 You on my snapshot, but I've seen some of you in the list. So hi, guys. And due to the current pandemic, we're also all working remotely. So the current carbon footprint of our organisation is almost nothing. Our future plan is to build a physical site from which we will run a range of workshops, courses and sessions around self-sufficiency and waste reduction. All buildings on the site will be examples of eco buildings. We will install composting toilets, rainwater harvesting, ac we will aim to be completely off-grid for our energy within five years of opening. To follow our journey, offer more information on our work. If you'd like to discuss partnering with us, our website is, as you can see, OakTree Sustainable Living Centre.org.uk and there are all our socials. If you would like to follow us, we would really appreciate if follows like amplifications from like-minded people. So, like I say, Alison, who's the founder of OakTree, hopes to join us later. I'm sure she won't mind me saying she has a small child who often doesn't go to sleep until much past this time, which is why I'm here representing OakTree tonight. And so, oh, yes, so the next organisation, carbon, and he is going to talk a bit about speak carbon later, so I will let him do that. And the third piece of the triangle of talking, taking action is Ivana from St Nick's. Ivana, I'll let you say a little bit about St Nick's. Hello. So, I'm Ivana from St Nick's. We are a charity that since 1990s has transformed a formal rubbish tip into a tip for a local nature reserve and environment centre just one mile from the city centre. We've recorded over 1,000 wildlife species so far and help with work on wildlife corridors across the city. The environment centre built in 2000 was designed to showcase sustainability action and it is a base for all sorts of projects that help make York a better, more sustainable city. Amongst others, these include a low carbon curbside recycling collection service which reduces electric vehicles and lowering tricycles, yog open eco homes, which is an annual event showcasing homes that reduce carbon emissions, energy bills and improve lives, eco therapy project that connects people to nature for improved mental health and a new exciting project which my colleague Esther will describe in a moment, in a bit later. So, that's just very quick introduction. And now, what do we have in common? So, talking, taking action is what we have in common. So, it was founded in autumn last year when Alison, Pete and Ivana met through Pete's speak carbon course. The project was born out of their shared desire to help local people and organisations turning spying conversations into meaningful action, hence the name, talking, taking action. The green movement was gaining unprecedented momentum before the pandemic hit and through talking, taking action we aim to keep that momentum going by connecting individuals and groups who can help each other to move towards a zero carbon future and by compelling people to pledge to make real meaningful changes in their lives. So, thank you all for joining us on this Tuesday, I believe, evening. I've lost all sense of time on this Tuesday evening, meaningful changes in our lives towards a zero carbon future. Thank you, Ivana. OK, to continue with the theme of what we have in common. Here's just a little bit about sort of what motivates us, what we kind of all hopefully have in common. And I think right now it's fair to say that we may probably all feel a bit overwhelmed by the news these days. The pandemic is certainly overshadowing everything, but the climate and environmental crises are going on regardless. Democracy and human rights are under threat in many places, including the UK. Not looking make us feel better and sometimes is just a thing to do, but it will not change anything. On the other hand, taking action and connecting to nature will make a positive difference both to us and the world. And what is a stake? People often talk about the need to save the planet, but to be frank, we are but a blink in its long life. We could easily go the way of the dinosaurs if we are not careful. We are busy making it less hospitable. We are living at the expense of others, both other species and people whose lives are already affected by environmental change and those of the future generations. We would do well to listen to the kids striking for future for their future. We are threatening our own species survival by damaging the life support system provided by the planet and its biodiversity. Climate change is just one of many symptoms of how unsustainable we have become. But there is a bit of good news in that the vast majority of British public now believe that climate change concerns all of us, regardless of politics. This graph is taken from the recently released Britain Talks Climate Toolkit put together by Climate Outreach. If you go to the website, you will also see graphs showing that the majority of population is worried about climate change and believes it concerns everyone regardless of their income or background. The various population segments will not necessarily all agree on the solutions. The extensive research underpinning the toolkit also reveals that certain values and ideas such as fairness, avoiding waste, unity and pride have almost universal resonance across Britain. These can be used to frame climate solutions in ways that make sense to the different parts of population. Communications from trusted sources and peers are important to engage people on the issues, which is partly why we're doing this event. And no one wants to go back to normal after the pandemic. So now's the moment to push for more fundamental changes and a green recovery. Now it's quite easy and fairly common to claim that a system change matters