Bude Climate Partnership is a dedicated community initiative focused on driving positive environmental change in Bude and its surrounding areas. Committed to building resilience against climate change, the partnership brings together local residents, businesses, and organizations to foster sustainable practices, reduce carbon emissions, and protect the unique natural landscape of North Cornwall.
Through innovative projects, educational outreach, and collaboration, Bude Climate Partnership aims to inspire collective action and create a greener, more sustainable future for generations to come.
who we are
Hello – we’re Bude Climate Partnership, a group of local environmental organisations working together to develop positive community-led climate-change responses throughout the wider Bude area.
Living in north Cornwall on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, we’re right on the sharp edge of climate change. Our lovely town, our beautiful countryside, our spectacular coastline and our close-knit community need protection to ensure they remain wonderful places for future generations.
Climate change is happening. We cannot avoid it. But it’s not all doom and gloom – not by any stretch. If we’re smart and we work together, we can turn a serious threat to our way of life into lots of opportunities that will future-proof our community, our economy and all aspects of our environment.
Every one of us can make small changes that collectively will make a huge difference. We’re here to help everyone in the Bude area pull together to make those changes that need to happen.
what we’re up to
For the last two years we’ve been working on 12 projects, using a £200,000 Lottery grant to employ experts in a wide range of areas. They researched all aspects of our community’s carbon footprint, including transport and energy use and the impact of tourism. This resulted in a number of strategies that could be implemented to reduce Bude’s carbon footprint in line with Cornwall Council’s goal of being carbon neutral by 2030.
At the end of last year, we went back to The National Lottery with our ideas and applied for additional funding to put our community’s many ideas and schemes into practice. We are delighted that The National Lottery awarded us a further £2m in December 2022 to implement the ‘delivery’ phase of our work.
Whilst work continues on the original projects, we have identified six key pieces of work to focus on over the next five years – Sustainable Tourism, Energy Efficiency, the Shoreline, a Community Growing Scheme, a Library of Things, and Community Storytelling.
We’re aiming to work closely with you – in fact, we can’t reach our goal without your help. We want to know what you think: your hopes, ideas and suggestions, as well as your worries and doubts, so we can work together to preserve our community, coast and beautiful landscape for future generations.
what we can do
Communities, organisations and individuals in the wider Bude area are rightly renowned for rallying towards a common cause. If something or someone needs help in our community – a family in need, a crumbling building or a special send-off – we are quick to offer support. This time, it’s the place we all call home that needs our help.
In the same way that we don’t think twice about simple acts of kindness to help our neighbours, we can commit to simple green behavioural tweaks to help our town, countryside, coastline and economy adapt positively to the threats of climate change. Find out the easy ways you can keep Bude as beautiful as it always has been.
programme management
Finally, the rest of the grant is budgeted for all the tasks, roles and responsibilities necessary to make our projects work and ensuring they meet the needs of our local community.
Jobs
We’ll be improving local employment with year-round positions and training for up to six people in full-time and part-time roles. They’ll be playing an essential role in helping us deliver the projects.
Investment
We’ll be supporting local small businesses and freelance workers by paying them to help us deliver parts of some of the projects, or in some cases, an entire project under our supervision.
Training
Working with The Carbon Literacy Project, we’ll be bringing accredited climate literacy training to hundreds of businesses and residents in the wider Bude area. This will inform them how to cut their carbon footprints, helping them save money and the planet.
Information
To keep the community informed, we’ll be making lots of resources and toolkits available to advise residents and businesses about building resilience and their journey to a carbon-free future. We’ll also be letting you know what we’re doing through our social media, our website, and films and events.
Learning
The Lottery requires us to undertake various other activities required by our grant, such as annual assessments by external evaluators of the work we’re doing. These assessments will keep us on track, let the community see what we’re doing and enable us to learn from our experiences.
Sharing
What we do in Bude is a testbed for climate adaptation elsewhere, so we’ll be actively sharing our learning and experiences with other coastal communities in Cornwall and more widely across the UK.
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