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40,000 Certified Learners!

August 2022 by Lucia Simmons

We are absolutely delighted to announce that, as of 31st August 2022, 40,000 learners are formally certified as Carbon Literate!

This means that over 80,000 actions have been pledged – in communities, businesses, local authorities, schools and universities, across the UK and beyond – to cut carbon emissions across all sectors of society.

Now, with over 40,000 Carbon Literate citizens spread across the globe – doing things differently, affecting their organisations and their neighbourhoods, creating the market for low-carbon goods and services, and changing society with increasing rapidity – a cultural shift is not only anticipated but already ensuing. Carbon Literacy is increasing at an exponential rate.

We reached 20,000 certified learners in July 2021, meaning the number of Carbon Literate citizens has doubled in just over a year. The number of organisations engaged and the number of Carbon Literate Organisations has also more than doubled in that time – we have engaged a further 2034 organisations and accredited 63 more Carbon Literate Organisations.

We could not have achieved this without the work of all of our partner organisations and supporters, the hundreds of trainers, and the thousands of organisations and learners who have undertaken and achieved Carbon Literacy; all of whom have worked so hard to deliver real action against climate change.

To have hit the 40,000 certified learners mark in our 10th Anniversary year is particularly special. It took seven years from the launch of The Carbon Literacy Project to certify the first 10,000 learners – a milestone reached in 2019. This figure doubled within just two years and, as mentioned above, has now doubled again. Having certified over 15,000 learners in this landmark year already – a figure almost equivalent to the total of the previous three years combined – we’re certainly on track to keep breaking records!

We ended 2021 with 25,000 learners, so are hoping to continue this doubling by aiming to end 2022 by reaching 50,000 learners certified as Carbon Literate! This means we will need to certify a further 10,000 learners over the next four months – can you help us get there? You can support our aim by creating a Carbon Literacy course, delivering training to your people, or helping to certify the learners. You could even take part in our 2022 Carbon Literacy Action Day!

If you would like to help us but can’t in any of the ways previously mentioned, please consider donating to our 10 for 10 Accelerator! As a small charity operating on a global scale with no core funding, donating supports our work by enabling us to maintain our high quality of work whilst keeping up with the unprecedented (and necessary!) growth in demand for Carbon Literacy.

This new milestone comes just in time for our monthly update to our infographic to reflect our figures as they stood at the end of August. Trainers looking for the most up-to-date infographic version can always find it on our About Us page, alongside information on each metric and descriptions of how we calculate these.

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