more than individuals' behaviour. However, household consumption accounts for around two thirds of global greenhouse gas emissions. So lifestyle changes are a prerequisite for reducing global emissions. True, some of those will be down to the system in which we live, but a lot will be down to our choices. We need the system to make it easier for us to make good choices, but we can all have changed the system through individual actions by reducing consumption and through our social influence. As residents of one of the richest nations in the world which helped spark the rather unfair fossil fuel revolution 200 or so years ago, we now need to lead on the zero carbon revolution of the 21st century which needs to be equitable. The centre for alternative technology in its zero carbon Britain reports clearly demonstrates that we already have the tools and the technology needed to efficiently power the UK with 100% renewable energy to feed ourselves sustainably and play our part in leaving a safe and habitable climate for our children and future generations. Their model, which is one of many, shows both what needs to be done to get us to zero carbon from reducing energy demand to capturing carbon through natural solution. But it also demonstrates the multiple benefits of doing all of that, be it improved well-being, healthier diets, better air quality and restored biodiversity. Together we can help make it all happen. At home and work it's good to start with the biggest carbon sources, transport, heating and diet, each of which must most likely present a fifth of your carbon footprint. As citizens we can join and support national and local campaigns for a green recovery and invest our savings of pensions ethically or at least divest them from fossil fuelers. Action to reduce carbon emissions and make space for nature wherever possible needs to become the normal thing to do and that's what we can do in our communities. I've used this picture of Sennig's Thren here because it is a very active bird and for its size has an incredibly loud voice. It's also a reminder that nature can help us in these turbulent times as being outdoors helps soothe anxiety and improve well-being. So let's be like friends, not afraid to take action and use our voice to amplify it. To do so effectively we might need to learn the same tune. So now I'll hand over to Pete of Speak Carbon which is one tune that we might want to all join in. Pete are you there? I'm here. Am I coming through loud and clear? Brilliant. That was amazing. Havanna, thanks for that. I'll try and be more like a Wren from tomorrow. I think that's a great thing to be. So yes, Speak Carbon we heard a little bit about it beforehand. It was my effort at trying to do something positive after moving to York and selling a business and wanting to do something around the climate emergency and the carbon issues that we face. And I came across the carbon literacy project and realised that the more I spoke to people there wasn't a common language that everyone was using. People's understanding was different or people's motivations were different. And I really wanted to do something and bring something together that could allow people to talk things through find out about our motivations. So this was my attempt at doing that. On the next slide, we've got some of the organisations that came together to help with this. Tralagon is a consultancy business that has been a part of this project. It has been a part of this project and it has been a part of this project. It has been a part of this project. Tralagon is a consultancy business. It's quite a small one based in York. Me and my partner. We've come together to help on the net so people can book it up. I won't talk over anything Yvanna said about St Nick's but it's a wonderful organisation. Yvanna and the organisation helped me to develop and test this whole project over the summer. We wouldn't be here doing this if they haven't done it. Yn y top left-hand corner is the centre for alternative technology where the zero carbon Britain hub lives. I'm studying there. I'm studying the masters in sustainability and behaviour change. That's part of what brings all of that together. On the next slide, we've got a course running at the moment and we've done a couple of live courses and testing. This is basically the whole course in 12 words. You don't need to come any more. You just need to have a look at this slide and you've done it. It's climate science 101 so it's warming. It's us, we're sure. It is bad. But most importantly in a bit that we need to focus on tonight, we can fix it. There's nothing that I've seen studying the science or any conversations that I have that suggests that we can't. On the next slide I've got a little bit about, oh yeah, that's just to remind me that this is a scientist who wrote this placard and everything is actually cited so it's a bit simplistic but if you look down on the bottom, that's where all the references are. Those bold statements. How we do the courses so we've got section one which is the science, section two which is the impact. We break the course down into three and section three is the action and that's where we come because at the end of the course which lasts about a day and this happened to Ivana and Alison and myself when we came to the end of the course we were like right, we've done that. What can we actually get out and do? So that's the key bit that we're looking at. All the courses and what we've done and what we've written on the next slide revolves around the carbon literacy project. So that's just a highlight. I'll click one more. So the carbon literacy project started up in math per person who comes in the call. It also means that people get together, they chat, they come up with different concepts, different