This blog post is from Andrew Durling, Executive Director of the Eastbourne Eco Action Network CIC:
2025 has been another busy year for the Eastbourne Eco Action Network (EEAN), so once again there’s plenty for me to review, just as there was in 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021. I can’t do justice to every single activity of EEAN in one blog, but here are the highlights I’ve chosen, with apologies for missing anything out.
Our second Eastbourne Carbon Neutral 2030 Symposium took place at Emmanuel Church in the spring, providing an opportunity for all present to catch up with progress, discuss the challenges and opportunities going forward, and do some invaluable networking. A similar symposium will happen in 2026. A full overview of the entire Eastbourne Carbon Neutral 2030 campaign can be seen on the EEAN’s One Planet Eastbourne community ecosystem plan on the OnePlanet.com platform.
EEAN received a grant from Eastbourne Borough Council’s Neighbourhood Community Infrastructure Levy Fund, match funded by the EEAN CIC and Eastbourne Food Partnership, to purchase an e-cargo bike with the primary mission of delivering donated fresh organic produce from local community gardens and allotments to local community fridges that offer very low cost food to residents experiencing food insecurity. Our volunteers have been busy training themselves up to ride the e-cargo bike and some have already been delivering donated organic food and drink from the newly established monthly Eastbourne Farmers Market to local fridges. EEAN intends to increase food deliveries with the e-cargo bike in 2026 in collaboration with the Eastbourne Food Partnership, and to purchase more cargo bikes if grant funding can be secured, in order to continue developing Eastbourne’s first ever community-run cargo bike network. This would contribute to the active travel revolution that is necessary to deal with the chronic traffic congestion in the town, which lowers local air quality and contributes 28% of the town’s annual carbon emissions. But increasing the numbers of people cycling depends crucially upon much greater investment in building a larger, more connected network of safe cycle paths, so EEAN will continue to campaign and lobby East Sussex County Council, and its possible eventual replacement by the new East Sussex Unitary Authority, for that extra investment.
Still on the issue of transport, the Eastbourne Bus User Group, established by EEAN’s Transport Group, continued its work in 2025 with several positive meetings with stakeholders, and lobbied for the introduction of new bus lanes for Seaside, which will now be established in 2026, leading to a more frequent and reliable bus service for the more economically deprived areas of town where car ownership is much lower than elsewhere. A better bus service combined with more safe pedestrian areas and a 20mph default speed limit in residential areas would support a substantial increase in active travel, with co-benefits such as an increase in mental and physical health, with a consequent long-term and sustainable reduction in the burden upon the local NHS.
Regular walking is a great way of improving one’s health, and in 2025 EEAN developed a series of long walks, funded through a grant from the Chalk Cliff Trust, in the local countryside to highlight many of the challenges and opportunities for local tourism, local heritage, and the local ecology. These walks led to valuable insights which can feed into the EEAN’s strategy for lobbying for significant improvements in the existing Coastal Cultural Trail, a major tourist asset linking Eastbourne with Hastings that currently does not have adequate active travel connections. The vision is to have much better walking, cycling, and bus connections along the trail, extending it as far as the new cultural centre that will be Black Robin Farm, on the Eastbourne Downland, when it is completed, thereby helping to make ecotourism an ever growing sector within the wider visitor economy that Eastbourne is dependent upon.
EEAN continued to develop its Energy Champions network in 2025 in collaboration with Energise Sussex Coast, a local community energy cooperative that has become a strong partner of the EEAN, funding and supporting various workshops and events in Eastbourne throughout the year. Several more of our volunteers successfully completed their training to become Energy Champions and joined our existing team to run several energy advice stalls and events around town during the year. EEAN now has its own thermal imaging camera to help residents assess how well insulated their houses are, and what may need fixing in order to prevent excessive heat loss and thereby keep houses warm enough as well as lower fuel bills, especially for those in fuel poverty. Eastbourne has a huge stock of older domestic properties that have very poor insulation, so not surprisingly the town’s housing sector is the biggest source of carbon emissions as far more gas is burned in domestic boilers than should be necessary to keep residents warm because of so much generated heat leaking out of homes.
As for new projects in 2026, EEAN will be an official community partner of the Eastbourne Farmers Market that was established in 2025 with great success; EEAN will help curate the market as one that showcases the wide range of local organic sustainably produced and which are essential to the long-term food security of the town, especially as global warming inflicts ever more damage on food growing areas abroad and disrupts international food supply chains. EEAN will also be establishing bike sheds for its new e-cargo bike to facilitate the storage and maintenance of the bike, hopefully with solar panels and batteries installed to allow for easy charging of the e-cargo bike’s battery. EEAN will also endeavour to help establish a Climate Hub in the town that will support better understanding of local climate and ecological issues and support greater collaboration on action plans for dealing with those issues.
The times we live in are undeniably difficult in so many ways, and the ever growing threat of catastrophic climate change looms over everything, so maintaining hope that effective climate mitigation and adaptation – both globally and locally – will happen at scale and quickly is difficult to sustain. Which is why is was so inspiring for us EEAN volunteers to witness the arrival in Eastbourne of the Coat of Hopes, which has been on a epic journey this year around the UK. We were lucky enough to speak with the team carrying the coat and even to try it on ourselves. Sustaining an ‘active hope’ is going to be very much a theme of 2026 for EEAN, which will build on the momentum of a Work That Reconnects workshop that Energise Sussex Coast held recently in Eastbourne by helping to organise more such workshops locally in 2026, which will – hopefully – create a local community of practice that will support local climate and eco activists – and indeed anybody struggling to cope with the pain of the world – for years to come.