. 

As the organisation matured, its work settled into three parallel strands. The first is everyday high-street engagement: free fridges for surplus food, a Library of Things, and the shop itself, all lowering the barrier to getting involved. The second is an ambitious energy project — a community anaerobic digester that would turn local food waste into energy for nearby buildings instead of sending it to landfill or the grid. Three years in, it secured planning permission with no objections whatsoever, “a first in the whole anaerobic digester industry” according to Sue, and has since expanded into plans for renewables and a decarbonised, off-grid business park, backed by interest from private investors and GB Energy. 

The third strand is a business hub, helping local companies move past the sense that it’s “profit versus planet” and find a practical first step. Running all three in parallel matters to funders too, Sue noted: what both government and private investors want to see is something “scalable and replicable,” not a one-off. 

Growing pains: “We’d got a tiger by the tail.” 

Rapid success brought its own problems. “We were kind of growing so fast and so quickly,” Sue said, with more volunteers, more projects and more to report on “and frankly, we were falling over.” From the outside, the organisation looked like a success story; from the inside, she admitted, “we felt we were at risk of imploding”: the classic start-up-to-scale-up squeeze, or as she memorably put it, “we’d got a tiger by the tail.” 

The fix started with honest conversation — first with the board, then with volunteers who felt lost amid the growth. Sue credits one piece of change-management advice in particular: “Don’t ask what’s wrong, because you’re just going to get a whole list of stuff… if you ask what’s missing, people really work out what is missing.” The answers (better communication, more input into decisions, a clearer sense of the bigger ambition) fed into one of the most important pieces of work the organisation did: a facilitated workshop that distilled very different language from very different volunteers into five shared values, now used as a filter for anyone joining the team, staff and volunteers alike. 

Measuring impact with three jars and a handful of pebbles. 

With no budget for research and no obvious way to measure whether any of this was working, Circular Malton & Norton borrowed an idea familiar from motorway service stations: the three smiley-face buttons. They set up three jars, each labelled with how a visit to the shop had made someone feel; “no different,” “happier,” or “inspired to act,” and let visitors drop in a donated pebble. 

The results surprised even Sue: 72% of people chose “inspired to act.” That simple piece of evidence did double duty. It gave her something concrete to show funders, government contacts and local authorities, proving the project was reaching people who wanted to do something but didn’t know where to start. And it directly inspired a new initiative, the Inspired to Act programme: a booklet and website calendar signposting everything already happening locally, from repair cafes to volunteering opportunities, organised simply around whether someone wants to make, repair, live more consciously, or help shape change. 

Key takeaways for community climate projects. 

Sue’s advice, distilled, is useful well beyond one Yorkshire market town: 

• Be bold with your asks. Workshop participants reflected that bigger, more confident requests to funders, landowners and partners tend to land better than small, hedged ones — confidence in the project reads as confidence in the person being asked. 

• Don’t skip the values work. A facilitated exercise to agree shared values, even years into a project, can be “one of the most important pieces of work” an organisation does. 

• Use the support that already exists. Sue leaned on regional networks like Community First Yorkshire for help with funding applications, alongside sources such as National Lottery Awards for All and Net Zero Hubs for energy projects. 

• Lead with money, not morality. As Sue put it: “We don’t have to talk about the climate… we talk about this being a way to save money and be good to the planet,” adding that the real trick is “making it cool and fun to do that.” 

• Expect it to be a labour of love. “It’s a roller coaster because it’s highs and lows,” Sue said — so it helps to be clear on your own why, whatever that is. 

Get Involved 

If this has struck a chord — whether you’re just starting out or working through your own growing pains — Sue has said she’s happy to hear from people via the Circular Malton & Norton website. 

Watch the full event recording below, and keep an eye out for the upcoming Carbon Copy Podcast episode featuring some of the people directly involved locally.

How do some local climate initiatives achieve remarkable impact? We think we have some of the answers.

When Carbon Copy commissioned Eunomia to conduct research across the UK, our aim was simple. We wanted to identify the key factors behind successful projects and share practical advice for councils, communities and organisations to copy what’s working.  

Backed up by our national collection of over 600 stories, it was very apparent that project ‘success’ is about more than reducing carbon emissions and that working together is essential for achieving remarkable impacts.  

The result was to define success in terms of a Changeprint and turn the insights into a high-impact action guide. 

In March 2026 we published From Footprint to Changeprint: High Impact Local Climate Action Guide. The report identifies twelve success factors, which fall into three core characteristics: a mindset of Abundance, a sense of Belonging and a Purposeful approach.  

Less than six months since the report became available, it has already been accessed by over 550 individuals, representing around 500 different groups and organisations across the country. We’ve heard from many that the report resonates strongly with their work, and that they are using it as a way to establish where they can improve and grow their impact. 

Sue Jefferson, cofounder of Circular Malton & Norton said: 

Can I say what an EXCELLENT guide you have created… I was nodding, making notes, having aha moments as it articulated where our gaps are… this is now to become our organisation’s go-to guide.” 

From Footprint to Changeprint has been shared with over 1000 local People’s Emergency Briefing organisers, and several hundred Great Big Green Week event hosts. Our goal was to support those whose interests and ambitions around local climate action had been sparked by participating in these high-profile national events. 

The response has been fantastic, with dozens more people accessing the report and sharing their thoughts with us. The guide is proving very useful for: 

•  Finding inspiration: “We have used some of the case studies – particularly from circular economy projects – as inspiration for how to kick off similar projects in our area”.  

• Involving more people: “It reinforces the view that we engage with the majority by being concrete and practical.  Addressing the everyday effects of climate in order to find non-partisan entry points”.  

• Aligning different groups, “Good to hear what techniques are useful in engaging with a diverse community… The document will be a useful reference and planning tool”. 

• And copying successful projects, “As a recently formed local Climate Action group (as a follow-on from the People’s Emergency Briefing film) seeing projects up and running with a blueprint to work from is perfect”.  

If you think your project, group or organisation could benefit from this practical guide to working together effectively, and you’ve not yet had the chance to check it out, it’s still available to download free from our website. 

If you’re looking for what to do next, we’re now giving you the opportunity to put this learning into practice – taking the findings of the research and applying them to real-world situations through a series of free online Community-to-Community Workshops.  

Whether you’ve recently started or joined a local group, or whether you are an established organisation looking to take its work to the next level – these workshops are a valuable opportunity to make connections, learn from each other and from the real-life example of a high-impact project. 

Find out more. 

How joining up individual nature projects has much bigger benefits for communities and nature.

Local nature-based solutions at a landscape level are one of the most powerful ways to tackle the twin crises of climate change and nature loss whilst providing multiple benefits for people as well as wildlife. From restoring woodlands and wetlands to bringing back beavers and rebuilding marine habitats, the idea is to take a more interconnected approach in working with and alongside nature.

Even at scale, we can become focused on an individual intervention: planting trees here, restoring a riverbank there, reintroducing a species somewhere else. These projects can be valuable in their own right, but nature does not work in our neat project boundaries.

Rivers connect hillsides to estuaries. Woodlands influence water flowing into the sea. Wetlands affect flood risk downstream. Farmers, communities, businesses and wildlife all depend on the same landscapes, even if they experience them in very different ways.

If nature-based solutions are going to help us respond to climate change and biodiversity loss at the scale required, we need to think bigger locally. We need to think in landscapes and where land meets water, in catchments and seascapes too.

From individual projects to connected systems

A landscape perspective begins with a simple shift in mindset. Instead of asking, “What nature-based solution could work in this specific area?” we ask, “What is happening across the whole system and how can nature help us achieve multiple outcomes at once?”

This connected approach matters because the environmental challenges we face are rarely confined to one place. Take flooding. A flood risk problem in a town may have its origins much further upstream, where land management influences how quickly rainwater reaches a river. Improving soils, restoring wetlands, reconnecting floodplains or changing woodland management could all influence what happens downstream.

Or take declining coastal ecosystems. Looking only at the sea might lead us to focus on marine restoration. But what happens on the land can determine what reaches the coast through rivers: nutrients, sediment, pollutants and freshwater. The health of the sea depends partly on decisions being made many miles inland.

And then there are people. Landscapes are not simply collections of habitats. They are places where people farm, work, travel, live, recreate and build communities. Any wider conservation approach that ignores these relationships is unlikely to succeed over the long term.

Taking a wholescape approach

Rather than treating nature recovery as a series of isolated sites, WWF-UK is working across whole areas in Norfolk, Pembrokeshire and the Firth of Forth. Its innovative Wholescape Programme is looking beyond individual habitats to bringing together land, rivers, coasts, seas and the communities that depend on them.

In Norfolk, for example, the challenge is particularly interconnected. The county is an important food-producing landscape, contains freshwater and coastal ecosystems, and is vulnerable to climate impacts because of its low-lying geography.

WWF-UK, working with delivery partners Norfolk Rivers Trust is exploring how working at landscape and seascape levels helps identify solutions that benefit nature, climate and people simultaneously. A wetland is not just a wetland. It can be wildlife habitat, flood infrastructure, carbon storage, water-quality improvement and a place for people to connect with nature. A river is not just a channel for carrying water or dumping waste. It’s part of a system connecting farms, communities, freshwater habitats, estuaries and the sea. A farm is not simply a site for food production. How it’s managed influences local biodiversity, water quality, carbon capture, flood risk and the resilience of the wider landscape.

Shaping seascapes on dry land

The No Trees No Seas campaign by Plant One in Cornwall takes this connected-systems idea and makes it particularly tangible. Its central message is deliberately provocative: the key to healing our seas lies on the land.

At first glance, restoring woodland and restoring marine ecosystems might appear to be completely separate activities. One belongs in the hills and valleys; the other belongs beneath the waves.

But follow the water. Rain falls on woodland and soils, enters streams and rivers, travels through catchments and eventually reaches estuaries and the sea. What happens along that journey affects the health of downstream ecosystems.

The campaign describes these connections through the idea of a ‘flowscape’: a living system in which life and energy flow from forest floors into headwaters, rivers and estuaries, out towards the ocean and back again. It argues that Britain contains hundreds of these connected flowscapes, each linking a headwater catchment to the sea.

This is the kind of perspective that can transform how we think about nature-based solutions. Planting or restoring woodland is no longer simply about putting trees on land. In the right location, restoring native, species-rich woodland can help influence water flows, reduce erosion and sediment movement, support biodiversity and improve the conditions that ultimately affect downstream freshwater and marine habitats.

The No Trees No Seas campaign highlights the connections between forests, rivers, fish, seabirds and marine ecosystems, and is using this thinking to guide woodland restoration in Cornwall.

Once we see the connections, the question changes from “Where should we plant trees?” to “Where could woodland restoration create the greatest benefits across the whole system?” That’s a more interesting question with a much bigger potential impact.

Collaborating with nature

The same landscape thinking can apply in our towns and cities too, as the Ealing Beaver Project demonstrates in urban Greenford, London. In October 2023, a family of Eurasian beavers was introduced in a 10-hectare site within the local Horsenden Hill landscape.

