If you have been reading my blog for a while, you have probably made some eco-friendly changes in your everyday life already.

In this post, I am looking into habits that can help you use your power to create tangible change.

When you feel ready to move into the next step in your eco-friendly lifestyle, these are some actions you can take to alleviate the impact of the climate crisis.

Let’s take a look at what you can do more of this year to kick off your sustainable habits for good.

1. Sustainable habit #1: choose an ethical and sustainable bank

Whilst we do our best to live a greener and more eco-friendly life, our money may be used to promote fossil fuel plants.
By just having a bank account, we may be contributing to the climate emergency.
You can use the drop-down menu here to explore detailed data sorted by bank or fossil fuel company.

According to campaigners, the five biggest banks in the UK (Barclays, HSBC, Natwest, Lloyds and Standard Chartered) have invested nearly £40.4billion into the coal industry alone between 2018 and 2020.

You can use services like ‘currentaccountswitch.co.uk‘ to swap to a more ethical bank and ‘ethicalconsumer.org/money-finance‘ for guides to ethical money, banks and more.

You can also check how your bank uses your money here ‘bank.green‘.

2. Sustainable habit #2: be an engaged citizen and take action

This habit is very important because by taking action you can help create a systematic change on environmental justice.

It is all good to discuss these things on social media or amongst fiends but taking action can actually help make things better.

• For example, you can share your views about local legislation on environmental issues with your MP. They must take action on your behalf if they stand by what they were elected for in the fist place.
• Make a list of companies/businesses that would like to see make more sustainable products/processes. Write to them explaining why this is important for you.
• Sign and share petitions on national and global environmental issues, like new coal mine applications and the logging of endangered trees in Canada.

3. Sustainable habit #3: mobilise the local community/take part

Mobilising people from your neighbourhood and creating a community with genuine representation is a guaranteed success because people will genuinely care about these issues.

This is the best way to address the most critical topics for your locality and find popular solutions that people can implement.

Where to find and connect with other likeminded people:

• People in your neighbourhood
• Community gardens / allotments
• Local libraries
• Social media groups such as Nextdoor.co.uk

4. Sustainable habit #4: consume less new stuff

Before you use the online ‘one-click’ buying option, check inside your cupboards, shed, and garage for the product you want to buy.

The chances are that you already own it; in fact, most of us have everything we need (and more).

Everything we ever need has already been made.

The media constantly bombard us with promotions for the newest and trendiest gadgets.

We are trapped in the vicious circle of working hard to earn more money to buy more clothes & more gadgets.
In essence, the more we spend, the harder we work to buy yet more things!

One wonders, though, why do we strive to increase our wealth? Why our primary goal in life is to make more money?

Why the things we already have is never enough?

It is all well and good to strive for a fossil-fuel-free world, but unless our lifestyle habits change, no source of renewable energy will be able to sustain us.

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