Our journey to Carbon Neutral

That’s a tough challenge but a vital one if we are to play our part in making a sustainable world for our children to grow up in.

St Mary’s church is part of a group of 5 churches collaborating as ‘Towards Carbon Neutral Churches in Craven’, which are sharing their approaches to this goal – you can find a lot of information about this wider project by clicking on these images above. Together we have made these videos, which we hope gives some background to this project.

In June 2022 St Mary’s Church Council adopted a detailed plan to make our church Carbon Neutral by 2025.  You can see the resolutions which were adopted here. The implementation of these is being steered by our Zero Group with involvement from the people of our two villages of Embsay and Eastby.

Most of our carbon emissions at St Mary’s – 82% – come from our gas boiler, so we will need to change our heating system in order to get to net carbon zero. Our plan outlines our researched options for this together with other steps which we are taking.

We anticipate that most of the funding for a new heating system will come from grant awarding charities together with some match funding from ourselves. We have set up a fundraising group which is investigating these possibilities.