Wales Climate Action

The Welsh Assembly's Climate Team are holding their autumn information sharing, inspiration and idea generation event in Llangollen over two days 22-23 November. Speakers include the outstanding Jay Griffiths, whose book 'Wild' is one of the best I've ever read.

I have the pleasure of running the first day - any questions to me or Usha Ladwa Thomas.

Further information here - look for the file titled Llangollen.

Welsh Assembly's view on delivering ESDGC

The ESDGC action plan was completed in December and the new draft was put together by the 25 or so people on the ESDGC panel; the plan's not prescriptive and wants to give individual institutions opportunity to develop their own.

Strategic context includes WAG's One Wales Agenda and the driver behind One Wales One Planet. Strengths - demand for learners, recognised as good practice, evidence of delivery, stakeholder commitment. Tina Hawkins is working with the team in the Dept fo Environment Sust and Health to develop the idea of a young person's charter - could this link to the idea of the '1 Club' - people who give one percent of their time to community and environmental projects? In ESDGC, there is funding available, but not massive amounts - £150k or so.

Five aims: mainstreaming and embedding it, simplify delivery, integration with other programmes, accessibility to learning, and learner participation. Priorities include evaluation, research to define quality and indicators, web based communication tools and engagement with local authorities.

In further education, there's value in creating a Practitioner Network, and looking at potential training for practitioners, projects, materials and events etc.

There's needs to be training for trainers on how to embed this across different areas - we have literacy experts and therefore need an agreed level of expertise on how to create common standards  and a common understanding of what good looks like.

Down to the wire

Working with government can be the most frustrating thing in the world, or the most inspiring. Today was the latter; I spent a while in conversation with Simon Bilsborough, the brains behind much of the best climate policy and action that is coming out of the Welsh Assembly Government; it's a high standard that he has to follow as Wales leads the world in areas ranging from CO2 reduction targets to built environment standards. We spent time talking about the first day of Hay on Earth, when the First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, and Minister for Environment & Sustainability, Jane Davidson, will be launching Wales' new Sustainability Plan. Apart from spending a couple of hours facilitating a process to get large organisations working out how to do things differently, and change much, much faster, we're going to building content on a wire timeline over the four days - putting 'smart' actions and real dates onto the line so that the urgency and need for action becomes clear and compelling to all who see and contribute to it. Simon was fully behind the plan, and could immediately see how it could gel action;  he is a doer of the first degree, and inspiring to work with as a result. Hay will be even more fun than I was expecting a day ago.