Beavers are not simply another species to add to a list. They are ecosystem engineers. Through their feeding and dam-building activities, they alter water movement and create a mosaic of ponds, wetlands, deadwood, shrubs and woodland.

The Ealing project has three explicit objectives: mitigating flooding, boosting biodiversity and engaging local people with nature and nature-based solutions. This combination is significant. A conventional conservation project might have focused primarily on the ecological benefits of bringing beavers back. But the Ealing project is asking a broader question: how can a keystone species help an urban community become more resilient whilst also restoring biodiversity?

That is a landscape question. The site itself occupies a low-lying basin, making water management particularly relevant. The project is investigating how beavers can help mitigate flooding and drought while monitoring their effects within an urban catchment.

There’s another benefit that is sometimes overlooked: imagination. Seeing beavers living in London challenges the idea that nature recovery belongs somewhere remote and rural. It demonstrates that nature-based landscape solutions can happen in places where millions of people live.

Bringing landscape thinking into your community

Carbon Copy is keen to help you bring this kind of connected approach to implementing nature projects in our own area. We are hosting a Community-to-Community Workshop where you can learn directly from those who have successfully implemented landscape thinking to connecting nature-based solutions. Harborough Woodland is a community organisation working with partners in Leicestershire to plant more trees, reduce local flood risk and to boost biodiversity in ways that work for communities and wildlife.

If you are involved in individual nature-based solutions and interested in a more joined-up local landscape approach, then this free online session on October 20 might be for you!

Find out more and register.  

We’re launching an innovative pilot series of Commmunity-to-Community Workshops to catalyse local climate action. 

With generous support from the National Lottery Community Fund, we are working with four highly successful local initiatives from across England to accelerate peer-to-peer learning and the spread of place-based innovation across the UK. 

In addition to the useful resources and inspiring content about collective local climate and nature projects that we share, a recent stakeholder survey highlighted the demand for more opportunities to learn directly from those involved.  

These workshops build on the recent research report and high-impact local action guide, From Footprint to Changeprint, commissioned by Carbon Copy. This guide has been used extensively this year as a local climate action resource, with over 550 downloads by hundreds of different organisations. Combined with peer-to-peer learning, these Community-to-Community Workshops are designed to strengthen the factors for success in each participants’ own work. 

Our approach is based on the fundamental notion that copying is human nature, and therefore, the our work is underpinned by the idea that the fastest way to accelerate change is to share it. These innovative workshops are designed to help people adapt what’s working elsewhere to their local context so that it spreads. 

Working with professional facilitator Roy Kareem (formerly of the Centre for Sustainable Energy and Bright Green Future), this mini-series of online Community-to-Community Workshops are hoped to be a pilot for an expanded series in the future. We’ll feature four very different high-impact organisations over four weeks, starting Tuesday 29 September. 

All the workshop guests are trailblazers who are implementing innovative, big ideas. 

The first guest project, featured in the workshop on September 29, will be Circular Malton & Norton; the UK’s first circular economy market town. This lively session will provide insight into linking different eco-groups, projects and businesses to create a fully joined-up circular economy locally. 

On October 5, Hull Food Partnership will join a session about sustainable food systems and their pioneering implementation of a Right To Grow policy in Hull; the first city in the UK with a community right to grow. 

Then, on October 13, guests from Cambridgeshire County Council will deliver a session about the Swaffham Prior Heat Network – a rural community whose reliance on heating oil is being transformed through a shared ground source heat pump system; the first village in the UK reliant on oil to switch. 

Finally, on October 20, participants will learn about nature-based solutions to flooding and climate change, from Leicestershire-based community project, Harborough Woodland; a pioneering programme that’s taking a whole landscape approach to join up individual nature projects. 

Carbon Copy’s co-founder Ric Casale said: 

“We know that hearing real-life stories about people coming together to take action for climate and nature can be hugely inspiring. But sometimes just hearing the story can leave you with more questions than answers. How can we do the same where we live and work? What are the key success factors? Can we make a similar difference in our area? 
 
“These Community-to-Community Workshops draw on new research findings and practical insights from our High-Impact Local Action Guide, as well as groundbreaking examples from inspiring projects, to help participants feel empowered and motivated to copy successful projects. We’re hugely grateful to the National Lottery Community Fund for their support, which will enable us to reach hundreds of new local changemakers across England.” 

Learn more and register. 

How the Right to Grow could help your community reap the benefits of locally produced food. 

Could unused council land become somewhere for communities to grow their own food? That’s the idea behind the community Right to Grow, a policy that makes it easier for local people to access suitable public land for food growing. At a time when the UK relies heavily on imported food, it could also help communities produce more food locally and build greater food resilience.

The UK imports around 40% of its food overall, but this figure jumps substantially when it comes to fruit and veg. The latest figures put vegetable imports at just under 50%, and fruit at a whopping 80%.  

The reasons behind this are complex, but whatever the cause, this reliance on foreign food puts us all at a far greater risk of shortages than a more self-sufficient nation. 

What is the community Right to Grow?

The majority of people in the UK live in towns and cities. Whilst some have access to a garden or outdoor space, many live in flats and apartments and have no space to grow food. 

Enter Incredible Edible. The movement, founded in Todmorden, Yorkshire, has now spread all over the world, and focuses on encouraging people to grow their own fresh fruit and veg anywhere where there is free space. Over the last few years, Incredible Edible has led the campaign for places around the UK to implement a community Right to Grow. 

The community Right to Grow is a policy designed to make it easier for people to access suitable council-owned land to grow food. So far adopted by Hull, Cumberland, St Albans, Southwark and several other councils, it creates a simpler mechanism through which local people can apply to use available public land for planting and growing produce.

