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CONNECTED

CONNECTED: Building a Toolkit to Support Decarbonisation of Communities

Funded by:

Pobal

Partners:

The partner list includes twelve academics in the University of Galway; five Decarbonising communities, their five local authorities and their climate action regional office, four volunteer Ireland branches, and Energy Cooperatives Ireland. To find out more click here.

Description:

There are 2 major climate-action barriers this research tackles, the first: consumers do not know what climate-actions to take confused by the: (i) financial cost, (ii) personal effort, and (iii) emissions reduction benefits of a whole series of competing climate-actions. Our busy lifestyles increase the dissonance. The second climate barrier is that communities are significantly isolated and there are relatively few trusted solutions in which they can invest. Our Spark Change research (here) utilised climate-action drivers to transfer climate-actions from lighthouse to follower communities building trust, knowledge, feedback, confidence, agency and action.

This research seeks to build a webtoolkit (Fig. 1) to drive co-creation and climate-action further. This will include a range of tools, case studies and a sharing platform to support decarbonized communities tangibly reduce their carbon footprint by 2050. There are supports to set up a decarbonisation committee and formal procedures including the development of a decarbonisation plan for the community. Necessary also are supports to engage the individuals and the community to measure the carbon intensity of a myriad of competing climate-actions. Susequent to measurement we provide supports for local campaigns on reinterpretation, dialogue and reflection on low carbon behaviours, practices and actions. As learning by doing and norm activation are powerful drivers of action our toolkit also hosts stories and case studies of climate-action both at the individual and community scales. The climate change challenges needing community action are diverse and we build a support within our toolkit for diverse climate-action issues such as erosion, flooding, economics, biodiversity and peatlands remediation.

Objectives:

  • To build a climate action toolkit for Irish communities
  • To test the toolkit and develop it for broad application in Ireland


More information can be found at: https://climateconnected.ie/