A lot of what ERA does involves keeping people well informed on climate change and biodiversity loss. Members get four newsletters a year with major articles reproduced here on our website. We are well known for our monthly talks which you can keep up to date with here. Also, we produce our monthly Swaps of the Month, which we hope provide some new ideas of smaller actions we can all take to be living ever more sustainably. Every four months a CAN-do is held so that all the local climate groups can meet together and catch up with what everyone is up to, and we host one of those events each year. And then there are the much more practical things that we do!

We have containers for collecting spent batteries in the church porches at Rogate, Trotton and Stedham. Dead batteries can be taken back to any shop that sells more than a minimum number of batteries. With our battery collection we are just trying to make that a little bit easier because it is so important that it actually happens – they are a fire hazard if mistakenly added to your rubbish or recycling and then crushed in a refuse collection truck and, equally importantly, we need to get all the components they are made of recycled.

In June and July we organise regular volunteer parties to pull out Himalayan balsam, an Invasive Non-Native Species that thrives along our riverbanks. This is a surprising satisfying and such a worthwhile task. In 2023 we did 25 work hours of Balsam pulling (we use the term work hours in preference to man hours), in 2024 it was 73 work hours and this year 140 work hours. Maybe you can join us in 2026 to see if we can improve on 140 hours!

And our big one is that we are testing for E.coli in the River Rother and its tributaries. Read about this, our latest and most ambitious project, here.