Cool Communities

Did you know that the average Queensland house contributes 15 tonnes of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere every year? That the cost of powering appliances left on stand-by mode costs Australia $500 000 every year! That just by making a few simple changes to the way you live your house can easily reduce its contributions to greenhouse by about 1 ton annually?

The CAFNEC Cool Communities Program will teach you this and a whole lot more - what is the greenhouse problem? How does how I live impact global climate change? What can I do to reduce my contribution to the problem? What are the consequences for our region of climate change?

CAFNEC has been successful in securing funding to run a Cool Communities program in the Cairns Region. Cool Communities is an Australian Greenhouse Office (AGO) initiative, and in Queensland is facilitated by the Queensland Conservation Council. The program aims to work with householders to reduce greenhouse emissions through a range of measures including the use of energy and water saving technologies. This program has run successfully in other parts of the Australia and has demonstrated real reductions in green house gas emissions at the household level.

Increases in global temperatures due to human activity are now generally accepted by the scientific community as fact. The FNQ region is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of increasing global temperatures. Climate change has very serious social and economic impacts, with likely increases in storm surge activity, cyclonic activity, insect borne tropical diseases and impacts on agriculture. Our natural environment in Far North Queensland is also particularly vulnerable to changes in global temperature. Our high altitude rainforests and their unique plants and animals could face extinction with a mere 20C increase in average temperatures, and the Great Barrier Reef will suffer massive coral bleaching episodes that will seriously threaten large regions of this international environmental icon.

CAFNEC has run several well attended workshops for householders as part of the Cool Communities project. Householders were given energy retro-packs which contained a water efficient shower head, three energy efficient light bulbs, a water flow restrictor, a thermometer and a range of useful and informative information on the Greenhouse issue and energy conservation. A survey form is used to collect information from householders to evaluate the impact of the program.

The current Cool Communities program ends in June 2004, but we are hoping to secure ongoing funding to continue to program.

If you would like to know more about climate change, the Cool Communities program, please contact us