New environmental group in Barnet!

From ecology experts to curious teenagers …. all were welcome

By Nitara Wijayatilake (A-level student, group member and budding blogger)

Helping our environment could never be more important than it is right now. The founder of the new environmental group “wanted to find a way to work locally with other Barnet residents on climate change and environmental issues to try to reduce the threats we face”. She decided to express her passion on Nextdoor, a website that helps you connect with people in your borough, and many people commented on her post about reforestation of the planet and how Barnet can fit into that. The founder believes that “individuals, corporations and politicians all need to work together and prioritise the existential threat of climate change; mass collective action on the environment is needed if we are to successfully keep the temperature rise to a safe level” and she found that many agreed with her…

The lovely group of people that attended the two hour evening meeting on 30th August 2018 ranged from experts in botany to curious teenagers. Everyone had one clear goal: helping our local environment to lead to reducing carbon emissions. From the start, the group’s aim seemed to be to work towards enlightening less enlightened people. The wonderful thing was that so many of the people who came are already deeply engaged in environmental issues. Individuals who are part of the forestry commission, who campaign for the rights of local residents and forest school leaders all offered interesting insight into some of the steps we can take to start to achieve our goals. We all felt extremely glad to have found people that share our passion for change.

We discussed how Christina Figueres who spearheaded the UN climate talks for 6 years and is a foremost expert on climate change has gathered together the world’s leading climate change scientists and formed Mission2020; a timetable for reaching a zero carbon civilisation by 2050. The plan is that carbon emissions will peak in 2020 and diminish decade on decade in every sector up to 2050. It is concerning that there is so little talk or knowledge about this and it was proposed that the group could investigate this further and understand how it relates to Barnet.

We all felt strongly that it was now up to citizens to propel the government’s rate of doing this. Although the group is aimed at residents of Barnet, we also considered what London as a whole is doing to reduce emissions. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, in his aim to clean the air, has set a lot of restrictions on vehicular emissions. We wondered how we could get involved in his plans. Delving deeper, the problem of a lack of buses on the North Circular became a clear reason for dirty air in Barnet.

Feeling negative about current state of our environment, we decided to play a game where we imagined what our ideal neighbourhood would look like. For some, this meant that instead of cars, there was only electric public transport. Others hoped for a proliferation of edible gardens with people exchanging their produce in new communal spaces. Ideas of rooftop and vertical gardens even came up. This lead us onto talking about, what we felt, was the most critical issue: trees. Our devastating reality is that Barnet has approximately 10% less trees than it did 20 years ago. Lots of ideas on how to solve the issue were being thrown around. The main one was that we need to approach the council with our facts (after carrying out tree surveys to see where there are deficiencies). People also raised the issue of how there are quite a few schools in Barnet with playgrounds that are directly on the high road. The solution for this seemed to be to grow ivy up the school walls, a brilliant plant that is effective in reducing air pollution.

As well as this, there was the suggestion of branching our ideas out into our local schools, forming eco-clubs and trying to engage young people in the issues they may have no awareness about. Another topic the group was impassioned about is concrete ‘gardens’. Other than the simple fact of there not being enough green around anymore, paved gardens cause a massive problem for climate change. Temperature rise will bring heavier rain and it’s now known that our drains will not be able to cope with the run off from the number of paved front gardens in the UK. To avoid sewage flooding into people’s homes we need the paving to be removed and replaced with porous surface so rain water can be absorbed into the earth. We discussed a few possible ways to solve this, such as the council taxing those who want to pave their gardens but this is something we still want to explore.

Next, the group moved onto our local wildlife; in particular, the habitat of swifts was discussed and how they could be helped to survive by placing special bricks into our walls where they can easily nest.

An amazing project that the group definitely wants to support is ‘Incredible edible Barnet’ where unused spaces are used to grow edible gardens. Eating seasonally and without additives is so important and needs to be emphasised. It’s a wonderful community activity that would brighten up Barnet and the group vowed to investigate the idea further.

We had all shared our strong views with one another, learned something new about our community and came out better for it. We decided to try to find a name for the group to show our positivity and ambition for Barnet to do its bit for the environment. Anyone in Barnet reading this who has ideas for what the group could be called please look for us on Facebook — Barnet Branches Out (working title) — and get in touch! Once some names are proposed we will vote for our favourite.

The aims of this blog are to keep Barnet residents up to date with our group and also offer a public record of our activities so that other boroughs can copy us or make their own variations. We want the world to tune to this grave issue in every local community!

Everyone left feeling inspired and hopeful, armed with ideas from carrying out tree surveys to identify where more trees can be planted, to approaching local businesses about increasing nature at their locations, to considering creating a communal garden, and to starting a campaign to depave front gardens.

Barnet Branches Out (working title)

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A community group in Barnet, London UK, working together on local issues towards keeping the temperature rise to a safe level.

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