Often, a local food partnership is involved with setting up the policy – working directly with the local council and food-related organisations to put the application process and mechanisms in place.  

Read more about food partnerships on our action page here. 

The benefits of a Right to Grow extend beyond producing more food locally. Making unused land available for community food growing can reduce maintenance requirements for councils, help people develop growing and horticultural skills, and create opportunities for neighbours to connect. It can also give people without their own gardens access to growing space and help more people understand where their food comes from.

How unused land can become community growing space

There are many projects that have taken advantage of disused space for food growing, without an “official” community Right to Grow. 

In London, Global Generation has been creating urban gardens on disused land since 2004. Working in particular with children and families, the charity is helping to improve access to fresh food, as well as teaching cooking and food preparation skills and supporting the confidence and mental health of participants. 

Manchester Urban Diggers are helping refugees and asylum seekers connect with new people and share their heritage through food, with the Stronger Roots project, hosted at an urban garden on a former bowling green. 

In Cornwall, Chyan is a community farm and permaculture project, which uses a formerly overgrown and unloved field to run growing projects including Roots and Seeds, a volunteer gardening group; and a Nature Playgroup, for families with young children. 

These projects show what communities can achieve with unused land, but they can require considerable time and determination to secure access and permission. A community Right to Grow creates a clearer route for doing this, usually through an application hosted by the local authority or food partnership, with a defined process from initial enquiry to implementation.

Learn how to bring the Right to Grow to your community

Carbon Copy is hosting a Community-to-Community Workshop where you can learn directly from those who have successfully implemented this kind of initiative. Hull Food Partnership was instrumental in establishing the community Right to Grow in Hull – the first place in the UK to implement this policy.

If you are involved with a food partnership, or a local group that would benefit from access to land for food growing, then you might benefit from watching our recent Community-to-Community Workshop with Hull Food Partnership, where members of the team behind the Right to Grow gave us firsthand insights into how it all happened.

Find out more and watch now.

How communities like yours could benefit from district heating systems.

District heating systems, also known as heat networks, provide heating and hot water to multiple homes and buildings from a shared source instead of each property relying on its own boiler or heating system. For rural communities that still depend on expensive, polluting heating oil, community heat networks could offer a cleaner and more reliable alternative.

Imagine houses across England kept warm through cold, wet winters by renewable energy that’s sourced locally and piped under the street to individual homes. You might think district heating is, well… a pipe dream. Or, if you’re familiar with the government’s new heat network zoning strategy, that it’s something reserved for large towns and cities. On both counts, think again.

About 800,000 households in England– many of them rural – still rely on oil for heating [Calculated using English Housing Survey 2023-4 and 2021 Census]. It’s messy, expensive, and bad for the environment, pushing out more emissions per unit of heat than even gas. And while homes on gas are protected to some extent by the energy price cap, oil prices are high and volatile, making heating oil users especially vulnerable to fuel poverty. It’s also unreliable, with householders expected to make sure their own fuel supplies remain topped up. 

The government is aiming for heat networks to supply 20 per cent of England’s heat demand by 2050, a significant increase from the current 3 percent, focusing on major towns and cities. Rural communities are not included in this strategy. But thanks to the collaborative efforts of local community groups and councils, supported by energy co-operatives and charities, some rural communities up and down the country are already planning to create heat networks of their own. 

Developing a community heat network can be complex, particularly when it comes to identifying suitable locations, funding and viable business models. The Community Heat Development Unit (CHDU) was an 18-month research and innovation project specifically set up to help communities explore these challenges.

It was specifically set up to help communities develop their own heat networks, using data to identify good locations and viable business models. It’s led by the Sharenergy cooperative, with partners Community Energy England, Marches Energy Advice (retrofit/insulation experts) and Carbon Alternatives (technical heat network design), with funding from the Energy Industry Voluntary Redress Scheme. 

Swaffham Prior in East Cambridgeshire shows what a rural community heat network can look like in practice. Swaffham Prior Community Land Trust and Cambridgeshire County Council (CCC) have worked together to offer a green heating alternative to oil. Using ground source heat pumps with backup from electric boilers and a nearby solar farm, sustainable thermal energy is now being pumped under the streets into homes, with a commitment to connect nearly all the homes in the village to the scheme.

How are rural communities developing heat networks? 

Swaffham Prior, the UK’s first rural heat network, is the pathfinder for a handful of other rural English communities in Northumberland, Staffordshire and Hertfordshire, which are now actively trying to clear the same feasibility and funding hurdles. The goal is affordable, dependable clean energy, and an end to fuel poverty. 

No one is pretending it’s easy or straightforward. Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire has been pursuing a community wind turbine and heat pump heating network, run by Shropshire & Telford Community Energy, Sharenergy, and Lightfoot Enterprises. After winning planning permission for the 900kW community wind turbine in 2025, building that into a full heat network has proved much harder. The heat network side is currently stalled on funding and pipe costs. 

Haydon Bridge in Northumberland is another pioneer village keen to promote the deployment of rural district heating owned by communities. The project, led by heat network consultancy Reheat, working with the rural community-support charity Community Action Northumberland and the Rural Design Centre, is at feasibility stage. 

Bioregional, who led development of the BedZED eco-village and the One Planet Living sustainability framework, has worked with four local communities across England to explore the feasibility of developing community-led, net-zero-carbon compatible heating networks: Whittington and Fisherwick in Staffordshire; Shenstone in Staffordshire; Brightwell-cum-Sotwell in Oxfordshire, and Grand Union Community at Kings Langley in Hertfordshire. 

What does a community heat network need to succeed?

