Green light for climate campaign in Gosport

ENVIRONMENT campaigners have issued a call to climate action in Gosport as part of the nationwide Great Big Green Week

Starting today, Tuesday September 21 and running until October 5 at the Gosport Discovery Centre, a display organised by Gosport Fairtrade Action about ‘How choosing Fairtrade can help tackle climate change’ highlights the need for urgent action on climate and nature ahead of COP26, the United Nations Climate talks, later this year in Glasgow. 

It explains how Fairtrade helps farmers in some of the areas worst hit by climate change – and who have done the least to cause it – to adapt farming methods and protect their crops, soil, trees and wildlife.

And it encourages Gosport residents to take personal action to reduce their carbon emissions, choose Fairtrade products and tell their politicians that they are concerned about climate change and support strong and urgent action by government. 

They can sign a petition calling on Government to act now: to ensure that help reaches those who need it most; to reduce emissions, including aviation and shipping, sufficiently to avoid the worst impacts of climate change; to make trade deals that encourage fair low carbon products to allow farmers to invest in sustainable farming, and to strengthen rules that mean businesses invest in fair, sustainable supply chains and enforce them.

This is one of many events in the region – another is the Leesland Greening Campaign launching on September 26 – and one of more than 4,500 taking place across the UK as part of the climate action campaign known as the Great Big Green Week (September 18-26), organised by The Climate Coalition, the UK’s largest group of people dedicated to action against climate change, whose members include the National Trust, WWF, Women’s Institute, Oxfam, and RSPB. Other organisations supporting the campaign included BT, British Mountaineering Council, and the Manchester United Foundation.

Sarah Hirom, co-ordinator of Gosport Fairtrade Action said: ”Here in low-lying Gosport we are at risk from rising sea levels, so we can sympathise with those whose livelihoods are already being devastated by increasingly severe floods and droughts, storms and wildfires made worse by climate change. We are all in this “fight that unites” which, as the campaign emphasises, is not a choice of now or never but now and forever.  Every action that anyone anywhere takes to help reduce climate change helps everyone on the planet.”