Glasgow Climate Action Hub

The Glasgow Climate Action Hub (GCAH) has an important role to play in balancing the many strengths and challenges of our city. Glasgow is a brilliant city with a rich heritage, culture and a tradition of community activism in strong neighbourhoods. It’s well known as a friendly city, but it’s also a city with entrenched poverty and inequality, and like most of the developed world, it is a city which consumes the earth’s resources at an unsustainable rate, contributing to climate change. The threat of climate change is now well known. The window to respond to prevent irreversible damage to the world’s climate is narrowing rapidly, and the effects of climate change are already clearly visible. While progress is being made, it’s not enough. We are now at a point in time when we must not only take greater action to prevent climate change; we must also respond to the rapidly emerging effects. Action is needed now that both reduces carbon emissions and supports communities to prepare for a worsening climate.

With high levels of poverty, the city is particularly vulnerable – but it is the city’s people that will lead the change. We need to ensure everyone is included while recognising that some of our citizens have more pressing problems, like putting food on the table for their families.

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There is already a growing network of community groups and other partners coming together around climate action. The Glasgow Community Climate Action Network (GCCAN) is keen to welcome new members and will form the basis for the Hub’s activities. The delivery of the activities will be supported by an initial group of six partners who have been chosen because they help us to do three key things that we think are important. Firstly, to ensure that the hub has access to the expertise and resources that it will need to deliver. Secondly, it has a strategic reach across the city to key partners. And thirdly and perhaps most importantly, how it has reached into communities – building on existing relationships that partners have with the communities they serve.

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The partners share an ambition of building community action in response to climate change – encouraging greater involvement of citizens, building connections within and between communities, sharing knowledge, developing capacity and accessing and focusing resources. We call these strands Engagement, Building Capacity, and Creating Connections.

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GCVS is the lead partner working closely with Glasgow Eco Trust, Loco Homes Retrofit, Rags to Riches (Govanhill Baths Trust), Merry Go Round and Parents for Future Scotland. While the hub manager will be hosted within GCVS, development officers will work amongst the partners and link to a wider network of colleagues, all playing an important part in building the hub and supporting change.