ideas and different actions and I really want those actions, those 30,000 actions and then anything that we do today to be collaborated, to be brought together so that we're all pushing in the same way that we find something that someone else is doing that we can help with, we help. We find someone else that someone else is doing that we're also doing, we combine forces and we make those things even more powerful. And at the end of the courses that we do on the next slide you'll see my certificate that I got in the summer and each course results in a certificate at the end of it from the carbon literacy project to say you've taken on the learning, you've learnt the basics and you're going on to do more. So that's a little bit quite quick. I hope I'm on time. Maybe, maybe not. But the last slide just to say from that science placard that we saw, don't forget that we can fix it. Like coming together particularly this year, particularly with the political happenings at the end of the year with the conference of parties to watch out for and the change in narrative globally as well because of certain democratic processes. This could be a really key year and I'm very excited that this project's got going particularly in 2021 and we can be doing hopefully things together about the problems that we face. That's me. Great. Thank you, Peter. Sorry, Lucy, did we say that you would introduce the groups or shall we just... No, so now is the time to share some action plans. We've got five different groups doing so. So I think now we will be really quite strict on timekeeping. So please, speakers, do stick to your two minutes at most. And first up is Summa. Hi, yes, okay. So I'm Rebecca. I work at Summa Whole Foods. We're an independent wholesaler of vegetarian, organic and natural foods. We've been going for over 40 years and we're based in Halifax in West Yorkshire. We're the largest worker-owned cooperative in the UK and that means we have an equal pay employer as well. I think you've got our vision next on the next slide to demonstrate through our actions that's a co-operative business coming. So we signed up to a scheme called Tree Responsibility to plan trees and offset our carbon emissions. We're 100% vegetarian, as I said, for a variety of reasons, not least because we don't believe it's necessary for animals to suffer, but also because we're aware of the impact. We have new trucks now that run on biogas created by a digested food waste. These have 84% fewer emissions compared to their diesel equivalent. We work closely with the real junk food project to take our food waste and either distribute it or turn it into energy. Sorry, I'm really rushing now. Our future commitment to remaining carbon neutral does involve investigating banking insurance companies we work with to look at their policies and ensure we're not investing in environmentally disruptive projects. We're going to extend our tree planting commitments to the tropics where the positive impact is the most significant and we'll be increasing our understanding of how our carbon footprint is calculated and providing climate action training to our workers starting with our drivers and our distribution teams and building services. We'll be looking at the journey to work of our employees, which is slightly different now with more home working and trying to encourage vehicle charging points, car sharing and electric vehicles. Have I run out of time or I could go on? Time's up really. Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm happy to introduce... Can you do the next one, sorry, Yvana? I'll take it from there. That might be easier than going from far here. Sorry. Maybe you can tell we haven't rehearsed this bit as well as we should have done. I'm having real problems with internet, so apologies. Your community energy next. Tom. Hi, yes. I'm Tom Desimon from York Community Energy and we are all about reducing emissions basically and that's through both community-owned renewable energy in York and also helping people save energy in the home largely through heating, which is what we've been focusing on recently. So we've started this warmer homes York project and the basic idea is to make it easier for York residents to basically insulate their homes and reduce their heating emissions. We do this in a number of ways, so we can do home assessments that come to your house and go through room by room and make suggestions as to things you can do. We do draft proofing workshops, so just really quick and simple tips and quite cheap measures to draft proof your house. We do what we call house warming parties where we can arrange for a group of volunteers to come and do some DIY insulation together with you and we also have a thermal imaging camera in which we can lend out to find some thermal leaks in your house as well. And if we ever sort of get into a better situation with COVID, then we can get back to sort of going around people's houses with the camera as well. Yeah, because that's been a really popular service. If you just go on to the next slide please, Ymanna. Yeah, and that's just to say you can find us there on the website or socials or whatever and yeah, just get in touch. That's it, thanks. Thank you, Tom Ymanna. I think you're up next with St Nick's Liz. Actually, it's my colleague Esther and possibly Freya. Plan for the future. Hi, Ben. This is a bit like a pilot game, isn't it? Trying to get through this in just a few minutes. Just so absolutely thrilled and honoured to be selected as one of the 36 organisations that are taking forward a national green influence project which means that our green mentor will be supporting and inspiring young people to leave them with our own knowledge of natural stability issues. So looking at Barnard over there. But we'll also