Climate Matters Now!

Over the 6 weeks, the Climate Matters Now Live Project Team worked with Sheffield Climate Alliance  to develop a vision for a Climate Action Centre for Can Do South Yorkshire: an ambitious project that aims to connect people, nature, and climate.

Key questions we asked were: 

• What are the boundaries and flexibilities of a Climate Action Centre?

• Could it be a physical space, a network or a geographical area? 

• How can physical and digital climate hubs work fruitfully together?

We divided their ambitions into a set of immediate and short-term actions and a long-term vision:

The immediate actions included testing a series of pop-up and engagement ideas in Liveworks through a series of events, shop window installations, and surveys, reaching out to communities across South Yorkshire. It was important to reflect on these methods of engagement, our feelings whilst conducting them, and to document and analyse the responses received. These qualitative responses were then used to guide our proposals for both the short term actions and long term project visions. 

Using both ideas from Sheffield Climate Alliance’s engagement plan with their partners, and responses from public engagement, we translated these discussions into a series of climate-related themed weeks. These then drove the design and vision for a pop-up climate hub in Sheffield, planned for summer 2021, culminating in a series of prototypes, spatial layouts, assembly drawings for ‘engagement tools’, vision drawings, and a ‘pop-up toolkit’. 

The long term focus sought to develop a vision for a 5 year funding project for a Climate Action Centre in South Yorkshire. Our vision explored a hybrid approach of a combination of climate hubs at various scales around South Yorkshire. These included temporary pop-ups, neighbourhood hubs, rural hubs, and larger civic climate centres, situated across South Yorkshire, rather than in Sheffield alone. Beyond South Yorkshire, our vision is for this to grow throughout the UK, where climate action centres become a normality in the future, bringing communities together.

Instagram @climatemattersnow_

Credits

Student Team: 

Elizabeth Schofield, Jack Ranby, Joseph Chapman, Kai Gao, Katie Cottle, Madihah Azhar, Natasha Jackson, Peixuan Du, Phoebe Stevens, Qiaochu Yan, Tsz-Long Lau, Xiao Han, Yue Wang, Yue Zhan, Zhen Li

Mentor:

Carolyn Butterworth