Why Community Climate Coaching?

The CCC initiative promotes and trains people to help bring about community transformation by supporting individuals, teams and groups to address the root causes of the converging climate, biodiversity, wellbeing and local economic challenges - which we call Community Climate Coaches. This approach aims to create a network of people that cultivate trust and relationships within the broader community, connect up different local initiatives, and facilitate conversations and actions that increase understanding and drive ambitious community-led responses.

Community climate action is essential for navigating the transition to a regenerative, low-carbon future. However, these efforts are often fragmented, inadequately facilitated, non-inclusive, and insufficiently supported. The urgent need for transformative change at local and bioregional levels, and for just transition, calls for people with a set of skills in community engagement, group facilitation and the ability to support communities and their leaders and activists in the process of identifying the local resilience goals, and then collectively achieving those goals over time. Our approach recognises that climate change, and our culture’s failure to respond with sufficient speed, depth or scale, is a symptom of a much deeper set of interconnected crises. The community scale response to these crises is the level where we can come together to look after the needs of ourselves and others, the places where we live, and the nature that lives alongside us there. CCC therefore focuses on what we can do at this local level.

This PDF summary guide (above) describes the approaches and intent behind the CCC project, which aims to train individuals and teams to help communities respond to and prepare for climate impacts at the local level, whilst also addressing social, economic inequality. This provides an overview of all the elements of the CCC tools and resources available, and the skills needed by Community Climate Coaches and the training system and learning pathway that delivers those skills.

To understand how the CCC approach can be taken forward at the local or regional level, watch this video below of a Webinar with Davie Philip of Cultivate in Ireland, which explains how the Community Climate Coaches approach has evolved and been applied in County Tipperary.


 

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CCC Ireland training

The CCC Partnership

Community Climate Coaches is being taken forward in the UK by the Permaculture Association by developing partnerships at the national and local level. We are working with SCCAN (Scottish Communities Climate Action Network) to explore how the CCC approach can be taken forward in Scotland, and with BITC (Business in the Community) to explore routes to rolling out CCC across the UK. We've also worked with Climate Action Leeds and SHIFT Bristol to pilot the CCC training.

The Community Climate Coach project was initially developed through a consortium of European partners active in the permaculture, ecovillage, Transition Towns and regenerative movements and networks:

Since 2021, the partners have worked as a Community of Practice to advance Community Climate Coaching as a new vocation that assists citizens and groups to respond to the ecological and climate emergency through a form of community-led regenerative local development. For more information on training in this field please go to our Community Climate Coaches training page.

The Community Climate Coaches project was co-funded by the EU Erasmus+ Programme.  The European Commission support for the production of CCC publications does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

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To continue exploring the Community Climate Coaches initiative visit the following webpages: