I don’t think I’ve had as many conversations about the weather this summer as I have in the last few weeks — and not the usual small talk. Amber heat health alerts. Hosepipe bans. Wildfire warnings on land that, a few years ago, we’d never have associated with the word “wildfire”. It’s been hard to miss, and harder still to shrug off as just another warm summer.
For those of us working across the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector, this isn’t an abstract conversation about global temperatures. It’s a very practical one. It’s about whether the day centre we support has anywhere cool for people to sit. Whether the outreach team can still do home visits safely at 2pm. Whether the community hall roof, that’s needed patching for three years, will cope with another downpour after a dry spell. Climate change doesn’t arrive as a single dramatic event for most of our members — it arrives as a slow accumulation of pressures on buildings, budgets, staff and, most of all, on the people we exist to support.
And it’s the people who are already most vulnerable who feel it first. Older people and those with long-term health conditions are most at risk during heat health warnings. Families already struggling with the cost of living are the ones least able to run a fan through the night or take a day off when it’s too hot to work. Rural communities cut off by flooding or road damage are often the ones with the thinnest safety net to begin with. This is exactly the territory our sector works in every day — resilience, care, community — so it stands to reason that climate is now part of our brief too.
In the past, sustainability may have felt like someone else’s conversation — a corporate one, or a policy one, happening at a level above the day-to-day reality of running a small charity or community group. But that’s changed. The organisations we talk to aren’t asking whether this affects them anymore. They’re asking what to do about it — how to keep services running through extreme weather, how to protect the buildings and people they’re responsible for, and how to have honest conversations with their own communities about what’s coming.
That’s exactly why I’d encourage you to come along to the Climate Expo & Sustainability Conference at Uttoxeter Racecourse on Friday 25 September. It’s free, it’s practical, and it’s been put together with organisations like yours in mind — not just big businesses. There’s a session on adaptation and resilience for your organisation, a workshop on cutting bills and carbon at the same time, and a chance to see the People’s Emergency Briefing, which does a genuinely good job of cutting through the noise on what the climate and nature crisis actually means for the UK.
Climate change may bring unprecedented times but we can get better prepared, better connected, and better informed about what our communities will need from us next. That feels like time well spent.
I hope to see some of you there.
Garry