Berkeley Rotary Climate Action Committee
The Berkeley Rotary Climate Action Committee focuses and enhances our club's efforts to contain the climate crisis and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as quickly as possible.
During the 2020/21 year, the Berkeley Rotary Club focused on combating global warming under the theme Tikkun Olam, “Heal the World.” Throughout the year, we educated ourselves, our club membership and California Rotarians about this challenge by bringing experts to address the club and discussing how we can improve our efforts.
Since then, we have been actively engaged in projects to reduce the use of climate-polluting refrigerants, achieve equity access for all to use electric vehicles and EV chargers, investigate if online calculators can reduce individual and collective carbon footprints, and plant trees in urban areas. In the future, using a bank for Rotary accounts that supports our Rotary climate goals will be explored.
The goal to significantly reduce GHG emissions in the next 10 years aligns with both with Rotary International and the many environmental groups working to fight the climate crisis, including the Environmental Sustainability Rotary Action Group (ESRAG).
Our efforts may support GHG reduction financially, with our volunteer efforts, with partners and by our own projects. Our collaboration will draw from Rotary International’s addition of Environmental Sustainability as one of Rotary’s 7 areas of focus that recognizes the existential threat of global warming.
For more information about the Committee or if you would like to join, please contact our committee co-chair Lewis Ames at [email protected]
BRC/Climate Action Four Step Approach
- Educate and inform Rotary members and community actors in general on climate change issues.
- Financial support initiatives dealing with climate change. For example, Rotary currently supports tree planting in forest fire zones and provides support to the Berkeley Ecology Center.
- Coordinate with other actors/partners, inside and outside of Rotary projects, to reduce GHG emissions.
- Launch "new ventures" i.e., new initiatives Berkeley Rotary could undertake to make a difference in the level of GHG emissions. Such ventures may include game-changing ideas whose time has come to address the urgency of global warming.