How is Tech helping to fight Climate Crisis and who is already involved?

Event’s participants thoughts on climate crisis

Written by Alina Kadyrova

Right, let’s talk about Climate Change. Climate Change IS happening. And climate change is making us angry. Climate change might stop ruining the Earth if every one of us does something. What a surprise, right? On a less sarcastic note, let’s talk about our October event on climate change.

This time our format was a bit different. Instead of three usual speakers, we had had seven amazing speakers that gave slightly shorter talks.

The first speaker was Eve Holt @evefrancisholt, Chorlton Labour Councillor. First off, Eve asked us to take WWF Carbon Calculator. The calculator is a questionnaire, it asks you questions about the lifestyle, whether and how often you fly or use a personal car, what food you eat, and gives you the estimation of your current carbon footprint relative to UK 2020 targets. I thought I was quite good – I don’t have any children, animals, or a huge house, I don’t drive a car. Iove trains and use buses, don’t eat meat that often. My result was rubbish, though -  183%! Most of it because of my travelling to see my family who lives in 6000 km away, I also travel for academic conferences held in different parts of the world every year and go abroad to catch some sun from time to time.  

My embarrassing carbon footprint calculator results

Knowing my number relative to the 2020 target, I will rethink my approaches to travelling or buying everyday stuff. Here comes the tricky question of whether I am ready to reduce flying and to see my family, develop my academic career or health by 2020? Living close to your family is not an option for some of us, and not seeing them is not an option either. I do not have an immediate answer now. Some people try to offset their flights and pay a fee that will go towards environmental projects. Offsetting was, however, criticised for failing to deliver any measurable results. Offsetting does not reduce greenhouse gases, flying less does.

But anyway, back to Eve’s talk. In addition to the calculator that shows your result relative to the UK average, Eve was suggesting to develop carbon calculators for metropolitan, district and community level to make it less abstract and compare how different parts of a town contribute to carbon footprint, and why. Reasons might be that not everyone has access to public transport or cycling infrastructure. More localised data will then enable to develop more targeted tools to reduce the footprint. While such calculators are not there, have a look at the carbon emissions map based on the reports of local authorities in Manchester.

Eve’s suggestion to develop local carbon emission calculators

Claire Stocks @stocksyatlarge, who was another speaker, is probably ahead of all of us in terms of carbon footprint. Claire is an activist campaigning for better walking, cycling and public transport in the city region, and she gave up her car for Extinction Rebellion in Deansgate.

Claire talked about the ways to reduce carbon footprint. To start with, we might stop taking car rides for 1 km or less, which, according to the data, is about a third of all our car trips. Not only expanding the public transport coverage will help to achieve our footprint goals, but also making driving in towns more difficult. Some cities like Edinburgh and Leeds and taking steps forward to it via introducing car-free days, but in Manchester a car park is still cheaper than a bus ticket.

Claire talking about ways to reduce carbon footprint

Our next speaker was Steve Connor @headstretcher. Steve is a founder of ethical communications agency Creative Concern and a climate activist for the last 25 years. Steve told us that deforestation takes up to 15% of the global emissions, and thus the battle for our future will be between meat vs trees. What we can do is to demand zero deforestation from our governments and plant new trees on the agriculture land that accounts for 72% of land use, only 0.5% of the economy and a big contributor to the greenhouse gases. Additional 50 millions of trees will decrease greenhouse emissions by 8 million. It’s time to choose trees over meat, folks.  

Steve talking about meat vs trees

Then we had Chris Paul @ChrispLOL, mobility justice advocate, environmental governance researcher, former walking and cycling lead for Greater Manchester. Chris reminded us that the painful truth that we are building more roads and parking harms us, and not building more bike lanes and footpaths because ‘not so many people would use it’. Also, Chris talked about ticketing schemes that punish poorer people who live further away from the city centres, and how almost no one would use this to demand change in bus fairs because the bus data is rarely released and usually not used. I can confirm this one – I participated in an Open Data Manchester meetup some time ago where we dig up the bus data released by GM. What a mess it was, takes a couple of drinks to get through it.

Chris talking about data problems and shitty excuses to keep building more roads.

Next one was Rachel from Plastic Shed @Plastic_Shed – a social enterprise that invites people to bring plastic waste along and make new things from it. The Shed owns several tools to shred and melt the plastic so people can work with plastic waste. So far people have made various notebook covers, envelops, notice boards. What Rachel is aiming for is mainstreaming plastic recycling and up-cycling so that the future Sheds would be in every neighbourhood be something like ‘launderettes’ for plastic waste.    

Rachel from The Plastic Shed - check them out.

The final part of our event was taken by Richard Wilson from @StopFundingHate and @StopFundingHeat. We had Richard at our October event (here is the blog about it), where he talked about the success of Stop Funding Hate – a  campaign that challenged advertisers to reduce the hate in newspapers and online media. Richard is starting a new project that would encourage advertising companies such as Fox News to stop funding ads on climate change denial. We spent some time in groups thinking about the best ways to do it – hope it was useful for Richard and his team. Give them a follow!

The event was ace, as all of our events are, of course. Join this Wednesday for our next event on funding your tech for good.