On Monday 24 March we relaunched our campaign on Church Land Use for climate and nature benefit. The webinar introduced our Church Land Use vision document and promoted our resources which include exciting case studies from Church landholders. Our guest speakers were drawn from the resource case studies and brought a wonderful range of experiences to motivate us about what can be done, even at a small local scale.

Revd Mike Saunders outlined the impressive planting of over 7000 trees by his team at St Lawrence’s Church, Hungerford. By partnering with the Woodland Trust and local landowners, a small local team has achieved significant impact. Mike was persuasive that they’d had a lot of fun and built good links with their local community as well:

“All you need really is a team of people and a place, and to talk to Woodland Trust… Anyone can do it.”

Jaye Brighton shared a wonderful clip of the work being done by Loveland, part of Falmouth Food Co-op where she volunteers. The plot is part of Diocese of Truro’s glebe land and they have been able to bring the community together to grow food together and offer a welcoming new place. The Loveland project is inspired and run by young people alongside a grocery hub and food kitchen.  Jaye shared: “We need food good for people and the planet, for health and the environment.”

Revd David Coleman from Eco-Congregation Scotland shared a video he had created featuring some wonderful peatland habitat in Scotland and proposed that peatland should be considered holy ground. He summarised the changing attitudes to peatland and recognised its value as expanding even beyond what it can support in terms of biodiversity as well as the monetary value of carbon capture and storage. The holiness of such places, he argued, “is reason enough to stand up for them, protect them, manage them, restore them”.

Operation Noah’s Sharon Hall presented the new Church Land Use vision and the 4 sider documents we have created on Growing Trees, Protecting Peatland and Supporting Farmers to Reduce Emissions. She also introduced a new campaign action where we are inviting people to sign an open letter to leaders of UK Church denominations asking them to respond to the Vision document and take action to ensure their land is part of the solution and not part of the problem. As part of this letter, people are invited to share their own examples of local projects which have inspired them.

We invite you to join in our campaign by signing our Open Letter to church leaders, and sign up and invite others to the next webinar coming up on 12 May entitled ‘Growing Hope: Landscape action for sustainable church land use’. This will feature actions which can be taken by larger landowners and will welcome guest speakers from Lee Abbey and Farm Carbon Toolkit.