Climate Change and Civil Society

Sensory Trust and the Eden Project worked with the Carnegie UK Trust on a project to help non-environmental civil society groups engage with climate change and resource scarcity. The project resulted in a guidance document to help organisations such as non-environmental non-profits, trade unions, faith-based groups and others to build an understanding of how these issues relate to their core agenda and are likely to impact on their core constituencies.

Climate change is frequently presented as an environmental issue, however the impacts of climate change are societal: rising costs and prices, migration and unemployment to name but a few. We need to build an understanding that issues like climate change cannot be categorised as environmental but are challenges to the whole breadth of society. To be workable and sustainable, decisions to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change should involve a broader spectrum of society than it does at present.

The project has involved facilitating a series of UK wide workshops and conducting targeted interviews discussing challenges, impacts and possible solutions. From the feedback of these interviews and workshops a practical guide will be produced for non-environmental groups allowing the findings of the inquiry to be accessed as widely as possible.

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