Year Of The Environment

For Communities

Liverpool’s Year of the Environment 2009 provides a real opportunity for the City Council, its partners and local communities to celebrate the environment, and highlight the challenges we face in the future.

Throughout the Year of the Environment we hope to initiate a series of discussions on green issues and are therefore looking for your ideas and suggestions. From discussions we will develop longer term priorities for the City’s environment, exploring a 20 year vision for Liverpool as a sustainable city. We aim to promote changes in all of our actions and behaviours. We will also celebrate and showcase the good work that individuals, communities, schools and businesses have made on environmental projects. Overall we hope that Liverpool could eventually become recognised as a City delivering positive and innovative green schemes.

Communities have a vital role to play in developing and promoting sustainable communities for today as well as safeguarding the environment for our future generations. 

The challenges we face in addressing climate change, recycling levels and combating CO2 emissions are serious, but can be overcome if we act together now. 

We are keen to engage local communities and local people in working together to improve their neighbourhoods.  Perhaps you are already running a local scheme aimed at improving the environment or local sustainability, or perhaps you just want to find out more about how you can get more involved in your local community and make a difference.  Either way, we are keen to hear from you about your ideas, your fears, and your vision of Liverpool in the future and what we can do to develop clean, safe, well managed, inclusive and sustainable communities. 

What are you waiting for – it’s your community, your Liverpool and your planet – and we need your help and commitment if we are to make Liverpool a better place to live and work.  There are various examples around the city of communities using their energy and drive to take ownership of unused land or plan for its use. 

• In Croxteth, Alt Valley Community Trust plans to open an environmental training facility based at a local farm. The Communi-Farm will become a base for developing landscaping, horticulture and environmental education programmes, and small-scale agricultural farming designed to complement, the work of partner organisations promoting health and well-being programmes.
• In Speke, Rotters Community Composting have an area of land at Dutch Farm under cultivation for food, and have applied for funding through the Local Food programme.
• In Granby, local residents have formed a group called ‘That Bloomin’ Cairns St’ to cultivate the pavements and curtilages of their street in a seasonal programme of ‘winter lights, spring bulbs and summer herbs and vegetables.’
• In L8, Include Environmental Services has worked with CDS Housing tenants and owner-occupiers on a range of environmental improvements, such as the ‘magic garden’ between Merlin St. and North Hill St.
• In Cockburn St in Dingle, and neighbouring ‘Bread Streets,’ a local resident has taken over planting and maintaining raised beds provided as part of a traffic calming scheme.
• In Elphin Grove, Walton, residents have imported soil and planters to turn their alleygated common space into a communal garden as part of a wider contribution to Walton in Bloom.
• ‘Operation Eden,’ begun in Liverpool, has been successfully extended to other parts of the NW as the Faiths4Change initiative, with NWDA funding.