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Helston Climate Action Plan

Cover of Helston Climate Action Plan

Produced in September 2019, Helston Climate Action Plan is intended to be an informative handbook of ideas and practical projects that we believe will help Helston on its journey to carbon neutrality, nature recovery, and a resilient community. Some of these can be put into action at the individual level, but others will need the combined efforts of the whole Helston community. Several projects are already underway, and you can find out more about them on this site. We hope you find this document both inspiring and useful.

You can view and download the Climate Action Plan as a PDF simply by clicking on the image, or by clicking here. However, there is also an online reader with the plan that you may also find useful — you can find that here.

Ideally, we want our Climate Action Plan to be a working document that you can adapt and use with your own town or parish. Please get in touch if you would like an editable document version.

How did we write the plan?

Since its formation in early 2019, Helston Climate Action Group (HCAG) met regularly and worked hard to engage the wider community. Drawing members from many existing local groups and organisations in addition to Helston Town Council, we set up several working groups to focus on key areas: Green Spaces, Food & Consumption, Energy & Transport, Communication & Education, and Business Engagement. Over time, we learned more abut the impact of the climate crisis on people’s health and wellbeing, and formed a working group to look at this issue also.

Each group was given a broad scope and encouraged to source ideas from community engagement, and by looking at best practice from elsewhere. These ideas would then be developed into projects that could be presented to the whole of HCAG for consideration.

The groups were encouraged to focus on looking for ideas to:

reduce carbon emissions,
support nature restoration,
build resilience and encourage localism

We considered ideas aimed at averting the worst outcomes of climate change (mitigation), and others intended to help us cope with the coming changes (adaptation). Many, we hope, will address both needs.

Community engagement

Throughout April-June 2019 members of HCAG attended market stalls at Helston Farmers Market and the Monument Market to talk with people about Helston Town Council’s climate emergency declaration and what this meant for the town. We sought people’s views on what we could be doing here in Helston to work towards carbon neutrality.

In June 2019 we held a community envisioning day, supported by Volunteer Cornwall to explore this further. Over the course of the day we met with 60-70 people, several of whom went on to join the climate action group. The ideas and suggestions made by people during these community engagement events formed
the basis of the climate action plan.

Meeting of Helston residents at Community Envisioning day

Literally hundreds of ideas were generated, which then needed to be carefully considered, in order to determine which had the best chance of success if taken forward. Some of the considerations that went into deciding which ideas were most practical to take forward included the benefits that the project could provide, its timescale and likely cost.

Co-benefits

When looking at the potential benefits of a project, we decided to prioritise projects that would have multiple co-benefits. In other words, a project that could reduce carbon emissions while improving resilience would be preferred over a project that only met one of those goals.

Health and wellbeing is a positive outcome of many of the projects being proposed so will be a central theme throughout the climate action plan. To look at the co-benefits of potential projects, we
adopted a slightly modified version of the Ashden Climate Action Co-benefits Toolkit, which demonstrates how responding to climate change can improve lives, not diminish them.

Cutting carbon emissions can impact positively on health and wellbeing through improved air quality and
increased physical activity, and on the local economy through the creation of new jobs and training
opportunities, and through supporting local producers. It can improve equity and social cohesion
through focusing on the most vulnerable in our communities, by taking action to alleviate food and
fuel poverty – thereby tackling inequality and ensuring a just transition to a low carbon future.

In HCAG we felt it was important to extend the range of co-benefits described in the Ashden toolkit (carbon,
health, economy, equity and resilience) to include nature, wellbeing and the circular economy. In the plan, we used a grid that explores the co-benefits for the projects we proposed. We used icons to make the co-benefits easy to visualise:

Using the above approach, HCAG decided on thirty or so projects to take forward for further consideration.

The Doughnut!

At a workshop facilitated by Permanently Brilliant in early September 2019, we discussed how the projects we would propose in the Climate Action Plan could ensure that we do not overshoot Earth’s life-supporting systems, while also ensuring that no one falls short on life’s essentials (from food and housing to healthcare and political voice).

To do this, we used a Doughnut Model of the global economy, pioneered by Kate Raworth. The doughnut combines two concentric radar charts to depict the two boundaries—social and ecological— that together encompass human wellbeing.

The inner boundary is a social foundation, below which lie shortfalls in wellbeing, such as hunger, ill health, illiteracy, and energy poverty. Its twelve dimensions and their illustrative indicators are derived from internationally agreed minimum standards for human wellbeing, as established in 2015 by the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by all member states of the United Nations.

The doughnut’s outer boundary is an ecological ceiling, beyond which lies an overshoot of pressure on Earth’s life-supporting systems, such as climate change, ocean acidification, and biodiversity loss. Its nine dimensions and their indicators were identified in Stockholm in 2009 by a group of earth system scientists.

Between these two sets of boundaries lies a safe and just space in which all of humanity has the chance to thrive. By quantifying and visualising the global scale of shortfalls and overshoot, the doughnut acts as a concise compass for assessment of the current state of human wellbeing.

Millions of people currently lead lives that fall far short of the social foundation’s internationally agreed minimum standards, ranging from nutrition and health care to housing, income, and energy. At the same time, human activity has led to overshoot for at least four planetary boundaries: climate change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus loading, and land conversion.

Improving humanity’s wellbeing this century depends on eliminating this social shortfall and ecological overshoot simultaneously.

And finally…

After all that, it was just(!) a case of writing, revising, commenting, re-writing, lots of coffee, some more re-writing, until we had our first edition, which we launched in September 2019!

Group photo showing launch of Helston Climate Action Plan

From feedback we’ve received from near and far (as far away as New Zealand!), our Action Plan has been found to be of use to other communities looking to address the climate crisis. We’ve certainly found it helpful in turning understandable concerns into a set of actionable ideas. We don’t consider the plan to be the ‘final word’ in any sense, and we’d love to have the time to put together and publish a second edition at some point. If you have ideas for what we’ve missed out, or would like to implement any of these projects, either in Helston or elsewhere, please do get in touch.