Kathy Aston Talk Introduction to Nick’s climate emergency work

You all knew Nick - what a great communicator, so good at people. I met him, through the Green Party, sometime in the noughties, but got to know him better when we were both in the Carbon Neutral University network at Sheffield University, along with all five of us “climate comrades” here tonight. In 2017 CNU asked a speaker from an organisation called Climate Outreach to give a two hour workshop on effective climate communications. This workshop inspired Nick and me to start the Climate Communications Hub (mentioned in the video) to put the principles we’d learned into practice, and Lauren joined us shortly after.

The Hub, recently relaunched as Climate Communications Sheffield, held talks and workshops on all aspects of climate communications, sometimes led by ourselves, and sometimes with outside speakers. You saw a clip from the session in November 2022 with speakers from the “Climate Reality project”, which trains climate activists. We had many other speakers, for example from Hope for the Future, which helps constituents talk to their MPs about Climate Change; from the Enroads project, talking about their educational tool for modelling future climate outcomes of present decisions; and from Doctors Against Climate Change. These meetings were face-to-face to begin with and then online (as you saw).

Nick was such a driving force in this group that when he passed away, Lauren and I decided to suspend these meetings for now and focus on the Barstool project instead. This involves talking to people in public places - shopping malls, sports venues, festivals, the high street - to ask them how they feel about climate change, what they think affects it and what they think should be done about it. The vast majority of people we talk to really care about this issue - they are aware, usually concerned and often well informed. I’m sure this wouldn’t have been the case even five or six years ago (when we had the 2017 workshop); this is surely at least in part down to the good work of brilliant climate communicators like Nick. Let’s keep up his good work.