Jump to content

Community action/Somerset

From Appropedia
(Redirected from Somerset)
Location data
Map
Loading map...
Location Somerset, United Kingdom
Coordinates 51° 9' 42.30" N, 3° 4' 31.39" W

The aim of this page is to recognise, celebrate and encourage the self-empowerment of community agency networks (CANs) and community groups' activism for climate, environment and many other sustainability topics across Somerset.

Somerset
South West England
UK
Europe
Cosmolocal
  • News Businesses face extinction unless they protect nature, major report warns, BBC News (Feb 09, 2026)
  • News Enlisting hearts and minds to save Somerset’s last eels, positive.news (Aug 18, 2025)
  • News New national forest to see 20m trees planted, BBC News (Mar 21, 2025)
Read more
  • News Citizens’ Assembly to invest £100,000 in West’s culture, westofengland-ca.gov.uk (Jan 16, 2026)
  • News ‘We found 23,000 worms!’ The soil project bringing life back to the land, positive.news (Oct 22, 2025)
  • News Mussel power: how an offshore shellfish farm is boosting marine life, theconversation.com (Jun 06, 2025)
  • News WL Meets: Zoe Gilbertson who is refashioning textiles from the ground up, wickedleeks.riverford.co.uk (May 13, 2026) — Nick Easen meets designer Zoe Gilbertson who wants to revive the UK textile sector, with sustainability woven in from the start
  • News ‘A share in the delight’: the people investing in the UK’s first community-owned solar battery, theguardian.com (May 08, 2026) — Oxfordshire’s Ray Valley Solar already generates clean energy for 7,000 homes, and is now crowdfunding storage to marry daylight with evening demand
  • News Fixing social care: Report highlights potential of co-op model in the UK, thenews.coop (May 08, 2026) — Commissioned by Co-operatives UK and Cwmpas, the study found co-ops provide ‘fairer, better quality, community-rooted care’
  • News Rewilding giants: captive elephants rehomed in Europe’s first sanctuary, theguardian.com (May 07, 2026)
  • News Sail-power offers passengers new crossing between England and France, reuters.com (Apr 28, 2026)
  • News Europe needs affordable, low‑carbon homes – here’s how Barcelona is reimagining its housing system, theconversation.com (Apr 08, 2026)
  • News How one Kenyan community is building a new future on reclaimed ground, globalvoices.org (May 14, 2026)
  • News Data Centres Need a Social License to Operate, demnext.substack.com (May 13, 2026) — How lessons from citizens' assemblies are highly relevant for the future of AI infrastructure and data centres, Another Democratic Future and Claudia Chwalisz
  • News Argentina’s co-operativas escolares: A case study in co-op education, thenews.coop (May 12, 2026) — In 1946, national legislation formally established the teaching of co-operativism and the creation of school co-operatives

Networks and sustainability initiatives

[edit | edit source]
Cosmolocal discovery club

Each week 3 different short videos from across the UK or world.

mqdefault.jpgYouTube_icon.svg
Future Rural Voices: perspectives on the countryside’s future
Authors: Campaign to Protect Rural England, 2.35 mins.
Date: 2026-05-07
mqdefault.jpgYouTube_icon.svg
Local Power, Lower Bills: Up the Energy!
Authors: Community Energy England, 1.38 mins.
Date: 2026-03-10
mqdefault.jpgYouTube_icon.svg
Tiree - This is Community Wealth Building
Authors: Scottish Community Alliance, 3.44 mins.
Date: 2025-11-18

Rural sustainability UK, Community energy UK, Community action/Argyll and Bute / ...This week's featured Global videos / ... read more about Cosmolocalism

UK and international events

[edit | edit source]

UK events

UK community action events

Global or international events

  • Event May 1 - 3, 2026 (Fri - Sun) first weekend of May every yearJane's Walk, How to Lead a Jane's Walk, Video, janeswalk.org
  • Event May 03, 2026 (Sun) — International dawn chorus day, first Sunday of May, wildlifetrusts.org
  • Event May 3 - 9, 2026 (Sun - Sat) — International Compost Awareness Week, compostfoundation.org
  • Event May 9 and Oct 10, 2026 — World Migratory Bird Day, worldmigratorybirdday.org
  • Event May 20, 2026 (Wed) — World Bee Day, May 20 each year, fao.org
  • Event May 21, 2026 (Thu) — Outdoor Classroom Day, celebrating and inspiring outdoor learning and play, outdoorclassroomday.com
  • Event May 22, 2026 (Fri) — International Day for Biological Diversity, May 22 every year, cbd.int

2021-2030, UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, International community action events

Somerset video

[edit | edit source]
mqdefault.jpgYouTube_icon.svg
Why are the British flooding parts of their coast?
Authors: Mongabay, 4.48 mins.
Date: 2025-03-19
mqdefault.jpgYouTube_icon.svg
Somerset Climate Action Network; Feed Avalon by Rob Harris
Authors: Strode TV, 2.24 mins.
Date: 2022-11-10
mqdefault.jpgYouTube_icon.svg
Woodspring Revealed
Authors: Skye Spring, 3.21 mins.
Date: 2022-09-07
mqdefault.jpgYouTube_icon.svg
sfmdirect.mov
Authors: sfmdirect, 4.21 mins.
Date: 2008-11-27
20468686.jpgVimeo_play_button.png
"Lawnmower Men" - Personal Project
Authors: Dan Merry, 3.44 mins.

