One of the key recommendations of the Kendal Climate Change Citizens Jury was to increase awareness of Climate challenges ahead and provide practical advice on what Kendal’s residents can do. Together with this website, the Town Council is actioning this recommendation by taking objects which reflect the Jury’s recommendations to festivals to create a talking point and raise awareness of both the Citizens Jury and the practical things many are doing to reduce carbon.

The objects were made by Torchlight creative Stuart Riston and have proved to be a brilliant engagement tool.

At Torchlight, festival goers were asked to rearrange the objects into the order they think actions need to be prioritised to improve Kendal’s response and resilience. Comments included:

‘We need to do them all!’

‘We don’t need leadership, we just need to crack on!’

‘We need leadership to invest in making it easy to cycle and refuse any planning that doesn’t meet strict environmental conditions’

Interestingly, many children made leadership the least important priority and almost all the adults placed it as the most important priority. Perhaps, thanks to the innocence of childhood, children can see a clear route to positive action, whereas adults have been blindsided to believe otherwise!  

Personally, I’m somewhere in the middle. I think leadership is required but so too is personal action. I sense a sweet middle spot is developing where widespread positive change is achievable thanks to both ends of the spectrum.

It was also interesting that everyone who stopped to play the game and chat, echoed the recommendations of the Jury and strongly believed rapid change is required. Gone are the days of the naysayers which surely makes the required transition easier to achieve in this decade than the last.

Please have a go and place the recommendations into your preferred order via this link. We plan to use the data generated from this website and festival feedback to help inform how the Recommendations Panel (more info here about the Recommendations Panel here) prioritises it’s actions. Thanks for reading and having a go!