The Planet Pledge Project

We all live our lives in different ways and this means that our patterns of emissions are different as well. The Planet Pledge Project is borne from the idea that one size does not fit all – we all need to reduce our emissions, but we need to decide ourselves on a way to do this that is consistent with our personal needs as well.

As part of the Planet Pledge Project, we will look at the whole picture of your emissions pattern and you will get help from us in meeting your climate change challenge. It will probably be easier than you think and there may be some hidden benefits.

Please read more about the project and then get in touch to find out how you can get involved.

The confusion

We are all concerned about our changing climate and what this means for our future and the future of those we love. 

Despite the stakes being so high, knowing what you should do is fairly baffling – is there anything more confusing than climate change? How do you know if you are doing enough or doing all of the right things. Conflicting information and contradictory statements don’t help.  It often seems that being green is just plain hard.

The reality

Many of the world's scientists now agree that to avoid the worst impacts of climate change we need to make sure that average temperature rise stays below 2°C (3.4°F) above pre-industrial temperature. If Scotland is to play its full and equal part in tackling climate change and help prevent global temperatures from exceeding 2°C, it must reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050. 

To succeed in reaching this target, we all need to start doing things now, but what we do needs to be enough to tackle the problem, and so needs to go beyond the tokenistic.

The Climate Change (Scotland) Act

With the passing into law of the Scottish Climate Change Act in 2009, Scotland is now leading the world in the fight against climate change. Whether or not this leading position is maintained by decisive action to reduce emissions is dependent on the actions of each and every one of us. 

What the bill means for you

In the Climate Challenge Bill, the Scottish Government has set out a target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 42% by 2020 and by 80% by 2050. To achieve this target, we all need to achieve reductions in our emissions of around 4% for each of the next 10 years.* While an 80% reduction sounds pretty intimidating, a reduction of 4% per year seems a lot more achievable.  By reducing our emissions in this way, the national rate of per capita consumption would fall from the current 11.61 tCO₂** to 7.72 tCO₂. If we kept reducing at this rate, then by 2050, per capita emissions would be just 2.27 tCO₂.**

Gaining through greening

New Caledonian Woodlands believes that we can meet the targets set out in the Climate Change (Scotland) Act and that getting greener can bring lots of extra positives beyond the environmental ones:

• financial savings;
• health benefits;
• improvements to our lifestyle. 

The Planet Pledge Project is our invitation to you – let’s work together to reduce our environmental impact little by little and year by year.  That will mean that we all need to look at our lifestyles and consider ways that we can make greening changes that will work for us as individuals.

What will work for one person may not work for someone else – the emphasis is on making pledges that will work for you and pledges that you can deliver.  The Planet Pledge Project has been designed to make this possible, by asking each participant to make pledges to change their habits and behaviours across 5 key categories:

• transport;
• home energy;
• biodiversity;
• waste reduction;
• consumer behaviour.

The benefits

We all know that getting greener is better for the planet.  The good news is that there are some real personal benefits as well:

• Save money
• Improve your health
• Engage with new activities that improve the quality of your lifestyle.

What happens?

• Baseline measurement. We will take a baseline of your carbon footprint and your ecological footprint. This can either be done during one of our team challenge, tree planting or biodiversity weekends, or you can make an appointment to pop into our office to carry this out. 
• Choosing pledges. We will then work together on coming up with pledges that suit your lifestyle and we will show you what emissions reductions are likely per year if you stick to these pledges.
• Annual review. We will arrange with you to meet up again in one year to review your progress and come up with an additional set of pledges.
• Prizes! We will enter you into our Planet Pledge Emissions Draw – the three people who reduce their emissions by the greatest amount each year will each win the mean green prize.
• Advice and support. You can contact us throughout the year for advice on emission reduction matters.

 

 

* The targets for the Climate Challenge Bill are for the production-based emission of Scotland. The emissions reductions that we make as individuals are consumption-based emissions. These are not the same, but currently the per-capita scale is very similar. New Caledonian Woodlands recognises this difference but feels that the targets within the Climate Challenge Bill are appropriate in scale for individuals to adopt at the current time. For further explanation of the difference between production and consumption based emissions, please refer to the report Counting Consumption - CO₂ emissions, material flows and Ecological Footprint of the UK by region and devolved country – WWF (2006).

** 11.61 tCO₂ per capita based on national rates of consumption (from Ecological Budget UK (2006) “Counting Consumption - CO₂ emissions, material flows and Ecological Footprint of the UK by region and devolved country.”