Food activism

[edit | edit source]

Towards sustainable economies

[edit | edit source]

Health and wellbeing

[edit | edit source]

Somerset Active Living

Climate action

[edit | edit source]
  • Somerset CAN, Somerset Climate action Network, Somerset net carbon neutral by 2030, added 11:57, 13 September 2021 (UTC)

Sustainable transport activism

[edit | edit source]

Long-distance footpaths in the county include: Coleridge Way, Limestone Link, Macmillan Way West, Mendip Way, Monarch's Way, Quantock Greenway, River Parrett Trail, Two Tunnels Greenway and West Deane Way. The South West Coast Path National Trail has its starting point at Minehead. W

Cycling activism

[edit | edit source]

The county has one of the first National cycle routes created in Britain 3, 4 and 24 provide cyclists with ways to minimise contact with motor traffic. The Bristol & Bath Railway Path is a 15-mile off-road cycleway, following an old railway track that forms part of Route 4. The path consists of a 3-m-wide tarmacked surface, and was used for 2.4 million trips in 2007, increasing by 10% per year.[90] Route 24, otherwise known as the Colliers Way, currently runs from Dundas Aqueduct to Frome via Radstock. W

Biodiversity

[edit | edit source]

In 2009, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, The RSPB and the Pensthorpe Conservation Trust, with funding from Viridor Credits, began a partnership project to re-establish a breeding population of cranes at a new wetland site. A rearing facility or "crane school" was set up at WWT Slimbridge; this consists of a 1-acre (4,000 m2) marsh garden designed to rear crane chicks between 2010 and 2014 in as close to a wild environment as possible. A pre-release enclosure was also constructed on the Somerset Levels. Although the cranes are hand-reared, all humans having contact with the birds wear special grey cover-all smocks, complete with hoods, and feed the cranes using plaster cast crane heads mounted onto litter picker handles. Approximately 20 cranes are reared and released each year. The first cranes were released in 2010 with annual releases planned up until 2014. The cranes are released in Somerset, on the Somerset Levels and Moors, where the project is also working with farmers and landowners to create suitable breeding areas for the birds. A pair of cranes from the project laid the first egg in 2013. W

Open spaces

[edit | edit source]

Somerset is a rural county of rolling hills, the Blackdown Hills, Mendip Hills, Quantock Hills and Exmoor National Park, and large flat expanses of land including the Somerset Levels.

The county contains several-miles-wide sections of the Avon green belt area, which is primarily in place to prevent urban sprawl from the Bristol and Bath built up areas encroaching into the rural areas of North Somerset, Bath and North East Somerset, and Mendip districts in the county, as well as maintaining surrounding countryside. It stretches from the coastline between the towns of Portishead and Clevedon, extending eastwards past Nailsea, around the Bristol conurbation, and through to the city of Bath. The green belt border intersects with the Mendip Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) along its south boundary, and meets the Cotswolds AONB by its eastern extent along the Wiltshire county border, creating an extended area protected from inappropriate development.

Wetlands

[edit | edit source]
  • Somerset Wetlands National Nature Reserve, information from gov.uk, published 19 May 2022

Rural sustainability

[edit | edit source]

CPRE Somerset

News archive

[edit | edit source]
  • News Enlisting hearts and minds to save Somerset’s last eels, positive.news (Aug 18, 2025)
  • News New national forest to see 20m trees planted, BBC News (Mar 21, 2025)
  • News Why the British are flooding parts of their coast, Leo Plunkett, Sandy Watt, news.mongabay.com (Mar 19, 2025)

2023-2024

  • News A new flow: pioneering UK river restoration declared a success, positive.news (Oct 21, 2024)
  • News Glastonbury gets 'climate action plan', BBC News (Aug 23, 2024)
  • News ‘It’s unbelievable the difference a path has made’: how volunteers are building a cycle network a yard at a time, theguardian.com (May 16, 2024)
  • News The plan to create a ‘nature recovery site’ in every English county, positive.news (Mar 27, 2023)

2018-2022

  • News With its digital community mapping, fungus-driven mill, and reuse of coastal buildings, the Onion Collective is a vibrant CAN, The Daily Alternative (Jun 14, 2022)
  • News Britain’s first wetland ‘super reserve’ offers boost to nature-based solutions to climate change, The Conversation (Jun 07, 2022)
  • Stream Farm – A New Model for New Entrants, Dec 21, 2018...Resilience
  • Ecological Land Cooperative purchases site in South Somerset to create new small farms, Oct, 2018...ecologicalland.coop. The Ecological Land Cooperative works to create affordable ecological smallholdings for new entrants to farming – those who would ordinarily be unable to afford a house in the countryside yet who wish to earn a living through farming.

About Somerset

[edit | edit source]

Past events

Campaigns

Somerset ( SUM-ər-set, -⁠sit), archaically Somersetshire ( SUM-ər-set-sheer, -⁠sit-, -⁠shər), is a ceremonial county in South West England. It is bordered by the Bristol Channel, Bristol, and Gloucestershire to the north, Wiltshire to the east, Dorset to the south-east, and Devon to the south-west. The largest settlement is the city of Bath.

Near you

[edit | edit source]

Page data
Keywords English county
SDG SDG11 Sustainable cities and communities
Authors Phil Green
License CC-BY-SA-3.0
Language English (en)
Related 0 subpages, 2 pages link here
Redirects Somerset, Somerset community action
Views 23 page views (analytics)
Created June 2, 2014 by Phil Green
Last edit February 9, 2026 by Phil Green
Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies.