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Join us in tackling climate change with help from our mates

Climates network

Climates is a social network for people who want to take action on climate change in their everyday lives.

It's all about mates helping each other, sharing our experience, knowledge and skills.

Climates puts people with questions in touch with mates with the answers to cut carbon or adapt to a changing world.

Join in and find out what you can do with a little help from your mates.

Setting up

Set up your Profile, find some Mates

Once you've joined, click your Profile button, top right, to set up your Profile and Account settings; tell us what you’re interested in and how you can help other mates.

Check out MATES to see who’s online, who’s doing what and find Groups.

Getting Started

Where to start?

A great place to start is Actions where you'll find things to do to cut carbon or safeguard your community.

You can Pledge to undertake Actions, ask questions, share ideas and inspiration and learn from mates' experience.

You can track your progress with live running totals of the carbon (CO₂e) you save!

Check it all out in Actions.

Join in

Joining in

There are lots of ways to join in the Climates network.

It's all about supporting our mates, asking for help or offering advice by:

commenting in the Actions pages
commenting in the Home feed
posting to your Timeline
uploading Photos, Videos and links to Sites
posting to Forums
voting in Polls
Chatting with your mates, by text, audio or video.

Alternatively, from the blue + button on the bottom toolbar you can post status updates, add Photo and Video albums and create Polls and Forums.

Come back

Come back here

While you're finding your way around you can come back here to Get Started as often as you like.

And check out HELP too if you need.

Quick results

Good news

Starting from scratch, you can bring down your carbon footprint by a massive three tonnes quite easily. That’s 30% off an average UK footprint and a really good start.

Food - Go Climatarian, adopt an easy meat-eating diet and cut a tonne off your footprint, even more if you go vegetarian or vegan.

Home - Insulating your loft and cavity walls saves over a tonne of CO₂e a year.

Travel - Walk, cycle or skate to school or work. to save up to a tonne of CO₂e a year.

Action

Act now

We have to act fast. The later we leave it the more we have to do to avoid global warming causing climate chaos.

Above 2^oC we risk dangerous and irreversible climate change, with sea level rise threatening major cities and coastal communities, frequent extreme weather events and, as areas of the world become uninhabitable due to flood or drought, large migrations of people.

To avoid this, global carbon emissions need to peak by 2020 and fall steeply thereafter. The later the peak, the steeper the reductions need to be.

We all have to do our bit, not sometime in the future, now!

Many of us have been watching and waiting, not sure how we can help. In Climates your mates are here to help you.

Average carbon footprint

Average footprint

The average carbon footprint varies across the world, but generally the more you spend, the greater your footprint. You may live in a country which has one of the lowest average carbon footprints, but if your lifestyle varies from the average, so will your footprint.

Government

The international situation

The international community has agreed to limit global warming to 2^oC above pre-industrial levels and aspires towards 1.5^oC.

At the historic UN Climate Change Summit in December 2015 nearly 200 countries reached a global agreement to limit emissions. However, their national pledges only go half way to reducing the necessary emissions by 2030. And that’s assuming countries actually fulfil their promises.

Even if things go better than expected, there will still be much more to be done to keep our climate safe.

That’s where we come in.

Causes

Humans are responsible for greenhouse gases which accumulate in the atmosphere and prevent heat from escaping.

Climates are helping each other to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we cause.

Although there are a number of contributory gases, for simplicity we express these in terms of CO₂e - the equivalent impact in terms of CO₂.

Effects

The effects of climate change are already being experienced around the world.

Low lying island communities, like Kiribati, are having to prepare to evacuate as the sea level rises.

Floods and droughts are increasing in frequency and severity. Dryer forests are more vulnerable to wildfires. Disrupted seasons make life difficult for farmers. Extreme weather events, storms, cyclones and typhoons are happening more frequently all around the world.

Species

Species are threatened by disruption to their habitat. Others, like the mosquito, are thriving as the world warms spreading diseases such as malaria to new areas.

Feedback

A new network

Climates is just starting out - we know it won't be perfect and we need your feedback to guide the development of the site.

Please drop us a line, join the polls or take a survey.

Thank you!