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At the time of writing, the first-ever Carbon Literacy course for ambulance services is being run – by the North West Ambulance Service. The trainer, and lead author of the course, is their Environmental Sustainability Officer, Karen Aguilera. Karen lives and breathes the implementation of best environmental performance for an organisation that covers all of England’s North West – you’ll have seen her amazing colleagues at work in the superb BBC1 series Ambulance. In other words, she’s a highly experienced environmental professional with a lot on her plate. So, when we read this Twitter thread on how preparing for today’s course has affected her, we asked if we could share it here. Needless to say, it’s not been just a case of preparing some workshop materials – the content has got her thinking about many aspects of her life. She also wins a prize for best use of funny GIFs in un-wrapping responses to the climate crisis…

You may have heard people who have been through the @Carbon_Literacy training raving about it…

And rightly so!

Ahead of next week's training I want to let you know what having the opportunity to develop the first 🚑 specific CL course has done for me – personally.

— Karen Daniels (@BloominSustiKaz) August 27, 2020

I was skeptical about CL at first (Phil will confirm this 🤣) I didn't know if we could pull it off in the time frame, if I could get commitment from our Sustainability Steering Group to attend or even if we would continue rolling out beyond the pilot 😬 pic.twitter.com/51k0aXz7Nj

— Karen Daniels (@BloominSustiKaz) August 27, 2020

https://twitter.com/NWAmb_Karen/status/1299031281062293505

So I started looking in more detail at that, finding research papers that both supported and opposed diets containing animal products. Turns out that many preventable illnesses are linked to animal product consumption. This spurred me to sign up for @veganuary this year. pic.twitter.com/VNxYSarr9Y

— Karen Daniels (@BloominSustiKaz) August 27, 2020

Over the following months, I started finding and testing alternatives until I was happy that I wouldn't slip back and then started understanding how much I needed to buy – I often ran out and ended up reverting back. pic.twitter.com/LanRGmLPPU

— Karen Daniels (@BloominSustiKaz) August 27, 2020

Last year we also went on holiday, we took the train all the way to France and used the public transport system to get around – with two kids! We spent 5 days in Wissant, 6 days in Paris and 2 days in London on the way back – not a single flight! pic.twitter.com/KJqRlhGRLF

— Karen Daniels (@BloominSustiKaz) August 27, 2020

I will still attend some meetings in person and will return to working in my office, I think it's important to get face to face time too but I'm hoping I can reduce this drastically now. pic.twitter.com/VwhBqQ1VeA

— Karen Daniels (@BloominSustiKaz) August 27, 2020

So there you have it, I've made and will continue with some massive personal changes & have further ones in the planning, right now my carbon footprint sits at 1.1 tonnes UNDER the govt target for 2020.

Developing this training stopped me from excusing myself from taking action! pic.twitter.com/8gBvRqocXe

— Karen Daniels (@BloominSustiKaz) August 27, 2020