The Blue Earth Summit

We took the podcast to the Blue Earth Summit 2023 in Bristol. Please check out our instagram feed @fortheloveofweather to get a flavour of what we got up to. We captured and shared as many speakers and guests as we could! We were absolutely blown away by the amazing talks and conversations we had and most importantly people’s willingness to give us their time to talk about what they were passionate about.

The Blue Earth Summit is held over 3 days where Bristol plays host to 5,000+ decision makers, industry pioneers, provocative thought-leaders, sustainability trailblazers, insightful solutionists and boundary-pushing start ups. It’s the place to explore, meet, learn, collaborate and take action.

FYI The Blue Earth Summit was incredibly busy! There is back ground noise but hopefully you will take away something from the mini podcasts we managed to record.

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Our first guest.

Meet Emma Askew @Emmaaskewuk, founder of @Earthminutesuk . Their mission is to drive the future of environmental learning and thinking, making it accessible to everyone but also sharing it in a way that is sustainable.

Emma was quite simply so inspiring to talk to. She is from the soil science sector which she said was a really important inflection point for her. This is where she realised there was a huge gap between the science she was working in and the communications of the science.

Emma speaks so passionately about encouraging young people into leadership early and building a connection with the environment from a young age.

She says she has hope for the future and community is where hope grows through community action.

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Our second guest.

Michael Cunningham is the founder of the 9trees Community Interest Company, founded in 2018.

Michael was originally involved in conservation and observed that while he was completing a lot of work, woodlands were changing rapidly and not all conservation work was having positive impact.

Michael decided he wanted to do something about this. He worked out that each individual in the UK roughly emits 9 tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere annually. Each tree (based on a hectare of woodland) sequesters 1 tonne of carbon over the lifecycle of any one tree and so 9trees was born.

Individuals or businesses can sponsor trees to create woodlands or nature reserves that you can visit today and watch flourish over time. Michael describes this as watching hope grow.

So far the company has planted 15,000 trees but they plan to plant 10,000 trees every year over the next few years and in every county in the UK with Northern Ireland being the next country to plant in.

You can find Michael’s company at https://www.9trees.org and on instagram @9treesuk

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Our final guest

Meet Sandra - chair of the West Bristol climate action group.

Sandra talks about how small local changes are very important nationally. She wants to create wildlife corridors locally and between other towns.

Sandra’s message is that decarbonising in small ways adds up to large changes.

You can find Sandra at http://www.westbristolclimateaction.org