be getting them up to speed with their own networking skills. So both with each other and my organisations and schools throughout New York. It's put in the forefront of project and events management. So we'll be working alongside the new schools up in those areas. Peace and Chargers slides. Cool. So we should have over the life of the project which is two years long. 120 involved in empowering young people to drive. Environmental change in New York. We hope that more organisations will be involved to make a real difference. We're getting out on a bike but I was saying that they will be taking part in decision making and are embedded within those organisations. And we want to be able to measure those differences. So it would be interesting to see how many will get their peers to make pledges of their own and how we can really capture the difference that the project makes so that's the Yorkshire more sustainable city. So over to Freya. Hi. I'm Freya. I've just started working on the project. So basically if anybody wants to get involved or you're part of a group or an organisation that works with young people, the age range is 10 to 40. So if you know any organisations or young people that you think would be interested, then email us at info.nix.org.uk. Thank you Esther, thank you Freya. Debbie from Green and Jobs Alliance. Are you there? Debbie. There's no Debbie in the participants list. Okay. Okay, that's a shame. Okay, well we'll skip through those and hand over to York Environment Week. Kate, have we got Kate? Hi, yeah. Hi, so I'm Kate. I'm a member of York Environment Forum which is a group of young people that works with young people in the York Environment Forum which is an organisation that has been running for, well it's now in its 11th year. It's an umbrella body aiming to be the voice for the environment in New York. So try and run a week of environment-based events. Tom de Simone, who you've just heard for, was key in putting the website together. I sort of gave you a name check there Tom. So York Environment Week can see the screen. It's the first time there's ever been a city-wide one. There is a climate change week at the university which has been running for quite a while, but nothing that's been run across the city before. It's from by the forum and it was based on the model was from York International Women's Week which has been running for quite a number of years and it's very much a sort of grassroots ground. It was based on much a sort of grassroots ground, grassroots up, not a top-down thing. So very simply we had five themes which are listed on the slide. We put out an online call for events. Even in the difficult times last year we still had a lot of interest. We didn't charge. People submitted their events online. We gave them guidelines for entries and helped them. We put on some how-to guides for online kit. Again, Tom was one of the architects of that and me and we coordinated the publicity for it. I think Kate Locke is on the call and she was our press and publicity guru for that. Overall it was very successful. We ran I think it was more than 25 events because we had quite a few tree planting sessions that were run by one organisation. They ran them like five times during the weekend. It was a nine-day event altogether. If you have a look at the website you'll see your record of all the events but also 14 of them recorded. There was one in particular that I would encourage people to have a look at. If they haven't it was an event actually on donor economics which is really well worth a watch. But they're all great. The stuff on it. Discussions for you 2021 are underway and as with our original intention to link it to the timing of COP26 which would obviously have been in 2020 where we're planning to do the aim is again try and link it to probably in October. Although I was at a meeting of the York Environment Forum this afternoon and I had a friend of mine who is the City of York Council's new carbon reduction officer first time they've ever had one of these so that's great. He said that the council want to have a climate action week this year so hey watch the space. Great, thank you Kate. It's a shame that we don't have Debbie because I think the greener jobs alliance has quite a lot also planning towards the COP conference, the climate parties conference they are planning quite a lot of action there so hopefully you can find out by giggling greener jobs alliance and find out more about what they are planning that way. Now there's been a lot of talking going on and I'm conscious of that so we'll have a quick poll and a little break before we're bringing in our expert panel and I'll try and sort out my zoom problems in the meantime so I will try and launch the poll or we'll do it the other way around and then by the time you're back so I suggest that just to kind of get a bit of headspace that if you can please stand up walk to the other side of the room look out of the window and see if you can see anything exciting in the chat and be back within a minute and then I'll launch a quick poll just to find out who's with us tonight. Thank you. Okay so 33 out of 42 have voted so if you would still like if you can I know that the zoom polls can be a little bit tricky so see if you can join in and shortly I will stop sharing my screen so we can see people can see each other and hand over to Joanne who will be sharing the panel in which you can ask questions on going towards zero carbon so let's do that I'll just hopefully you should see the results of the poll just so you can see so most people are here as individuals but we do have quite a few representing organisations as well and most of us are here to get inspired or motivated but meet like minded people as well so thank you that's really good and hopefully