Creating a successful community heat network involves much more than choosing a renewable heat source. Projects need to understand local energy demand, identify suitable sources of heat, develop a financially viable model and, crucially, secure support from the people who will use it.

Work with communities across England has included modelling the energy demand of existing buildings, exploring different local heat sources and developing technically and economically feasible solutions for community-wide heat networks.

Community engagement is equally important. Residents need to understand what a new heating system could mean for them, including potential benefits such as long-term price stability, lower-carbon energy, opportunities for local ownership and potential investment.

In many cases, local Climate Action Networks can provide the civic infrastructure that makes community energy projects possible: trusted local networks that can knock on doors, hold public meetings and build the kind of community buy-in that helped Swaffham Prior get its scheme over the line

Learn from Swaffham Prior

Carbon Copy hosted a Community-to-Community Workshop with representatives of Swaffham Prior Heat Network, who shared how they have successfully implemented their own renewable energy heat network. If you’re keen to explore how your community could do the same, then watch the recording, available online now!

Watch now!

How you can take a local economy full circle.

A local circular economy keeps products, materials and resources in use for longer through repair, reuse, sharing, resale and recycling. Instead of valuable resources becoming waste, communities can create local systems that keep them circulating, supporting local businesses and jobs while reducing waste and environmental impact.

From repair cafés and tool libraries to refill shops, community composting and second-hand marketplaces, many of the building blocks of a circular economy already exist in communities across the UK. The opportunity is to connect them and create a stronger local system. 

What is a circular economy? 

In a circular economy, products and materials are kept in use for as long as possible through processes such as repair, reuse, remanufacture, recycling and composting. This reduces the need to continually extract new resources and prevents useful materials from becoming waste.

This is very different from the dominant ‘take-make-waste’ economy of today, where raw materials and natural resources are extracted, used once and then discarded as waste. 

Most of us think that a circular economy is about eliminating waste and pollution, and we would be right. But there’s another, equally important element. By shifting from a take-make-waste linear economy to one that is circular, we also support natural processes and regenerate nature. 

For example, food production based on circular economy principles involves moving away from soil extraction and towards soil regeneration. Regenerative food production practices reduce the need for polluting fertilizers, fossil fuels and pesticides to boost crop yields, relying instead on healthy soils to grow more food. 

Circular economies can work particularly well at a local level because many of the activities that keep resources in use, including sharing, repairing, reusing and recycling, benefit from being close to the people and businesses using them. In contrast, take-make-waste economies often use cheap global shipping to extract raw materials in one country, manufacture products in another and dump waste in a third.  

What are the benefits of a local circular economy? 

Underpinned by the transition to renewable energy and its positive impact on nature, a local circular economy is a resilient system that is good for people, place and the surrounding environment. Benefits include: 

Stronger Local Jobs: Sorting, upcycling and remanufacturing create steady jobs that cannot be easily outsourced overseas or replaced by AI. 

Affordability: Extending product lifespans, easier access to repair, using goods instead of buying them, all act as money savers.  

Less Waste: Reducing waste is an issue people feel very strongly about. Public polling shows how much people in the UK hate waste and how ready they are for greater ambition on using resources more efficiently. 

Community Building: Tool libraries, clothing swaps, and local food composting systems rely entirely on nearby neighbourhoods and people working together. 

Community Wealth: The money spent and benefits circulate locally within the community and with local businesses, rather than leaking out to multinational corporations.    

Supply Security: Reduced reliance on global imports, long supply chains and exposed international shipping routes lowers the supply risks and price volatility. 

Reduced Emissions: Extending product usage cuts carbon emissions from raw manufacturing, and keeping reuse and recycling networks local cuts polluting transport emissions.  

Nature Replenishment: Reducing waste, pollution and emissions all help in restoring local water, soil and air quality as well as the environment more generally for both people and wildlife. 

What does a local circular economy look like? 

A local circular economy isn’t one individual project or business. It’s a network of organisations and services that help people keep products and resources in use for longer. Repair cafés, tool libraries, second-hand retailers, refill shops and composting projects can all form part of the same local circular economy. They can be grouped based on what they do and together they grow into a comprehensive and thriving circular economy:

Maintenance, repair and refurbishment: These organisations focus on extending the useful life of products, keeping items functioning so people don’t have to purchase brand-new replacements. Repair Café Wales, for example, supports a network of 150 individual repair cafes across Wales. Electronics refurbishers such as Fixing Factories repair small household appliances and electronics, helping to tackle e-waste. Community tool libraries like Edinburgh Tool Library act as local hubs where people not only share tools but also have tools repaired. Craft-based businesses – cobblers, tailors and furniture upholsterers – extend the lifespans of favourite footwear, clothing and expensive furniture. 

Sharing and providing ‘products as a service’: Instead of buying a new bike or car or piece of equipment, people share or pay to use these products for the service they provide and for a limited time only. This maximises the use of these products while incentivising the owners to maintain them to increase their lifecycle. Library of Things have hubs across London, enabling locals to borrow a variety of things related to DIY, cleaning, gardening and more. Devizes Swap Shop and other sharing hubs are places to swap items within the local community, from toys to sports equipment. Local transit operations such as TrydaNi Car Clubs allow multiple users to share a single fleet of vehicles, providing people in rural areas with access to a car without the cost of owning one. Zero-waste and refill shops require customers to bring containers with them, sharing their containers with the retailer to eliminate single-use packaging in the outlet. 

