In 2019, Watershed declared a climate emergency, with a target of net-zero emissions by 2030.

To ground this work, Watershed's Environment Group conducted a survey to understand staff concerns and map the next stage of action.

The results outlined how staff wanted to be more informed about the climate crisis in general, and specifically how environmental action related to roles at Watershed.

How can individuals and the organisation make a difference within our work?

We knew a key aspect of this must be training, and training offered to all members of staff.

For our organisation to change holistically, we needed input from across all levels: what work was already happening informally? What were the barriers to climate action across Watershed? What did our staff need to start creating change across all levels?

As Watershed strives to centre inclusion at the heart of climate decision making, we wanted to avoid climate action which serves to exclude or put disproportionate burdens on specific members of staff. Training would be a foundation for resilient and sustainable action.

The Carbon Literacy Project provided an excellent framework to support us in our aims of ensuring all staff had baseline access to climate education and space to generate ideas. 

Understanding the needs of different teams to meet our net-zero commitment

Our inclusion producer, Tony Bhajam, introduced the concept of framing possibility for action through understanding different staff members ‘capacity, resource and power’ (2022). This led to us tinkering with the format as we went, changing our training plan as we got feedback from staff throughout the process. We were aiming to create an environment which nurtured action while understanding not everyone has the same resource, capacity and power to act.

Carbon Literacy Training

With Watershed's Environmental Group having designed our own unique Carbon Literacy Training Course, since November 2021 we have rolled the course out to approximately 70% of Watershed staff, delivering 7 sessions of between 2 and 15 people.

The training sessions are the first step of a long-term commitment to creating inclusive, positive change across Watershed. We are currently working to achieve our gold accreditation, by embedding this process in our onboarding and KPIs and working to support other organisations achieve Carbon Literacy. 

In the process of designing of our training, we were desperately searching for examples of other training plans to inform ours – and we couldn’t find many, especially for the creative sector, addressing its specific impacts and role in fighting climate change. 

So below you can find all of the training resources we used. We hope this may be a useful resource for any organisation (creative or otherwise) in designing and roling out Carbon Literacy Training. It will always be evolving, responding to changing contexts and developments, but these are the resources we got to as of August 2022. 

If you are interested in attending a Carbon Literacy Training, or if you would like us to deliver a Carbon Literacy Training to your organisation, don’t hesitate to contact climateaction@watershed.co.uk

We welcome collaborations, partnerships, and feedback on our processes. 

Watershed training resources

As part of our commitment to Climate Action we are happy to share our training resources and examples. These are free to use, but please credit Watershed.

1. Full day in-person training programme slides [pdf, 3.9Mb]
2. Training prompt sheet and resources [pdf, 93kb]
3. Training day actions submission form [screenshot, pdf, 2.4Mb]
4. Banana game question cards [pdf, 370Kb]

The Carbon Literacy Project

The Carbon Literacy Project supported and accredited Watershed's Carbon Literacy Training.

The Project initiates and helps deliver Carbon Literacy in a unique and award-winning way. They were invaluable in helping us fulfil the first of our 2022 priority climate actions – to train, and maintain at that level, at least 70% of our staff as Carbon Literate.