we are meeting those expectations and now it's time for some inspiration and motivation so over to Joanne Thanks very much Yvanna and thanks very much for the opportunity to have this RTS expert slot during your event I'm really looking forward to the upcoming talking and taking action events as well it's a great initiative and thanks to everybody watching for joining us tonight and for submitting some great questions in advance we've had quite a range of questions and we'll try and get to them but there's also a lot of questions and we've only got half an hour so if we don't manage to get to all of them we will our event inspired by tonight's theme of taking action I did a bit of on the side looking up and I was really impressed by how many little things we can do to reduce our carbon footprint and it's often just little habits that sneak up on us that waste energy or heat I was particularly chagrined to read that 90% of the electricity that phone charger tables use is actually while they're on standby so I tend to just leave it in and forget that it's left in and I think that will be one of my zero carbon actions for this year is to go around and make sure they're all unplugged so I'm really looking forward to what our panel can tell us about things big and small that we can do and so without further ado let me welcome our panel you'd just like to introduce yourself briefly I'll go with the order I see you on my screen I'm a senior lecturer in the environment and geography department at the University of York and my expertise is in energy and environmental issues for very much behaviours, attitudes and thanks and Joe do you want to go next? Hi I'm Joe I'm an environmental science PhD researcher at the University of York and I'm interested in the impacts of our food and dietary choices on the planet Thanks Who do we have next? Alison would you like to go next? Hi I'm Alison Dike I work for the Stockholm Environment Institute as well where I'm a political ecologist and a lot of my work is on environmental behaviour in one way or another whether that's in relation to housing or nature engagement a lot of my work is on nature engagement and particularly different ways in which we engage with nature and the impact that that has on us Thanks individuals Richard? Hi, yes I'm Richard Lane I'm currently the secretary of your community energy I was a founder member you also heard a little bit about your community energy a moment to go from our good chairman Tom de Simone I have a background in renewable energy I'm interested in energy systems especially home energy systems things like PV and battery storage heat pumps that kind of stuff but I've got a big job in the sector and I'm also a bit of an environmental activist as well with various groups XR most of the moment Great and finally Ivana is also on our panel Thank you sorry I keep forgetting to mute myself I would have to say my level of expectations is only budding and emerging I am studying carbon retrofit course by the association of environment conscious building I'm very interested in energy efficiency energy efficient home improvement so that's why I've been edited to this as a representative of CEDDICS and a founding member of your community energy Great, thanks So across the five of us hopefully we'll be able to answer most questions that come up so just before we start a bit of housekeeping I guess if you'd like to ask any questions please do ask them in the chat we've had many questions submitted already so we'll answer a few of those while people to give people a chance to put their questions in the chat and then we'll get to questions in the chat and if we don't as I said if we don't manage to answer all questions we'll have to do it and if you'd like to be notified about when we've posted questions and any other information I think Ivan is going to have a feedback form at the end but we'll find out more about that later so let's start with an icebreaker question perhaps for everybody and so I'd like what is your top tip for a zero carbon action perhaps something that you'll do for this year maybe again I'll go and order Karen do you like to give us your top tip for a zero carbon action one of the things I did quite recently is I made sure that my supplier electricity supplier from renewable energy and it used to be that you would have quite high cost associated with it but now there are some really great companies that are all coming and it is quite financially viable now to do that so I always insist on when I'm doing my switch check that it is a renewable energy supplier thanks how about Jo so sorry sorry Joanne to cut you off there inspired by some research I was involved with over August my top tip that I'm going to try and do this year is to use my oven less and my microwave more so the microwave has much lower energy demand and cooking time than my oven so I can cook my food faster, save on energy and save on emissions as well brilliant how about Richard what's your top tip for us I would say what I'd like to endorse is well we're all keen to sort of return to our normal lives after the pandemic but I would say that maybe try not to just immediately jump back in planes but I urge everyone to try and go flight free for 2021 or perhaps for the rest of your life you know why not aim high for us in the developed rich parts of the world that is a significant impact that we have so and if of course if you're saving money on flights then why not to invest that money in community energy projects there are lots of people doing bonds and shares in local renewable energy generation schemes up and down the country I'll pop a link to some of them in the chat if anyone feels inspired to have a look at that wonderful thanks and Alison what's your top tip for us so my tip is maybe