I was going to blog about kitchens of the future, and the fact that people’s dream futures are often ecologically-friendly without primarily being driven by environmental concerns. But how could I not blog about 10:10’s new film? If you haven’t seen it, take a moment, take a pinch of salt and have a watch.

Did they go too far? I’d say you have to measure it against the issue in hand. If people were showing pictures of starved, beaten dogs in order to sell a particularly healthy brand dog food, viewers would probably feel that the emotional response elicited by the advert wasn’t justified by the objective importance of the message. But animal charities regularly use such images to highlight the objectively cruel and unnecessary plight of animals that are genuinely neglected and abused by their owners. We think, and the Advertising Standards Authority tends to agree, that that is justified.

As messages go, there are scarcely any more important than climate change. Commentators have said that the film gives a negative, doomsday view of climate change. James Delingpole goes so far as to say that the film shows, “the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.” Entertainingly, this is as big an over-exaggeration as the film itself. I won’t bore you with a deconstruction of Delingpole’s adjectival mish-mash, but suffice to say it mainly reveals fear. He doesn’t both to engage with the reasons behind the film, he simply rails against it as ‘eco-propaganda.’

Now arguably it is propaganda, but in its true sense: ‘the organised promotion of information to assist or damage the cause of a government or movement.’ Delingpole suggests that it is mis-information, but of course the film is based on solid, peer-reviewed scientific fact. This is what Delingpole is scared of, and this is what he fails to engage with. When people say that this is a doomsday scenario, they are right: this is the alternative to action to reduce carbon emissions. As Fanny Armstrong says, 300,000 people are dying from climate change every year – this year, next year, and every year after that unless we change the way we act. Is this film more or less offensive than real life footage of children starving to death because of crop failure in sub-Saharan Africa? I leave you to judge.

Environmental Management Systems, or the Story of a Tree that Grew from an Tiny Seed

I have to say, I love looking at all the actions that the organisations signed up to JustAct are taking. In fact, I think I'm turning into an Actions Geek. Honestly, I spend my lunch hour tootling round the website finding out how many people are turning off their lights and who's engaging with their staff over climate change. Someone's got to do it though, eh?

When my lunch hour's over one of the things I do is work on our Environmental Management System (EMS). I don't know how many of you have/ are working towards one? Ours is called the Acorn Scheme, and it's based on British Standard 8555 (BS8555); we're working towards completing level three by March 2011.

So far... so good. Things do tend to sound more difficult once you capitalise them (EMS), but really it's been surprisingly easy. The Acorn Progress Matrix (see?) which Groundwork gave us as part of our initial training lays out each step, and there's lots of guidance if you're not sure what a 'continual improvement action' might be (turns out to be JustAct, give or take).

The first stage is all about 'securing commitment and establishing a baseline', and happily we already had quite a bit of this - a draft environmental policy, senior management commitment, and the aforementioned 'improvement actions.' For example, we've got good recycling, but we're realised that in one office we can get water filter jugs and stick them in the fridge rather than run a water cooler. Even the 'Environmental Performance Indicators' haven't been too hard because we've realised that we already collect lots of the information we want - how much electricity, gas and water we use etc. We do need to know the proportion of our waste that's recycled, but all we have to do is ask the cleaners to note down the number of recycling and non-recycling bags that go out each day. Bisto.

Stage two isn't much fun to be truthful, it's the legal requirements and our compliance with them. Still, because we're a law-abiding, office-based organisation it's still pretty straightforward, we just need to check that we're doing what we should, and that we have a process to monitor that compliance.

We haven't quite got to stage three yet, but I'll let you know when we do...

We're really lucky that our senior management are so supportive, and that we don't really have many impacts. One thing that I know some people face is the pressure to use offsetting. Now I don't think offsetting is the solution, but if you know people who do, try showing them Cheat Neutral. If they're still keen, send them to Sandbag.

If you have any questions about EMSs, do drop me a line...

Just Acting: who are the JustAct members?

Since launching in March, the JustAct website has become a fully fledged interactive resource, with now 179 members. Huzzah! And who are you all?

Well, the biggest group (by organisational status) is charities, who make up a substantial two thirds of all JustAct members, but it's not just the usual suspects. Far from it. We have social enterprises, community groups, not-for-profits, housing associations and faith groups, to name but a few. Our latest member, as of today, is ArcSpace Manchester, welcome...

The diversity of members' work is frankly astonishing, from community support, to the arts, to housing - we even have a member from India. A random selection from the 'F's gives me Friends of the Great Copse & Leigh Park; Fruitful Consulting; and the Furniture Re-use Network (FRN).

Perhaps most interesting thing is the reasons that people have given for joining up:

• "We are concerned for work on environmental issues to be accessible to disabled people and people with long term health conditions." (Self Help Nottingham)
• "To be a positive role model for the communities that we work with, and lead by example." (Groundwork North Northamptonshire)
• "Participating in government and voluntary sector initiatives on the subject, and being seen to do so." (Look Ahead Housing and Care)
• "If we are all going to dream of a solution the third sector is the only place that dreams become reality." (Core)

Some news we thought you might find interesting... researchers at the University of Cardiff have found that 71% of britons are concerned about climate change, despite hacked emails, failure at Copenhagen and cold weather. The (fantastically-named) Professor Nick Pidgeon who led the study said: "By no means has there been a collapse in confidence in climate science... If I was in policy circles I would not be complacent."

So, it looks like people believe that what we're doing is important here, and just to prop that up, we've even found academic endorsement: according to the summary of Tschakert and Dietrich's work there is "a dearth of methods and tools to facilitate and sustain... collaborative, iterative, self-organising processes of learning-by-doing." That's exactly what JustAct was set up to do (though we might not have phrased it like that...). So well done us!

Finally, CDF have started an e-bulletin called 'Sustainable Developments' aimed at third sector/ civil society groups who are interested in what everyone else is getting up to around social, environmental and economic sustainability... if you fancy it, follow the link.


Kate
On behalf of the JustAct team

Welcome to the JustAct Blog!

JustAct is a website that supports Third Sector organisations to help each other create, implement and review their action plan, in order to fulfil their commitments under the Third Sector Declaration on Climate Change.

This blog is a place to find updates, news and discussions on the Declaration, the JustAct website and climate change.

The JustAct website is now online and in the beta testing stage. It can be found at http://www.justact.org.uk/. Feel free to sign up and start using the site, and let us know if there are any problems, or anything else you would like to see.