Reuse, resale and redistribution: These operations help maintain and grow the second-hand market, transferring ownership of unwanted but perfectly functional goods to new users. Charity shops and vintage retailers on the high street are very popular examples, with Charity Super.Mkt growing into a multi-brand department store for all things charity fashion. Upcycling workshops run by artisans and small manufacturers transform unwanted products into higher-value items (e.g. New 2 You turns old furniture items into interesting new pieces). Renew Hub is an example of a local marketplace that supports resale of used goods, helping people to reuse donated and discarded items on a huge scale across Greater Manchester. More generally, local scrap yards, second-hand building centres and salvage shops recover raw materials and reclaim functional parts, for reselling and redistribution. 

Organic recycling and regeneration: These operations safely return biological materials back to nature, helping to restore local ecosystems. Facilities with commercial composting facilities or anaerobic digesters collect local restaurant and household food scraps, converting them into biogas for energy and nutrient-rich fertiliser for local agriculture. For example, the Humberston Eco Conservation Centre uses a novel micro anaerobic digester to create bio-energy from local garden and food waste. 

How can you build a local circular economy?

Building a local circular economy doesn’t necessarily mean starting everything from scratch. Your community may already have repair cafés, reuse projects, sharing schemes, second-hand businesses or recycling initiatives that form some of the building blocks. The next step is to understand what’s already happening locally, identify the gaps and find opportunities for organisations to work together.

Every local circular economy will look different because it needs to reflect the resources, businesses and needs of the community. However, there are common approaches and lessons that communities can learn from one another.

On 29 September 2026, we hosted an online workshop with Circular Malton & Norton. In Closing The Loop, we explored how these elements come together in practice and effective ways of collaborating across an entire system. 

To watch the recording of this Community-to-Community Workshop about expanding your local circular economy, click here. 

Art has always helped us make sense of the world around us, and climate change is increasingly becoming part of that story. From theatres and festivals adapting to extreme weather to artists using their work to explore the climate crisis, the relationship between art and climate change is growing in both practical and creative ways.

We spoke to Arts Council England and looked at projects across the UK to explore how the arts are responding to climate change, supporting community resilience and helping more people engage with climate action.

How is climate change affecting the arts? 

For many of us, summer is synonymous with festivals. Music, poetry, comedy, theatre – there’s an event on the calendar for almost every taste. But how do these events, and the artists and production companies behind them, cope when faced with extreme weather? We spoke to Robin Lyons, Senior Officer for Environmental Responsibility at Arts Council England, to learn more. 

“Operationally, climate change is having very real impacts. We only need look at the recent heatwaves May through July to see examples of this. We’ve seen closures and changes to opening hours, challenges around performer welfare (including a need for performer hydration breaks), the disruption of transport infrastructure which is critical for our sector and of course affects our audiences, visitors, and creatives and particularly our touring productions, and we see financial impacts ranging from ticket cancellations and reduced visitor numbers through to increased building management and cooling costs… 

“But at the same time as there may be negative impacts the sector is facing, we should also recognise that cultural organisations are increasingly showing themselves to be forms of public infrastructure, and a part of community resilience. A really positive example is the Cool Off in Culture campaign, where cultural venues across the country are opening their doors as free-to-use cool spaces for the public, during periods of extreme heat.” 

Climate storytelling and the arts

Climate change is affecting the arts in two important ways: it is changing the conditions in which artists and cultural organisations operate, while also increasingly becoming a subject for creative work itself. The arts have long been intertwined with social change, politics and protest, and the climate movement is no different. Robin also had some thoughts on this: 

“There are far too many brilliant examples of climate storytelling for me to mention any individually, so instead I’d like to highlight the Climate Playwriting Prize, which is a partnership between Shakespeare’s Globe, Climate Spring and Fern Culture. Its aim is to uncover exciting new plays about the climate crisis, and to support them to find their audiences. Submissions are open this year until the 1st of September. 

“I mention the climate playwriting prize because it demonstrates in a high-profile way, how the sector itself is actively now investing in climate storytelling in a way that perhaps wasn’t commonplace ten or fifteen years ago. And this isn’t by accident; this is because the sector recognises its own strengths, and recognises the importance of climate storytelling. And what’s perhaps even more compelling, is that research suggests that audiences themselves want more climate change content in culture.” 

This desire for more climate-related work is already being acknowledged by companies like Script6, the Norfolk-based production team behind the podcast soap opera, Parklife, which Carbon Copy is supporting; Manchester-based theatre company Ergon Theatre, composers like Sarah Nicolls and Erik Ian Walker and many other performing arts and cultural institutions. It also speaks to the bigger picture: that climate change is now affecting every part of our lives, and therefore whatever story is being told, there is a climate narrative embedded within it. 

How local arts organisations can adapt to climate change

The arts are not all about headline acts and sell-out shows. Like climate action, much of the work that has the most profound and meaningful impact is happening at a more local level. In smaller galleries, community theatres and through passionate volunteers and creatives. That the venues are less high-profile does not mean they are less affected by climate change. In many cases, community arts organisations are wrangling tighter budgets and older buildings, making their need for adaptation even greater. 

For local arts organisations, adapting to climate change can mean understanding how risks such as extreme heat and flooding could affect venues, audiences, performers and the wider community. Robin had these thoughts and advice for local creative projects: 

“Certainly, the principles of assessing risk apply to most – that is first to consider your community’s vulnerabilities from social and infrastructural standpoints. To then understand what climate impacts or hazards (e.g. heat, flood) might have an effect on those vulnerabilities. And then finally, to consider how exposed to those impacts you might be on both a national and hyper-local scale. That will help you to better understand what your version of adaptation and risk might want to be centred around. 

“It’s also vital to focus on collaboration amongst your local arts ecology: finding opportunities to share knowledge and experience of climate change impacts and sharing both successes and failures in attempts to improve environmental responsibility. 