slightly less direct but could potentially have quite a large impact and it's around money thinking about who you're banking with and what their investment policies are and what your money is doing and if you're lucky enough to have savings to think about how you could make those savings actually do something good at a time when we've got very low interest rates at the moment so there are lots of peer-to-peer lending platforms where you can decide how much money you want to invest in people doing good things or potentially there are also kind of micro investment platforms as well so I think we're doing something like that that's really interesting thanks Nirvana what's your top tip okay I'll see if a deal co-operates I think my top tip would be you know the circumstances differ so I would say choose one of the big areas so be it food, energy or transport and thoroughly research your options start small but aim high and carry on learning because science and circumstances change personally as a non-driver and vegetarian kind of part I'm vegan I'm focusing on the house creating a short and long-term plan for reducing our energy use and making it better not just for being my partner but for those who come after us that's wonderful thanks okay we had as I said we had quite a few questions that had been submitted already before this event and so I'll group them a bit into some broad topics and the first topic that I'll ask to the panel is rather conveniently on our minds is about heating in winter so there were a lot of questions about energy, about insulation about what boiler should we get for the lowest carbon footprint about what is the best heater we have to have a portable heater so the next question I'll ask you all is what are your thoughts on the big things for us to consider to reduce our energy footprint and maybe I'll start with Richard from your community energy what is your advice for big things for us to consider sorry I'll get my video back on well each of us is a bit different but with the typical lifestyles we have here our main carbon and climate impacts are the way we heat our house the food that we eat and the way we travel around so you have to decide what's the best one to tackle of those for you personally I've just already said about travelling around aviation is a huge impact anything that you can do to reduce the round especially red meat and dairy in your diet is brilliant I'm currently my personal news resolution we were doing two days a week last year we've gone up to three this year so we're just trying to work on that a little bit more and yeah and Yvanna already mentioned I'm sure we'll go to her in a minute about I won't say too much about that because I'm not the expert on that but I think I'll stop because I'm sure other people will have a lot more thanks useful segue to Yvanna I was going to ask you what is your top thoughts on retrofitting and insulating and improving the house that I think would answer a lot of the questions that came in yes we don't really have quite enough time but it will depend on your circumstances a little bit if you own your house then definitely insulate if you can again research your options because insulation needs to improve the house but your wellbeing as well and it needs to be done well so first way will depend on how the house was built how you use it what your existing state of repair is and what your ambitions are for the home and after improving the fabric the structure of the house insulating that well ideally then you would put renewables on to make the energy what's left of your heating demand but of course not everyone can do that not everyone will be living in their home for a long term they might not be planning to so if you're renting or your home is temporary for whatever reason then checking your appliances making them as energy efficient and sort of not switching them off obviously when they are not on you can still draft proof and your community energy office has offered a workshop on that because again with draft proofing you are changing the environment of the house it's a system within the earth so you need to be a bit careful because if you're draft proofing reducing uncontrolled drafts you need to make sure that you have controlled supply of fresh air learning to control your heating not everyone knows how thermostatic valves works so it's good to find out how your boiler or whatever else you need useful heating works for portable heaters again research sort of how long you need the heating on or how big is the room I can sort of their sustainable energy has quite a good summary of the differences in them and how to keep warm and do keep warm it is really important for our health on average British houses keep temperature of about 17 degrees in winter and that's definitely entering the territory of potential long term health impacts so this is why it's really important that the government actually does more to support us citizens to interlate homes and do it better. They are trying a bit with the green homes grants but there are quite a few issues around those so again don't have the time to go into it now but if anyone's interested we can maybe talk after sorry that was well Thanks so much Yvanna that was a huge amount of information I think hopefully this recording will be shared afterwards so that people can go back to it. I've been having a look at the chat and there's a lot in the chat which is great about different energy users so it's really cool to see that conversation happening I haven't seen any specific questions that haven't yet been answered haven't already been answered in the chat rather so I think I'll move on from energy and ask a quick question about food consumption because that's the next or it is certainly along with travel