OUR STORY AND OUR HISTORY.

Since the summer of 2019 Voluntary Organisations’ Network North East (VONNE) has been working ‘behind the scenes’ with representatives of the public, private and VCSE sectors with the intention of creating a North East England Climate Coalition (NEECCo). The Coalition, with a vision of ‘Becoming England’s Greenest Region’, would aim to address the climate crisis, ecological collapse and ensure a just transition to a green economy.

The Coalition’s creation is in part a response to our region’s history of developing and exporting the technologies - deep mining, the railways, coal fired power stations - that have caused, and continue to cause, most of the carbon emissions that have resulted in the global climate emergency. It was the engineers and entrepreneurs of North East England who ‘released the genie of coal into the world’, and this places a specific moral responsibility on our region.  In response we will set ourselves truly demanding targets for the next 30 years to forge a viable, just and attractive low carbon future.

In May 2020 we established an Interim Steering Group to guide NEECCo through the next stage of its development, working towards a regional prospectus and official launch of the North East England Climate Coalition in Autumn 2020.

The climate emergency we all face has been brought into sharper focus by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has abruptly reminded us all that we live in a highly interconnected and interdependent world where collective action is the only solution to a global threat.

While the threat to life on earth posed by climate change is profound, this is also a unique moment of opportunity, post pandemic, to create a better, greener, fairer world for all people – a world transformed.

Read more about the unique history which has influenced the establishment of NEECCo –

Climate Change and North East England: From Cause to Effect