St Mary’s is one of the five churches in Craven which are part of Towards Carbon Neutral Churches in Craven, a government funded pilot scheme to plan a viable path to carbon neutrality for churches by 2030.

This last week has seen a significant step forward in our progress towards that goal as site evaluations were carried out by the independent consulting engineers Locogen at each church.

Locogen engineer Leila Tavendale is seen here at St Mary’s with Revd Marion Russell and members of the church community. Leila also visited churches in Skipton, Draughton, Burton-in Lonsdale and Carleton which are participating in the project.

The lessons learned from these visits, which included discussions with members of the community, will be combined with information on energy usage and recommendations of appropriate technology to produce individual feasibility plans for each church before the end of the year.

An important aspect of the TCNCC initiative is to make the lessons learned available for other organisations, both churches and secular, as they tackle this issue which challenges us all. The project team will be issuing information about this early in 2022, following the completion of the feasibility stage. You can find out more about TCNCC and our progress at: St Marys Church Embsay with Eastby | Carbon Neutral Churches in Craven (stmaryembsay.org.uk)