“It’s important to be constantly asking the question ‘who is missing from the conversation?’ to ensure that stakeholders at all levels and from all backgrounds can have an input. 

“This is something that our sector has actually been doing for a long time already through networks such as GMAST, or SAIL. These are creative networks that support local culture-based climate action, and recognise the strength in collaborative resilience. There are networks like these found in multiple parts of the UK, and you can find these on SAIL’s website – under the title Project Constellation: UK Sustainability Network of Networks.” 

How art can inspire local climate action

In Carbon Copy’s new report about the characteristics shared by some of the most successful local climate action projects, we uncovered that creativity was one of the twelve attributes we found enabled initiatives to thrive. This doesn’t always mean creativity in the sense of being an arts-focused project, but in many cases the arts have been used as a way to engage more people and to communicate complex issues. 

Power Station is a project led by artists Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell. The pair raised money through creative projects to help install rooftop solar for themselves and their neighbours on their street in East London. Listen to Hilary speak about this inspiring initiative on the Carbon Copy Podcast. 

Scrap Antics is a Dundee-based CIC rescuing materials from landfill and running playful, creative sessions with people of all ages to create awareness and engagement with issues around waste. 

Hwb y Gors in South Wales is a community arts, environment and enterprise centre run by Awal Aman Tawe and funded by profits from renewable energy projects. The centre provides a venue for a wide array of classes and workshops, helping to support local wellbeing, to bring cultural enrichment and to provide education about climate change. 

The cultural sector is not immune to the effects of climate change, but it’s clear there are many ways in which museums, venues, artists and musicians can help to address its causes and build resilience locally. Whether it’s practical adaptation to protect artistic institutions, or the creative outputs themselves prompting discussion and action to tackle the crisis, art definitely has a climate story. 

Discover more climate stories like these to inspire you at carboncopy.eco/initiatives. 

Football and climate change are becoming increasingly difficult to separate. Major tournaments can generate millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, while rising temperatures and extreme weather are changing the conditions in which the game is played.

But football can also be part of the response. From grassroots clubs cutting emissions to fans calling for greater climate leadership from the sport, football has the reach to bring climate action into communities around the world.

What an unforgettable World Cup feast of football over the summer and fantastic final four teams!

The sporting extravaganza brought people together in enjoyment and celebration but has also cast a long shadow. There were moments of indefensible interference and ill-treatment, from Trump intervening to overturn a red card to barring a Somali World Cup referee to ugly scenes by losing teams. There were moments of brilliance from Bellingham to Lamine Yamal, big impacts from the likes of Cape Verde and Norway, and the highest-scoring third-place playoff. But for all the breathless excitement this tournament generated the lasting harm is one of breathtaking pollution.

Beyond what happened on the pitch, the tournament also raised a much bigger question about football and climate change: what is the environmental cost of staging an event on this scale?

The 2026 World Cup was said to be the most polluting ever. Conservative estimates of about 9 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions is the same as 21 gas-fired power plants running for a year or driving 1.9 million cars for a year. For comparison, the 2024 Paris Olympics emitted one-fifth of the atmospheric pollution, around 1.8 million tonnes.

How is climate change affecting football?

Some, perhaps many, will say it was worth it. Many would also say that the ‘hydration breaks’ midway through each game broke up the entertainment of watching the match, turning football from game to groan.

But even if FIFA exploited the climate rationale for even more ad money, the main point about the negative impact of climate change on playing and enjoying sport still exists.

As we’ve experienced firsthand from the unbearable heatwaves this year, the world is getting hotter and is threatening the safety of us all, football players and fans included.

In looking back at the World Cup, where should our focus be for the football season ahead? Being part of the solution or taking an ever-increasing emissions approach that increases the risk of harm to players and the sport itself?

Football’s climate impact doesn’t reset each season

At the start of every new football season the points tally resets to zero: last season’s highs cannot be banked and thankfully the lows count for nothing.

Climate heating does not allow for a clean slate. We start every new season in nature from the cumulative total of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. The points tally, measured in temperature degrees of warming, builds on the emissions of previous seasons over decades.

If we are to tackle this accumulated heat together, the football community thinks the world’s favourite sport should play a leading role. A 3,600-person fan survey by Football For Future across the USA, Canada, and Mexico found 96% of Mexican, 90% of Canadian, and 87% of USA fans believed the World Cup should be a global role model for climate leadership.

Unfortunately for all of us, Gianni Infantino and FIFA do not share this perspective and that’s not how it played out this summer. We don’t simply get to reset the score in August and forget the results of the World Cup that we don’t like.

How grassroots football clubs can take climate action

The solutions lie closer to home than you may think. Local sports clubs have always been natural community hubs and can be central to communities making change. As always, fans play a pivot role; not only during a game but also in their club’s efforts to address the causes of climate change and impacts of climate-related damage and disruptions.

Grassroots football clubs can reduce their environmental impact in practical ways, from installing solar panels and insulating clubhouses against heat and cold to reducing transport emissions when teams travel to away games. These changes can cut running costs as well as emissions, allowing clubs to invest savings back into their facilities and communities.

In an exciting new project led by Climate Outreach and Pledgeball, Gamechanging Futures will showcase how grassroot sport can bring people together to strengthen communities and take action on climate change. The initiative works with six local sports clubs across England that include Bexhill United Football Club, FC United of Manchester and Hastings United Football Club, helping each club become a thriving community climate hub.

There are green shoots everywhere. Carbon Copy shares hundreds of local climate action projects from across the UK, from football to fashion to food, where the stories told are by people who don’t come from typical environmental organisations and the positive impacts go way beyond emissions reductions.

