The Diocese of Bath and Wells has received a bronze Eco Diocese award for its commitment to caring for creation. The award also reflects the work undertaken by churches in all parts of the diocese to help take better care of God’s world.
The Eco Diocese award is an A Rocha initiative to encourage diocesan-level engagement with Eco Church and is aimed at promoting local church participation in the scheme. It also requires each diocese taking part to have achieved a number of targets before the award can be given.
Bath and Wells Climate Justice & Environment Advisor, Sara Emmett said, “The Eco Diocese Award means that we have demonstrated our commitment and progress towards Creation Care and Net Zero Carbon as a diocese.”
As part of the criteria required to reach the award Bath and Wells needed to have; a written environmental policy, have gained the appropriate levels of local church registrations and awards for Eco Church, and achieved the relevant award for the diocesan offices – Flourish House in Wells recently received a Silver Eco Award. Sara said, to reach the bronze award has taken a lot of effort by people from all parts of the diocese.
“It has been a work in progress for at least 3 years.To achieve the award requires a breadth and depth of action from across all our scope. We have had to achieve 5% of our churches receiving Eco Church awards, to have an embedded Environment Policy, have a training plan, and achieved an award for our offices.”
But Sara also admits that there is still work to do. “In order to progress to silver, we need to have 30% churches with an award, 10% of which are silver, so this is our biggest challenge and one which we need everyone to commit to working towards.”