Speak Carbon - Carbon Literacy Training Network Creation

Speak Carbon Collective is a group of experienced, accredited Carbon Literacy Trainers, who facilitate, design and deliver climate awareness and knowledge at scale and pace. Their mission is to foster rapid adoption of carbon literacy, as a baseline standard for action planning in support of net zero carbon targets for organisations and regions. There is strong evidence to support the idea that a baseline level of carbon of climate literacy has a direct behaviour effect effect on carbon reduction and a much greater, indirect effect through accelerating net zero strategy in organisations. At the time of writing in early 2024, the team had supported over 800 people to achieve their independently-accredited Carbon Literacy Certification and contributed to the carbon literacy journey of hundreds more through train-the-trainer cascaded learning programmes.

Developing an entirely new service from scratch wasn’t easy - perhaps the greatest psychological challenge was not knowing whether there was genuinely a market for the service. Carbon Literacy was not a new concept, but a consistent network of trainers which deliberately sought to provide services to local authorities (in the first instance) which in many cases had only recently declared climate emergencies, was by no means guaranteed to be a winning formula.

We tackled this uncertainty through agile service development and by engaging with the difficult business of lead generation and opportunity development early, dedicating time and resources to speaking with dozens on climate officers, net zero teams and other relevant stakeholders at local authorities up and down the country, which helped to understand the appetite for the service and how exactly it needed to function and be presented to have value within net zero strategies. This effort led directly to the first significant projects for Speak Carbon.

We initially provided hands-on business operations support and then gradually transitioned the network operations out of the incubation space as a separate CIC. We went one step beyond the initial brief by providing a lead generation and proposal management service, creating lists of relevant opportunities and helping to secure and project manage the first Speak Carbon sessions with local authorities, to ensure that the network had an initial base of case studies and that the service had been proven in delivery before further growth investment was made. Case studies which relate to work delivered while the project was within the incubation space provided by Treligan can be found elsewhere on this site, but the Speak Carbon team have gone from strength to strength since then to deliver a multitude of other projects, and have achieved ‘Platinum Carbon Literate Organisation’ status, the highest level of accreditation awarded by the Carbon Literacy Project.

This project followed closely on the back of supporting Pawprint’s personal carbon footprint behaviour change project, which had provided us with an amazing opportunity to immerse ourselves in carbon footprinting science and begin to understand the power of behaviour change practice as a tool to achieve net-zero systems change. Speak Carbon’s work further reinforced this and applied a sector specific lens to the challenge, as courses needed to be developed to speak directly to different cohort audiences i.e in a local authority setting, further and higher education, food manufacturing and production, the arts, and more. It positioned us really well for later work with NHS England on net zero recipe development solutions aimed at changing patient mindsets around healthy and planet-friendly eating.