WHEN Rachel Nunn started reading about the urgent need to help tackle climate change, she could not sit back and do nothing.
Instead, she has launched an ambitious plan to turn Stirling into the first carbon-neutral city in the UK.
Yesterday, her efforts were boosted by £1.25 million from the Big Lottery Fund and the Scottish Government. It is the first time a proje
ct of such a scale has been attempted in this country.
Mrs Nunn, 35, hopes the impact of her Going Carbon Neutral Stirling campaign will reverberate around the world.
"Carbon Neutral Stirling is going to be an exemplar and a beacon project," she said. "If we can do this, it will have a cascade effect across the globe."
Four years ago, Mrs Nunn owned a sales and marketing business but one day picked up a pamphlet about the threat of climate change.
She decided that she had to help and gave up her job to focus on environmental work.
"We are talking about billions of people, homeless and displaced, without food and water," she said. "I can't bear to sit back and think that I did nothing about that."
Going Carbon Neutral Stirling will employ seven staff to get out into the community and bring about changes of habit among the city's 30,000 residents.
They will work with mother-and-toddler groups, schools and churches, asking them to sign up to carbon-cutting tasks such as using cooler temperatures in washing machines, switching off lights and changing to buying local and seasonal produce.
"It's a bit like WeightWatchers," she said. "We will create a 52-week plan. Each week, there will be a carbon-cutting activity, such as remembering to switch lights off."
The aim is to slash the annual carbon dioxide emissions in the city from current levels of 12 tonnes per person to just one tonne, which would be a sustainable level. She hopes this can be achieved by 2035.
To measure progress, Mrs Nunn plans to ask utility companies to provide information on the city's energy use.
The project will also monitor how much fuel is sold in local petrol stations and measure the amount of local food compared to overseas produce sold in Stirling's supermarkets.
The project has been given £750,000 funding by the Scottish Government from its new £18.8 million Climate Challenge Fund, which will be spent on schemes to help reach the goal of reducing Scotland's emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.
The full article contains 426 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
