Climate change is everyone’s business, so let’s all act to address it

With a recent survey showing that three quarters of people in the UK say the environment will be important to them in 2020, John Rose, our Director for Wales and environment lead, discusses our environment strategy.

As we’ve seen in the news increasingly over the past year, the climate emergency is touching more and more parts of our lives. There’s a lot of talk about individual action, but as the largest funder of community activity, The National Lottery Community Fund believes that bringing people together to take action at a community level can have a big impact.

In a recent survey from the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations, more than three out of five people (62%) said that addressing climate change requires a ‘high’ or ‘extremely high’ level of urgency.

Meanwhile, another public survey showed that one in three people in the UK recognise communities have a role in taking environmental action this year, while many - more than one in 10 people - intend to join in with community environmental activities in the year ahead. This is great news, and we are stepping up support for communities acting to address climate change.

Since our inception, we’ve been an environmental funder and, in the last seven years alone, we’ve invested £345 million in projects with an environmental aspect, including Our Bright Future, the Fair Isle Project, and Create Your Space.

Over the past five years our ‘people in the lead’approach has increasingly focused on bringing people together to make the most of what the natural environment has to offer in improving their lives.

We’re now delighted to have our new three-part environment strategy (learn more about it in the video on this page) in place.

The first part of this is to support the 12,000 organisations a year that we fund, as well as those that apply for our funding, to take steps to mitigate their environmental impact. We’re doing this by providing new information and inspiration on our website to take environmental action, and via our Climate Action Top-ups in Wales, a test project that will inform the way we work in the future.

The pilot scheme offers non-environmentally focused projects additional funding of up to £10,000 along with expert advice from our partners Renew Wales and Sustainable Communities Wales to help them identify practical action to implement more sustainable ways of working. 

Those participating in the scheme are committed to monitoring the impact of their changes, allowing us to use these lessons to see how we can support more communities to act in the face of this climate emergency.

South Denbighshire Community Partnership in North Wales is one of the community groups taking part in the scheme.

They will use the grant to install 24 solar panels on their community centre, not only helping them reduce our carbon emissions, but also save on energy bills, making it good for business too. The other organisations taking part are about to be announced.

The second part of our environment strategy is the £100 million Climate Action Fund. Launched in July last year, this fund will enable people and communities to take the lead in tackling the climate emergency.

It will build a network of people and communities, well-placed to drive change within, between and beyond their community.

The submission period for initial ideas in our first round of funding is now closed and we’d like to thank everyone who submitted their idea – we had a fantastic response with over 600 proposals spanning across issues areas including energy, transport, natural environment and food. We expect to start announcing who has received funding in the Spring.

Meanwhile, the final part of the strategy is about reducing The National Lottery Community Fund’s own environmental impact.

Over the last decade, we’ve been working to reduce our environmental footprint in several ways, including reducing the amount of energy we use to heat and light our offices.

We’ve reduced waste we divert to landfill, improved our recycling rates and are using video conferencing, meaning we can cut down on unwanted car journeys for meetings. We’re committed to reducing our carbon emissions further and continuously seeks ways we can achieve this.

Although our environment strategy will ultimately help mitigate the impact of climate change in the UK, it will also bring about additional benefit to communities up and down the country.

We know that environmental community projects not only help reduce carbon, but they also offer plenty of other benefits that people, and communities, can reap.

And our survey supports this.

It shows that people are already aware of the benefits community involvement has, including bringing the community together (49%), making new friendships and connections (42%), and there is improved mental and physical wellbeing amongst participants (40%).

All these benefits help people and communities thrive and that’s what we at The National Lottery Community Fund are all about.

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Find out more about what you can do to reduce your environmental footprint.