Proud to be made Poynton’s first Eco-Church in 2022 by Rocha https://ecochurch.arocha.org.uk/.
We were awarded a bronze Eco Church Award in late 2022 and converted this to a silver award in May 2023. We are now committed to achieving a gold award by September 2028.
Our Worship and Teaching already satisfies the criteria for a gold award. We hold a climate service in the Season of Creation every year and often run small group discussion series looking at the climate and wider environment emergencies and how we should respond to them as Christians.
With some tidying up of our policies and procedures we will also be at gold level for our Buildings. Our current carbon footprint for the whole church is less than 4.4 tonnes per year which is about half that of the average UK citizen. We achieve this by only purchasing our gas from renewable sources and using the electricity from our solar panels which we have enjoyed for over 15 years now. (can we get a photo of the panels?).
Our gardening group has now developed a Land Management Plan to ensure that our grounds are managed to encourage wild flowers, insects and other animals. We have recently planted two apple trees as part of Poynton’s Community Heritage Orchard. We are at silver level for Land and expect to reach gold before too long.
We are starting to engage more with our local community and recently hosted a screening of the People’s Emergency Briefing film. We need to work harder at taking action on local, national and global issues to reach gold level.
We encourage our members to reflect on their own carbon footprints are reduce the emissions they are responsible for. At this year’s Climate Sunday we heard about how our banking system often finances fossil fuel companies and on how we can choose to move our money to more ethical banks. This will all contribute to achieving gold level in the Lifestyle section by September 2028.
