It’s knowing where to start; that’s the thing. Anything as massive as global warming is pretty daunting for rural communities with limited critical mass to get the Net Zero ball rolling.

But up in the frozen north of Leicestershire the village of Bottesford has at least made a start.

We’ve held a webinar for local businesses during lockdown and followed that up by working with Masters students from Nottingham University on projects in the village.

One of these did a desktop exercise to evaluate the potential for using the Parish Council’s Tree Charter as a template to assess how many trees could be planted on the various areas of publicly and privately owned parcels of land in the village and then assessing the carbon sequestered by the trees planted and how they would lock up carbon after years one, two, five and so on as they matured.

Another student is working with us evaluating with Green Fox Community Energy from Leicester whether a Car Club is justified and whether we can have solar panels on a community-owned building to feed into EV charging stations for both villagers and the community owned cars.

And we’ve done a brilliant project in our churchyard by creating a community wildflower orchard. Couldn’t be simpler; the wildflowers increase biodiversity, they attract the bees, which then pollinate the fruit trees and the fruit (scrumpers permitting) will be used in the church’s Food Bank. As if that wasn’t neat enough, we’ve worked with Support and Connections from Melton Mowbray who run day care for adults with learning difficulties and they have planed-up some discarded pallets and repurposed them into compost bins for the churchyard. These will replace the two council ones and will save the church some £180 a year. Everyone’s a winner!

But small and often isolated, rural communities don’t have the scale to do the big, sexy projects that attract funds and government support, so what we’ve created is a wider area grouping for anyone interested in biodiversity, sustainability and reducing our carbon footprints. This includes parish councils and groups that want to do something positive to address the climate change that is all too evident.

It’s early days but already in Communities Network Foundation we can see how we can avoid duplication and working in silos , and can also share best practice and, with the help of the local authority’s recently launched Leicestershire Net Zero Toolkit we can join up some of the dots that will help us make a meaningful contribution to Climate Change issues and leave future generations a greener, healthier and more sustainable world.

Ambitious? Yes, but you’ve got to start somewhere.  Find out more here:  

https://www.leicestershirecommunities.org.uk/parish-councils/net-zero-toolkit

Bottesfordnetzero@gmail.com