Report by Helen Gibbs of The University of Chester recording our first meeting with CRed, Wednesday 4th January 2006 at the University of East Anglia.

On Wednesday 4th January 2006 Garry Charnock and myself met with the members of CRed (Community Carbon Reduction Programme) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich.  CRed is an innovative programme working to encourage residents and businesses to reduce their CO2 emissions by 60% by 2025.  Although this is mainly in the East of England, they have projects in the USA and Japan too.  We had gone down to meet CRed to see how their system worked, and also to hear about their experiences of working with communities in carrying out a carbon audit. 

The CRed system itself is based on-line.  Its main focus is to help people record and track their reductions in CO2.  This is done through people making pledges, which are actions that they will carry out to reduce their CO2 emissions.  Once the pledge has been completed the system shows the reduction in CO2 achieved.  Individuals are grouped into communities, for example CRed Norwich, for which the accumulative CO2 savings can also be shown.  It was interesting to have the system explained, and it is something that could be adopted by Ashton-Hayes in the future to enable the tracking of the CO2 reductions within the village. 

We also found out about the carbon audits that CRed have carried out within three communities in Eastern England.  This was very useful since this is what will happen in Ashton-Hayes in May.  Different approaches had been used with each survey, and from their experience they were able to give us helpful information as to what is the best approach to take.  I will be using their information to help design the survey that the students from the University of Chester will be carrying out in May. 

CRed have expressed their interest in this project and supporting us.  They will be at the launch on January 26th.