Discover different kinds of local climate stories to inspire you at carboncopy.eco/initiatives

How football can inspire wider climate action

Central to the conversation about how football contributes to climate action is how the sport can energise others to contribute to a more regenerative world.

By translating climate science into football’s language and working alongside football, we can without doubt achieve bigger climate goals and avoid more own goals.

Advancing climate action through sport, entertainment and other avenues makes perfect sense. In finding common ground, connecting with much loved activities like football, and focusing on the relatable impacts of climate change, it’s possible to engage a much wider audience in action that safeguards the things we love to do.

How is climate change affecting food security in the UK, and could stronger local food systems help reduce the risk of future food shortages and empty supermarket shelves?

The image is seared into recent memory: early 2023, and British supermarkets were rationing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and courgettes — two or three items per customer. Social media filled with photos of bare shelves where salad vegetables should have been. The official explanation was “adverse weather conditions in southern Europe and north Africa.” Which was true, as far as it went, but that wasn’t nearly far enough. 

The supply chains behind British food are climate-exposed. The UK imports 45 to 50 per cent of its food, and the proportion rises sharply in winter when domestic growing capacity falls. British supermarkets are dependent on growing regions like southern Spain, Morocco, Portugal and Italy which are now experiencing some of the most rapid climate deterioration in the world. The Mediterranean basin is warming about 20 per cent faster than the global average. Once-in-a-generation droughts now arrive every few years. 

The 2023 shortage wasn’t a unique event. It was a preview of what’s coming. And it’s not just an import problem: UK domestic production is also increasingly exposed. Our 2023 wheat harvest was one of the worst on record — a wet, cold spring delayed planting, a difficult summer compounded the damage, and yields fell sharply. That fed directly into higher flour and bread prices. In 2024, the UK experienced its wettest 18-month period since records began. Farmers couldn’t get machinery onto their water-logged land at the right time and some crops simply rotted in the ground. 

Due to unseasonal frosts and unpredictable rainfall, the growing window that farmers and supermarket buyers plan around is becoming less reliable. That also creates gaps: not always empty shelves, but reduced availability, higher prices, and more imported substitutions precisely when domestic supply should be at its peak. 

Why climate change puts UK food security at risk

Modern supermarket supply chains are engineered for efficiency, not resilience. Just-in-time logistics, minimal stockholding, tight supplier contracts — these worked well when conditions were stable and predictable. Now they are neither. What we saw in 2023: empty bays and rationing notices within days of harvest failures we’d never even heard about, is not just a logistics failure or a supermarket problem but a climate impact, arriving in the most visible way possible — in our weekly shop. 

How serious is it? A national security assessment by the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in January 2026 warns that global ecosystem collapse is likely to trigger severe food shortages in the UK within five years. Professor Paul Behrens, British Academy Global Professor at the Oxford Martin School, has delivered this stark food security warning in The People’s Emergency Briefing, now being screened in local communities all over the UK: 

“One estimate suggests that about a third of the food price inflation that we saw in 2023 was driven by extreme weather events that are now becoming the norm. And when families can’t afford to feed their children, societies break down.

“The good news is that the research is crystal clear on what we need to do, and fortunately, it’s healthier for us. We need a great food transformation, built on four main pillars: shifting to plant rich diets; reducing food waste; improving production and increasing climate resilience”. 

How local food systems can improve food security

The risks facing the UK’s food supply are real and growing, but communities across the country are already finding ways to build greater local food resilience. Growing more food locally, shortening supply chains, improving soil health and sharing food-growing knowledge can all help communities become less dependent on vulnerable global supply chains.

These aren’t distant pilot programmes or government initiatives. They’re local people deciding to tackle the risk of food shortages head-on, right now.

Middle Ground Growers at Weston Spring Farm in Bath are using regenerative farming to grow fresh food for local people all year round.  Started in 2020 on just 2 acres in Bathampton, the project now farms 16 acres and supplies food to over 200 families and 12 local outlets.  Their model — short supply chains, soil health, no fossil-fuel fertilisers — is precisely the antidote to the vulnerabilities that caused 2023’s empty shelves. They’re also part of We Are Avon, a growing network of producers and communities collaborating to build better local food systems across the region.  

Fordhall Farm in Shropshire is England’s first community-owned farm, run through a charitable community benefit society with over 8,000 community shareholders, 30 staff, and more than 100 volunteers.  Their model — community as landlord, farmer as tenant, nature as partner — shows what food resilience looks like when it’s rooted in place rather than global logistics. Charlotte Hollins, who alongside her brother Ben helped save the farm, now offers consultancy to other community groups wanting to follow the same path. 

Lincoln Greeners is a community urban gardening group run by Leeds-based CIC Mafwa Theatre. Participants decide together what to grow, follow the whole process from seedling to harvest, and share skills and knowledge along the way.  The group has been welcoming to all, including support for people on lower incomes to attend, and has helped to create lasting friendships among participants who might otherwise be socially isolated.  It’s a reminder that food resilience isn’t only about supply chains — it’s about the knowledge and connections that support communities. 

Can local food systems help prevent food shortages?

Short supply chains. Soil that works with nature, not against it. Community ownership and knowledge. Food that doesn’t depend on a harvest in Morocco or a gas price in Rotterdam. These vital projects are all prototypes for a UK food system that can actually withstand what’s coming. The question isn’t whether this is possible; it’s already happening. The question is scale. Can you join in to help build that scale where you live? 

Refilling empty shelves is just one example of how a climate story can be about lots of things and can create wider positive impacts, beyond a reduction in emissions. 

Discover more climate stories like these to inspire you at carboncopy.eco/initiatives.