On Friday 18th October the Wiggenholt Association held a Climate Change Forum in Pulborough. The village hall was bulging at the seams with over 150 people. It was considered a great success and now there are plans for the event to be repeated in other villages.

Presentations were given by the following guest speakers chaired by Jane Mote, media expert and ex BBC broadcaster.

• CLIMATE CHANGE BACKGROUND Geoff Barnard, Coordinator Greening Steyning
• COUNTRYSIDE Kia Trainor, Director CPRE Sussex
• FARMING Peter Knight, Estate Manager Arun to Adur Farm Cluster
• ENVIRONMENT Tony Whitbread, President Sussex Wildlife Trust
• COMMUNITIES Carrie Cort, Al Gore Climate Reality Leader & Founder, Sussex Green Living

If you are interesting in organising this event in your town or village please contact us. In the meantime below you can see some of the shocking stats provided by the speakers and below that their top tips on climate action.

A few shocking climate change statastics:

• 1/2 the Worlds coral has died in the last 30 years.
• Only 60% of food consumed in this country was produced here with 40% being imported.
• WATER: The Environment Agency report that we will run out of water in 25 years.
• Water is the most basic commodity that we cannot live without.
• More thought needs to be give to building more reservoirs or purchasing land to help store flood water.
• 1 Hectare of land can store 228,000 tonnes of water, equivalent to nearly 23 million litres.
• Of all the mammals in the world, 96% are humans, our livestock and our pets. Only 4% is everything else (badgers, antelopes, rabbits. Lions etc).
• Land and sea emit about 770 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide but they reabsorb about 790 billion tonnes, the extra 20 billion is reabsorbed from the fossil fuel sources we emit. So, as we emit 36 billion tonnes, subtract the 20 billion that nature reabsorbs giving the difference of 16 billion – that’s the net amount that we put into the atmosphere every year.
• We are in the 6^th mass extinction. Extinction rates are probably 1000 times higher than the expected background rate – that could mean 200 species are going extinct every day.
• Humans have been on the planet for 200,000 years, we have only had agriculture for the last 10,000 (that’s just 5% of our evolutionary history). That’s because the climate was not predictable enough in those 190,000 years to support agriculture. We are now bringing that stable period of the earth’s climate to a close because of climate change. Maybe agriculture will become impossible again.
• The hottest 5 years on record were the last 5 years *

* NOAA and NASA report, as expected, 2018 was the fourth-hottest year on record globally, and another near-record year for U.S. weather and climate disasters. All of the years on record that were hotter or more disaster-filled came in the past decade.

Here are some downloadable lists of action you can take, often saving you money, reducing your carbon footprint and your contribution to climate change.