and energy food consumption is one of the biggest impacts on our carbon and there's so much we can say about that as well and in fact the next talking and taking action event will be dedicated just to food so look out for that I think we're going to discuss the date to the end of tonight's session but maybe I'll ask Jo because she knows a lot about food what is your advice on top things to do to make our food consumption more sustainable and the others might have something to say as well after that Yeah so like you said it's such a big topic that we do need an entire session dedicated to just discussing food but I'll try and run through a few things quickly so in terms of greenhouse gas emissions the best way to make your diet more sustainable is to reduce your red meat and dairy consumption because these come from remnant animals which are passing methane which as a greenhouse gas is between 25 to 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at trapping heat the second thing to think about is your food waste so food waste as it decomposes also produces this potent methane gas so if you want tips on how to reduce your food waste you can check out the Love Food Hate Waste website they have recipes that you can use to cook food that would normally be wasted such as cauliflower leaves or beetroot stalks and they also have a food storage guide so if you've got food in your fridge that's close to what it's used by date and you're not going to use it you can just check on their website for how to store it and freeze it for next time so you're not going to put it in a bin straight away my third point quickly would be about travel most of the food that we get in the UK arrives by boats which can carry vast quantities of food so the travel footprint of most foods is a fraction of the total emissions associated with that product except for things like fresh berries and asparagus so if you're buying them out of season they'll likely have been air freighted across to the UK so it's really important when you're buying just to double check that it is in season I think I'll stop there and leave some for our discussion next time great did any of the panel if the other panel members want to say anything about that quickly I'm aware that we've only got seven minutes so it was about community engagement so moving on from individual actions there's a lot that we can actually do as community and I wondered if Alison would like to say something about community action engagement so when we were talking about this event when we were planning it earlier today we were talking about the fact that sometimes taking actions to improve the sustainability of our lives can seem to be punitive or negative and actually trying to make the things that we do actually make our lives better for us and for the people around us can be really powerful so some of the questions that we had around things that you could do as a neighbourhood or a street and we're asking for ideas of things that you could do to bring people together so one potential thing that you might be able to do would be to set up sharing schemes for different types of things one example could be tools gardening tools or DIY tools the kind of thing that takes a bit of setting up you need some rules around how they're going to be used how they're going to be maintained who's going to buy them that kind of thing but they can be really good for bringing people together around something which actually reduces everybody's impact collectively and the other kinds of things that you can do collectively are things that help everyone to engage with nature and to understand a bit more about the kind of impacts that we might be having on our local environment so there are lots of different citizen science projects that you can get involved in and I can add some links in the chat for things that you can do there to understand a bit more about the environmental condition of your local area so a project that I used to work on called OPAL has a lot of different citizen science projects on different topics that you can do at different times of year with young people, any age so finding out a bit more about your local environment and then from that you can think about what actions you might want to take to try and improve things locally so that could be things like doing some you can do traps that identify mammal footprints if you have hedgehogs in your local area then that could be something that you could do around improving habitats for them where you could improve habitats for pollinators within your local area but there are the kind of activities that really do help to bring people together and people who wouldn't necessarily be interested in something which isn't necessarily marketed around sustainability so maybe widen your audience a little bit Thanks Alison We've got one question in the chat which is a follow up to the food question What would you say to those who believe they are eating sustainable food by buying organic but aren't aware of the emissions still involved in the transport of that food? Joe, do you have something for that? I was just typing out a response in the chat I was actually typing out So I'm not aware of any differences in emissions between non-organic or organic vegetables so I've made a note to look better later but in terms of the emissions from transport it makes very little difference whether you buy local or not in terms of greenhouse gas emissions because when you do transport foods by boat there's such a large quantity of food on that boat that the transport emissions per product are greatly reduced and I see that someone has put in the data backing that up into the chat as well if you want to check that out Thanks Joe In the last three minutes I wonder Karen did you want to say