Climate Week is brought to you by...

It's Climate Week! It's described as "a supercharged national occasion that offers an annual renewal of our ambition and confidence to combat climate change".  Sounds like something you can't argue with. It's also particularly significant for us, as the Social Brain Centre is in the early stages of an exciting programme of work investigating behaviour change for climate change.

Nationally, there are over 3,000 events taking place throughout the week, ranging from launch events for hydrogen partnerships to vegetarian punjabi cooking courses. It's more than likely that there's something happening near you and it's easy to find out what.

Exploring the Climate Week website, I was most interested to see what suggestions were included under the 'Green your home' tab. One of the themes we intend to explore in our own project is that of 'home' so I was naturally curious to see how the Climate Week team had dealt with the topic.

The list of suggestions appears as follows:

The initial shock for me was that the first of these categories consisted entirely of an advertisement for a brand of 'eco' toilet paper. Fair enough, sponsorship is a fact of life these days, and securing it was no doubt essential for Climate Week to proceed with its good work. But the fact that its 'Green your bathroom' category consisted only of promotion for one brand of loo roll was disappointing to me.

There are plenty of more effective ways in which we could genuinely take steps to 'green our bathrooms'. Ironically, one of the best things we could do is take a lead from the majority of the developing world and do away with toilet paper all together, but such a step lacks universal appeal not to mention sponsorship potential.

Moving on, the next category is 'Green your cuisine'. I was expecting to find all sort of useful tips on how to reduce my carbon emissions by changing my cooking habits, as well as a strong message about reducing meat consumption. The meat industry creates more Co2 than the car industry. One of the single most important actions we could all take to make a difference is to reduce the amount of meat we eat.

Do the Green Thing have, in my opinion, done a good job of finding the right marketing message for this, with their slogan 'Make Meat a Treat.' If we can move from considering meat as something that is necessary for a 'proper' meal to seeing it as a treat to be enjoyed on special occasions, we could see dramatic drops in carbon consumption per capita. This poster gets this across beautifully, parodying the 'enjoy responsibly' campaign that has accompanied advertising for alcohol.

But, no, Climate Week's thoughts on 'Green your cuisine' make no mention of meat, and instead consists of a single, rather vague point about making meals from leftovers. Disappointing indeed.

Next, another advertisement/ plug for a specific company, this time in the form of a 'green' energy supplier. Again, this is the only suggestion that is made under the 'energy' category, and no attempt is made to suggest ways in which we might actually reduce the amount of energy we consume at home.

I was especially curious to see what was included under the heading of 'Sustainable DIY' - I genuinely couldn't imagine what sorts of suggestions might be made here. Using a hand drill instead of an electric one? How naive of me. Yes, you've guessed it, the category appears to have been included purely as a promotion opportunity, this time for a paint company that measures the carbon footprint of the products it manufactures. Measuring the carbon footprint is all well and good, but are they actually doing anything to reduce it, or encourage us to do our bit?

Of the eleven categories in the list above, there are only four that do not contain links to specific companies selling particular products.  The four that are not linked to adverts are pretty limp, not really saying anything new and appear at the end of the list, all of which makes me think that this entire section of the website was created entirely for the purpose of giving a platform to advertise the products of companies that have given support to climate week.

I'm disappointed and I think it is a shame - even if the organisers of Climate Week had to include a page to list their corporate supporters, they could have used it as a real platform to share best practice and suggestions that we could engage with rather than the tokenistic disappointment that it is.

However, I don't want to be so critical as to detract from the important messages that Climate Week is trying to convey. I very much hope that the week of events will go a long way towards renewing national ambition and confidence to combat climate change, far more deeply than simply persuading us to change our brand of toilet roll.