To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs to detail his Department’s Climate Change awareness campaign, scheduled to launch in October 2021.

My Department is taking the lead on a ‘Northern Ireland Climate Action’ (NICA) initiative in this year that sees the UK Government hosting COP26 in November. This conference presents an excellent opportunity to increase further interest and engagement across Northern Ireland in issues relating to Climate Change and to showcase the initiatives and achievements being delivered on the ground here.

The overall purpose of the NICA initiative is to raise awareness of issues relating to climate change such as energy, transport and biodiversity. It is also to highlight the benefits and opportunities of everyone taking action; to help ease the pressures on nature, to help reduce carbon emissions and ultimately to help tackle climate change and support the UK Government COP26 objectives.

The NICA initiative went live on 5th March 2021 and is being promoted primarily through my Department’s collaborative and public-facing MyNI channels on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The MyNI website also provides an evolving shared hub for NICA where people living and working here can access information from a range of trusted sources. This will also be supported and complemented with a range of communication activities by DAERA for the COP26 event.

To further support the NICA, my officials are currently liaising with DoF CPD colleagues and the Government Advertisement Unit to engage the services of a specialist contractor by September 2021. They will deliver a multi-media advertising campaign that will maximise the opportunities for audiences to become aware of the NICA initiative and to encourage them to find out more about it or to get involved.

The primary calls-to-action for the advertising campaign will be to encourage people to visit the NICA hub at www.myni.life and to follow @MyNILife on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, so that they can keep up to date with developments, schemes, grants and local success stories. The primary target audience for this campaign is ‘consumers’ across Northern Ireland and the secondary target audience is ‘farmers and landowners’.

To complement the NICA, my Officials are also engaged with Keep Northern Ireland Beautiful to develop Northern Ireland specific carbon literacy materials which will be provided through networks such as eco-schools and community groups to further raise awareness of climate change. It is envisaged that those materials will be formally launched in September 2021.