anything more about community engagement otherwise I would ask you about plastic waste and stuff consumption and leave it to you which one you want to answer I'll go with plastics Alison's done a fantastic job already talking about community engagement and citizen science so to reiterate that there are some fantastic things you can get involved in so I'm not going to be anywhere as coherent as everybody else but when it comes to plastics the thing to keep in mind is what we're primarily concerned with at the moment is single use plastics so I'm going to try and avoid repeating all the stuff you've heard before like swapping out coffee cups and reusable stuff like that and avoiding single use carrier bags there are a plethora of plastic alternatives and reusable non-plastic alternatives now so in particular as uncomfortably as it can be to talk about some of these sensitive subjects it's worth having discussions with your kids or anyone else around things like reusable menstrual wear it's come on so far it's so vastly different to how it was even several years ago the range of different products that are out there same as with incontinence wear so there's those sorts of things that you can actually do to swap out even further I've gone to bamboo toothbrushes I'm careful about even toothpaste I've gone to little pellets rather than tubes you can obviously go to some really great you can probably the panel will know better than I do but you've got zero sort of shops well where you can refill different products be it detergent through to food stuffs and some supermarkets are also allowing you to do that now as well please don't go chucking out all of your Tupperware or various plastic sort of things that you have because all that's doing is quickly getting that into the waste and leading to the development of more plastic waste use what you've got but as you're replacing replace it with better sort of environmental products wax wraps and so on and then the final thing I just want to point out of plastic something that I only learned a few years ago by working with scientists at Hull and York is around clothes and plastics quite a lot of our clothes have plastics in them when we're washing them release thousands if not billions of particles micro plastics so think very carefully about the clothes you're going to buy if you have got them wash them on gentler cycles, lower temperatures you can get bags which I always want to call grubby bags but that's not what they're called I think they're called grubby bags that are purport to be able to capture some of these micro plastics but the science around that isn't terribly clear so think about not just food and plastic waste around that but also things around clothes and that's probably time done it is right on time thanks so much to the panel that's been so much information and there were a lot of questions that we didn't get to so we will make sure to publish some kinds or answers to them somehow afterwards and let you all know and with that I'll hand back to Varna thanks again everybody and thanks for all of the comments in the chat thank you I should have said we probably could have taken a couple more maybe since we started a bit later but we can leave it there if you've got one that's clearly lined up then we can do one more and then we'll get on with pledging I think that's covered most of the areas really we've covered energy, we've covered food and thanks Richard for putting in a big punt for transport as well it's one thing we didn't really get questions on but it is such a big thing to think about so and staff so yeah great okay well let's see so the idea of this so a bit of an experiment we'll see how it works but the idea here is we will break into groups and we will sort of try and come up with some action pledges and I'll just share my screen with you again because the way it will work hopefully I'll give you a link to this document which will be shared with you and so that in your breakout room you can be looking at the same document and you can sort of be discussing the different sort of action what we could be doing and the panel and also the sort of talking taking action organisers will be sort of scrubbing through the rooms so that hopefully there will always be someone you can ask if not sure how to work it only thing I would say is in the room then please assign a scribe so that if someone can't use the gem board then you can still capture the action points it's really simple to do so you click on that sticking out button if you want to colour code it if it is a change that you want to make at your home or in workplace use green my pledge is eating vegan three days a week and appears there and you can pledge as much as many as you like and it can be pledges from something you can change at home or workplace or if you want to support someone who can do more or an organisation talking to people as the climate outreach toolkit shows how important actually talking to your peers and your family and anyone who will listen about the issues obviously there are MPs because there's definitely a lot that needs to change on the national level so that's the basic idea so I will now create breakout rooms all you need to do I think I'll stop sharing again just for a bit so that I can see my controls a bit more easily so the link should be appearing in your chat now so you can click on it and we will go into the rooms Yfana can I just say just to remind people that we won't be recording in the breakout rooms with the pledges so if people have had their camera off due to not wanting to be recorded and are now okay to have their camera on that would be lovely again don't feel pressured to put it on just as a reminder that we won't be recording in the breakout rooms thank you very good point