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Community Energy South wants your help to fund a 3 year monitoring & information officer for the Sussex Kelp Restoration Project.

Why Kelp? Kelp forests worldwide sequester vast amounts of carbon, they also support and promote biodiversity. Community Energy is all about reducing carbon to tackle climate change, supporting the regeneration of kelp forests is something we want to encourage our communities to do.

Since the 1980s Sussex lost 96% of its coastal Kelp Forests.

Alarmed at this decline, in 2021 the Inshore Fisheries & Conservation Authority and partners secured legislative changes that put nature at the heart of policy making and outlawed ocean bed trawling off the coast of Sussex.

This short & beautiful film narrated by David Attenborough makes a compelling argument for the regeneration of this marine environment.

Sussex Wildlife Trust are now monitoring the restoration of the Kelp Forests, tracking the increases in biodiversity, measuring carbon sequestration and registering the socio-economic impacts of this regeneration project on fishermen and other groups.

We want to support this programme with their recording and to share their learning with other coastal communities so the byelaw changes and regeneration programmes can be replicated.

The power of local communities to take positive action on climate change is growing. Community Energy groups reduce carbon in our heat, power and transport systems. Our communities can mobilise to support carbon sequestration and regenerative projects and demonstrate the power in our hands to make effective changes on climate change.

Two community owned solar farms have already donated £80k to support this project. An additional £80K is needed to support the project to run for 3 years.

Please donate what you can to this campaign. If 8000 people contributed £10, we’ve got this.

If you want to pay back for the carbon emissions you are creating in your personal life, and do not want to subscribe to or are unable to subscribe to formal carbon offsetting projects, we encourage you to contribute to the projects that we support.

You can calculate your carbon emissions here https://carbonindependent.org/

The average carbon price in the UK in December 2022 was £69 per tonne - more details here: https://tinyurl.com/2hztn2es

You could use the carbon calculator & price above to assess how much you would like to contribute. As we are not a formal scheme, there are average and informal calculations to enable people to take informal action to make good some of the emissions emitted as part of modern life.

Here in advance is a thank you message from Henri Brocklebank, Director of Conservation Policy & Evidence at Sussex Wildlife Trust:

The Sussex Kelp Restoration project website where you can see regular updates about the project

https://sussexwildlifetrust.org.uk/what-we-do/living-seas/kelp/sussex-kelp-films

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