A new free business support programme has been launched in the South Hams specifically aimed at helping construction and maintenance professionals to reduce their carbon footprint.

Participants can also benefit from one-to-one meetings with specialist advisors, either online or in person.

These sessions cover a range of business topics including marketing, staff retention, HR, and succession planning.

Additionally, each participant will receive a customised decarbonisation plan and advice from digital experts on using digital solutions to increase efficiency and save time.

Visit www.businessinfopoint.co.uk/construction-business-support for more information

Using systems thinking to transform our food: Beans as an analytical lens. Wednesday 19 June 10 a.m. to 11 a.m.

Given the complex nature of the UK food system, it is clear that interventions to transform it will need to be designed from a systems perspective, i.e. as systemic innovations. Key questions include; what should be the boundaries of the system?

Which actors and what perspectives would have to be involved? What collaboration would be needed? How could all the moving parts pull in one direction at once? Who would be the winners and losers?

The webinar will look at a systems approach to food system transformation, through the lens of the BeanMeals project, which was designed to explore systemic innovations using beans as the case study.

The benefits of incorporating more beans into our diets and farming systems are well documented: not only can they contribute to healthier and more sustainable diets and lower shopping bills, but they can increase soil fertility, provide a home-grown livestock feed, and ultimately reduce GHG emissions.

In this webinar, speakers will use the example of beans to show why thinking about the wider system is so important when trying to create large-scale change in diets and food production.

Click here to find out more and register.

Climate Majority Thinks: Nature Resilience with Ben Goldsmith - Thursday 20 June 9 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.

Britain is chronically nature-deficient. This makes it very hard to be transformatively  adapted to climate damage, as for instance, we mostly no longer have the wetlands to buffer flooding. So this badly needs to change.

In Wild Card, the Climate Majority Project incubated Britain’s most successful cutting-edge rewilding organisation/movement, which could help spearhead this key aspect of transformative/strategic adaptation.

Ben Goldsmith is likewise a key supporter of Wild Card. The needful agenda is one of rebalancing and restoring ecosystems, to become resilient or even anti-fragile (ie actually growing stronger from hits and challenges, rather than merely absorbing them without damage).

There is room here also for ‘agriwilding’, to synthesise rewilding with food-growing and to remove the culture war patina sometimes attached to rewilding. (The CMP regards agriwilding as an important agent of potential depolarisation, a win-win-win in classic transformative adaptation style.).

To register, click here.

A study published in the Nature Cities Journal has found that cities around the world are more likely to maintain climate action if local decision makers were more alert to the health risks of inaction.

Raising the profile of co-benefits associated with cleaner air and more access to natural spaces were seen as particularly important.

The study used data from 793 cities from the Carbon Disclosure Project 2021 platform to assess how the COVID-19 crisis has affected cities’ reported climate commitments and action. 

Click here to read more.

Scientists from the United Kingdom, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany, including scientists from each of the National Meteorological Services in the Western Europe storm naming group, collaborated to assess the extent to which recent prolonged and severe rainfall was influenced by climate change.

October 2023 to March 2024 was one of the wettest October to March periods on record. The study found that the average precipitation on stormy days have become around 30% more intense, compared to a 1.2C cooler pre-industrial climate.

As warmer air can hold more moisture, the production of rain increases, and as the climate warms, we can expect to see further increases in rainfall.

To read the study in full click here.