Sustainable education or training

Using local expertise to drive awareness of conservation among visitors to the area

The Black Mountains Land Partnership (BMLUP) was awarded a Sustainable Management Scheme grant as part of the Welsh Government’s Rural Communities – Rural Development Programme 2014-2020.  This funding has allowed the Partnership to promote the restoration and sustainable management of the natural resources of the Black Mountains area of the Brecon Beacons National Park (BBNPA).  This is being achieved through the delivery of a series of landscape-scale projects focused on bracken, peatland and visitor management.

The primary issues the project was seeking to address in regards to visitor management was deterring antisocial behaviour and promoting the Black Mountains as a living working landscape. The Partnership recognised that engagement of local businesses who could act as Ambassadors were crucial in conveying sustainable messages to visitors. They could also help to support landscape-scale collaboration with issues such as illegal off-roading, which contributes significantly to peatbog erosion.

In the last twelve months the project has made significant progress and impact. A total of 56 Ambassadors have been trained. Training was delivered to three cohorts over a bespoke two-day training programme followed with an ‘action planning’ session with partners. The focus of these sessions identified the actions that might be undertaken by Ambassadors to both support the Partnership in its work and to sustain their ongoing role into the future. Some of the suggestions evolving are being used to continue and sustain the engagement initiated by the training for the benefit of the Black Mountains environs, its communities and visitors.

Secondary school initiative to inspire the environmental professionals of the future

Our Future’s People (OFP) is Severn Wye Energy Agency’s sustainability project for secondary schools.

Severn Wye’s education team works with groups of pupils in secondary schools across Wales, training them in environmental issues, energy management and renewable energy. Pupils are offered work placements’ with local businesses to replicate the same survey and campaign there, too.

Between April 2018 and March 2019 the project built on its first phase of delivery with its second (and final) phase “ appointing four new Powys schools campuses and adding a natively Welsh-speaking Project Manager to the team so that the programme was delivered in the Welsh language.

Working with Llanfyllin High School, Llanidloes High School, and two Newtown High School campuses, the project recruited students to School Energy Management Teams (SEMTs) that led energy-saving campaigns. Once trained, the SEMTs surveyed the whole school, wrote a report and presented the findings to the school’s SMT and Governors. After the subsequent awareness-raising and energy-saving campaigns designed to affect positive behaviour change amongst staff and peers to reduce the school’s energy consumption through no cost actions, the four schools achieved combined energy savings of 165,000kWh, £18,000 and 72 tonnes of CO2 when compared to readings from the previous year.

The project is now in talks with Monmouthshire County Council regarding rolling out OFP in the county, and in Pembrokeshire it is beginning to deliver a similar secondary school engagement project, ENERGE (Energizing Education to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions), to apply OFP principles to school students elsewhere in the country.