Low Carbon South Oxford

Low Carbon Living Programme

• Want to save energy and money?
• Concerned about climate change or fuel security?
• Interested in learning practical ways to make a difference?

The Low Carbon Living Programme is a FREE year-long programme to help you reduce your carbon footprint. You'll learn how different aspects of your life contribute to the household's overall energy consumption, and be given practical support to enable you to make significant energy savings.

What you'll get

Comprehensive Carbon Footprint

Analysis of the energy use of your household, highlighting where you can cut your carbon.

A free smart-meter

A real time-display showing the electricity being used to power your home.

Tailored Support Package

Access to information and expertise on a wide range of carbon-busting topics

Become part of a switched-on low-carbon community

A chance to meet with friends and neighbours to share ideas.

In return we ask you to:

Set yourself a target for reducing you carbon footprint

We'll work with you to help create a personal pledge plan, and show what difference different actions might make. What changes you decide to make are entirely up to you.

Attend two key meetings

We ask all participants to attend the welcome session and a crucial goal-setting session. There are also six optional carbon-busting sessions, where you can share ideas and learn about ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

Submit monthly meter readings

To enable us to monitor the impact of the programme on energy consumption.

Permission to use your data

We'd like to use your household data (in a strictly anonymous format) to help us build up a broader understanding of our local community's carbon footprint, and in carbon footprinting research.

 

Low Carbon Living Programme 2011/12

Guiding South Oxford residents to a greener way of life

We ran our first Low Carbon Living Programme beginning in September last year.  The course begins by providing each participant with their own comprehensive carbon footprint, showing in detail how much CO₂ they produce each year from various activities such as travel, food, buying habits, how environmentally friendly their home is and so on.

The course then offers a series of six 'carbon-busting' sessions covering Lighting & Appliances, Heating & Insulation, Travel, Food & Cooking, Waste & Stuff and Green Energy.  Information and ideas are presented in a creative, interactive workshop style; with practical exercises which get the message across far more effectively than a straight lecture could. (e.g. 'Good Crumble - Bad Crumble' in which participants had to select the ingredients for a crumble which would be most and least beneficial for the environment, taking into account what fruit is in season, where various items came from, the likely energy required to get it from farm to shop, packaging etc.  It raised tricky issues such as balancing environmental impact and fair trade, land use and sharing scarce resources…)  There was space to share ideas and questions and to learn from one another.

Participants were then helped to make their own 'quick fix' short-term pledges, and bigger longer-term pledges, for how they might reduce the greenhouse gases they produce.  We're now in the phase of putting some of these into practice.  In September this year we will produce a second carbon footprint for each person and hopefully see a noticeable reduction in individual and overall footprints.

 
Here are comments from some of the participants about what was the best thing about the programme:

"Information, encouragement, team spirit"

"Doing the carbon footprint and talking with others"

"Many of the individual sessions were excellent.  Useful content, lively presentation and much practical advice."

"The practical approach"

"Hearing other people's views and ideas"

Many appreciated the summary statistics of how the group as a whole measured up at the beginning of the programme in terms of their joint carbon footprint.  Here's a snap-shot:

All course materials are now available free to download from the 'Supporting Greener Living' Resource section of the Low Carbon Hub website.

If you are interested in finding out more about this course or would like to be involved in the next one with Low Carbon South Oxford, please contact Helen at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.