UK town’s economic plan envisages significant benefits flowing from increased localization

The report identifies a multi-million pound opportunity to create new jobs, grow new enterprises and help existing businesses to thrive in Totnes & District, UK.

No 724 Posted by fw, April 19, 2013

This post opens with a 5:17-minute video introduction to the Totnes plan by Fiona Ward, Project Manager for Local Economic Blueprint project, Transition Town Totnes. Following the video is the Executive Summary of the Totnes Local Economic Blueprint, authored by Ward. For a free download of the 32-page report, click on the preceding linked title.

REconomy’s Fiona Ward discusses the Totnes Local Economic Blueprint – published March 21, 2013

Totnes Local Economic Blueprint: Executive Summary by Fiona Ward, March 28, 2013

Fiona Ward is the Project Manager for Local Economic Blueprint project, Transition Town Totnes

Totnes and District is feeling the effects of the economic downturn, along with the rest of the country. Climate change impacts and rising energy costs are further signs that the assumptions underpinning our current economic system need urgent review. Here we have an unusually independent economy. Rather than sacrifice that by pursuing growth at any cost, here we suggest that protecting and enhancing this economy is where our future lies. But how will this provide the jobs we all need to survive?

This report identifies a multi-million pound opportunity to create new jobs, grow new enterprises and help existing businesses to thrive. It’s people-based, community-led, sustainable economic development that provides new livelihoods. At the same time, it helps ensure we can feed ourselves, minimize our fuel bills and carbon emissions, provide safer refuge for our savings and pensions and take care of those most in need.

This work brings together a coalition of local stakeholder organisations, anchored here in our community, to develop an economic approach designed specifically for Totnes and District (T&D), and shows that we can unite to deliver real change.

The project has looked at 4 key sectors and used publicly available data to compile a picture of what each sector could be worth to our local economy, if we develop more demand for local products and services, delivered by local independent businesses and using a supply chain closer to home.

Just developing 10% of this potential could contribute over £5m to our local economy within the next 12-24 months. This is worth even more than its face value, as more of the money continues to recycle locally when it’s spent on local things from local independent businesses (the local multiplier effect).

Caring for those that need extra help in our community will bring some economic benefit to local enterprises too, but more importantly, we can find new ways to use other means of exchange to look after each other better, especially the most vulnerable.

While we do not suggest that all of our needs could be met by our local area, we propose that what can be grown and produced here, should be, where there are net benefits to doing so. The rest will be met by trade both national and global, as has always been the case. This Local Economic Blueprint tells the story of a new kind of local economy, one based around people, their wellbeing, and their livelihoods, and which better respects resource limits. It calls to action more of our local organisations and businesses, and invites them to work with us to shape this story and turn it into reality.

[The Blueprint’s key conclusions] –

Food and drink — Up to £22m of money leaves our local food economy each year on food imports. Diverting just 10% of this existing spend within the next year or so would boost our local businesses by over £2m. Local independent shops offer three times the number of jobs as the main supermarkets, for the same retail spend, and local food producers employ 50% more workers than larger scale farms.

Making our homes energy efficient — Retrofitting activity on our homes is worth £26m (basic) – £75m (full) in total. This relates to around 70 to 700 jobs respectively across the whole supply chain, and we want to maximize our share of these. Aiming to unlock 10% of the basic spend within the next year adds up to £2.6m to our local economy.

Developing our renewable energy assets — This could generate over £6m worth of energy each year for householders and community investors. The solar PV technology alone could deliver 370 jobs across the supply chain, some of them based here. Building just 10% of this capacity adds another £600k into our economic system each year.

SEE ALSO

• Transition Town Totnes website

• Totnes, from Wikipedia

• Totnes publishes groundbreaking Local Economic Blueprint by Rob Hopkins, Transition Network Org., March 28, 2013. Hopkins, a co-founder of Transition, sees the publication of the Totnes economic blueprint as “what may well turn out to be one of the most important documents yet produced by a Transition initiative.”

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I claim no ownership of such materials. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing.

Community action — A way out of pit of climate change doom and gloom says Rob Hopkins

Sitting with the pain of awareness while engaged in solutions-focused, positive action

No 627 Posted by fw, December 7, 2012

“For the past six years I have been part of an experiment known as Transition, which encourages people to…sit with the pain of this awareness, while also pointing to a path beyond it. It’s a bottom-up approach to the creation of community resilience; the ability to withstand shocks at the local level. It focuses on “engaged optimism”, a solutions-focused and positive response, rather than the ‘false cheer’…” —Rob Hopkins

In this post, Rob Hopkins, co-founder of Transition Network and author of The Transition Companion, reacts to an article by Guardian editor, Jo Confino, who, “after three weeks on the road in the US and Turkey soaking up the latest news on sustainability, [concluded] there is not a lot to be positive about.” In response, Hopkins finds reason for “engaged optimism” from Transition’s “do-ocracy” approach. He reviews inspirational stories of “communities taking visionary leadership when their leaders are failing to do so.” Transition, he insists, is an action-driven path out of the pit of despair.

Rob’s article is reposted below with my added subheadings. Alternatively, read the original version by clicking on the linked title below. And don’t miss Shaun Bartone’s ‘aha’ comment following Rob’s piece.

Community action alleviates climate change gloom by Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture, November 7, 2012

(Rob’s article was originally published here, in the Guardian newspaper).

Confino’s “dark night of the soul” piece prompts Hopkins to respond with the Transition story

In his recent piece on climate change, Jo Confino wrote of the dark place he found himself in after a few weeks immersed in the latest news on sustainability – his climate change ”dark night of the soul” if you like.  For the past six years I have been part of an experiment known as Transition, which encourages people to do just what Confino suggests: to sit with the pain of this awareness, while also pointing to a path beyond it.

It’s a bottom-up approach to the creation of community resilience; the ability to withstand shocks at the local level. It focuses on “engaged optimism”, a solutions-focused and positive response, rather than the “false cheer” Confino warns against.

Transition is not ”false cheer” thinking; rather, think of it as a “collective experiment”

There is an important distinction to be made between the kind of positive thinking that Barbara Ehrenreich  lambasts in Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, and the Transition approach. Ehrenreich writes of “mandatory optimism and cheerfulness”, whereas Transition is very different. It acknowledges the scale of the challenges we face and that they can be deeply upsetting, but also invites you to be part of a collective response, with no predetermined answers, to help make history figuring it out. A collective experiment, if you like.

The Transition approach in a nutshell

It works like this: an initiating group forms; raises awareness about climate change, peak oil and so on (always in the context of what can we, now, here, do about it); then subsequent groups form around key areas – food, energy, transport – which enable the people who are passionate about those areas to get involved. It works to create a collective vision of how it would like its future to be in the context of the challenges outlined above. This then leads to practical projects driven by what people feel enthused to do. You might think of it as a “do-ocracy”, a process driven by the people who are doing stuff.

It is open source, bottom-up and self-organized. It represents a shift from focusing on probabilities to focusing on possibilities. Confino’s despondency following his immersion in the data on climate change is about probabilities, the probability that such-and-such will happen by a certain time. But what if the thinking shifted to what was possible? Given that we are where we are, what might we be able to create in this situation?

Transition success stories “represent communities taking visionary leadership”

It is that refocusing that led to the creation of Bath & West Community Energy, a co-operative, community-owned energy company which just raised £750,000 in its first share launch. It led to the Bristol Pound, launched last month with the full support of the city council and already accepted in many hundreds of businesses, and Transition Lancaster’s Fruity Corners, fruit trees planted across the city. . There are many other examples of such initiatives.

While none of these on their own are an adequate response to climate change, combined they represent communities taking visionary leadership when their leaders are failing to do so.

Might we redefine resilience as the degree to which we can breathe possibility into our local communities, changing the stories they tell about themselves, so that when they encounter shock, they are able to refocus on the possibilities that emerge? The realization that we live in a world of limits can be a great stimulus for new thinking and creativity.

Feeling part of an action-driven community process is a path out of the pit of despair

I too have sat in the pit Confino writes about, the gloomy place where it feels like you are the only person who can see the wall our juggernaut of civilization is heading for at great speed. Indeed, I pop back there on a fairly regular basis. But feeling part of a process, with others, of starting to build the kind of world we want to see, helps hugely. It contributes to my own personal resilience, as well as to the resilience of the community around me.

It is perhaps a path out of the pit driven by action.

COMMENT Shaun Bartone’s ‘aha’ moment, November 10

Rob–this is by far the best explanation of what Transition Towns is about. It contains numerous but implicit references to chaos theory: that we have to self-organize, start from the simplest level, from the ground up, that we don’t know the ‘mature state’ of the system or even where we’re going, but that by following simple ‘nearest neighbor’ rules, we can create resilient communities and perhaps arrive at a mature system state that is resilient and more ecologically sound than the current one.

After reading this, my ‘aha’ moment was that I realized that there’s no way we can solve the problem of global climate change—it’s impossible. It’s too big, it’s too complex and too intractable. Since we can’t solve the problem of global climate change (or ‘peak oil’) we have to focus on problems that we can solve. “Focus on possibilities, not probabilities.” We have the capacity to build local, resilient communities that can survive whatever hits us, whether climate change, peak oil, economic collapse, or the decline of an empire. We can solve that problem by working through movements like Transition Towns that ask the right questions and focus on the right issues, even if they don’t have all the answers. “Resilience” doesn’t solve the problem of climate change either—it just helps us to survive it so that we can adapt to whatever conditions will be thrust upon us for the indefinite future. In the face of these insurmountable dilemmas, we cannot avoid collapse, large or small. Catastrophic transformation is on its way and we can’t stop it. All we can do is survive it and hope that the new communities we create will evolve into a system that is adapted to the new world that awaits us.

After four years of doctoral studies in environmental sociology, systems theory and chaos, I finally “get it.”

Fair Use Notice: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing

How resilience thinking can turn crisis into opportunity

No 177 Posted by fw, May 19, 2011

The following post is taken, in part, from an article, On resilience, by Carl Folke, which appeared in Seed Magazine, 2010. I have made minor editing changes and added sub-headings and font highlighting to facilitate browsing. To read the entire article, click on the above title. This post complements, quite nicely, the video presented in the preceding post, What is resilience in people and ecosystems? (Video). 

On Resilience by Carl Folke

Resilience: a definition

Loosely defined, resilience is the capacity of a system—be it an individual, a forest, a city, or an economy—to deal with change and continue to develop. It is both about withstanding shocks and disturbances (like climate change or financial crisis) and using such events to catalyze renewal, novelty, and innovation. In human systems, resilience thinking emphasizes learning and social diversity. And at the level of the biosphere, it focuses on the interdependence of people and nature, the dynamic interplay of slow and gradual change. Resilience, above all, is about turning crisis into opportunity.

Two radical premises of resilience theory

Resilience theory, first introduced by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling in 1973, begins with two radical premises. The first is that humans and nature are strongly coupled and coevolving, and should therefore be conceived of as one “social-ecological” system. The second is that the long-held, implicit assumption that systems respond to change in a linear—and therefore predictable—fashion is altogether wrong. In resilience thinking, systems are understood to be in constant flux, highly unpredictable, and self-organizing with feedbacks across multiple scales in time and space. In the jargon of theorists, they are complex adaptive systems, exhibiting the hallmark features of complexity.

Resilience science focuses on sudden transition shifts and tipping points between self-organizing, complex adaptive systems

A key feature of complex adaptive systems is their ability to self-organize along a number of different pathways with possible sudden shifts between states: A lake, for example, can exist in either an oxygenated, clear state or an algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession. Conventionally, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change in a smooth way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed, at which point the water abruptly goes turbid. Resilience science focuses on these sorts of regime shifts and tipping points. It looks at incremental stresses, such as accumulation of greenhouse gases in combination with chance events—things like storms, fires, even stock market crashes—that can tip a system into another equilibrium state from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to recover.

The resilience challenge is to find out —

• How far can a system be perturbed before this shift happens?
• How much shock can a system absorb before it transforms into something fundamentally different?
• How can active transformations from an undesirable social-ecological state into a better one be orchestrated?

A resilient response to the challenge: anticipate, adapt, learn, and transform human actions

The resilience line of thinking helps us avoid the trap of simply rebuilding and repairing flawed structures of the past—be it an economic system overly reliant on risky speculation or a health-care system that splits a nation at its financial seams and yet fails to deliver adequate coverage. Resilience encourages us to anticipate, adapt, learn, and transform human actions in light of the unprecedented challenges of our turbulent world.

Human activity is pushing Earth perilously close to its limits

Arguably the most urgent of these tasks is the nested set of global environmental crises we now confront: climate change, ocean acidification, pandemics, water scarcity, overfishing, and loss of ecosystem services. The tremendous acceleration and expansion of the human enterprise, especially since World War II, is pushing the Earth dangerously close to the limits of the human activity it can sustain, and beyond which abrupt environmental change is increasingly likely. Obviously, global sustainability demands that humanity remain within these planetary operating boundaries. The relevant question then becomes: What will it take?

 

 What will it take to keep humans from kicking us into an unknown geological era?

To begin, we need to put our role on this planet in perspective. The graph above puts humanity and the Earth’s systems in a geological context. It shows temperature variations on Earth over the past 100,000 years. About 10,000 years ago, temperature variation stabilized, and we entered what geologists call the Holocene epoch. This is the stable period during which agriculture and complex societies, including our own, developed and flourished.

Considering the fact that our modern globalized society has developed within these unusually stable conditions, it might come as no surprise that today’s hospitable environment is often taken for granted in investment decisions, political actions, and international agreements.

Before the Holocene period, the climatic conditions on Earth were likely too unpredictable—with temperatures fluctuating wildly—for humans to settle down and develop in one place. Clearly, the only rational strategy now is to try and ensure that we remain in the human-friendly Holocene phase, that human development does not kick us into an unknown geological era.

For starters, work with, not against, the biosphere

The big challenge for humanity, then, is to begin working with the processes of the biosphere, instead of against them. This is not merely an environmental strategy—it is about sustaining our own development on planet Earth. And there are countless pathways for such development, as long as the biophysical preconditions for a functioning Earth system are respected.

As well, stop treating environmental issues as external to and separate from human society

This global resilience perspective stands in stark contrast to development paradigms and global policies that treat environmental issues as external to society, that offer only minor adjustments of current behaviors, and that tend to concentrate on technical quick fixes to get rid of the problems. It also runs counter to the philosophies of many traditional conservationists; they tend to see the world as environmentally stable, and seek to “save the environment” by limiting or excluding human activity. Both perspectives treat human and nature as two separate entities.

Harmful mind-sets: capitalist-driven economy and the need to save nature

Embarrassingly, in a few generations we seem to have created a mind-set that either assumes that the economy is at the very center of the universe, or that nature needs to be saved from us humans. This is a dangerous mental trap, one we must escape as soon as possible in order to seed a prosperous future for humanity.

Could the climate change crisis be our salvation? How ironic would that be?

Luckily, the climate crisis has kick-started a new kind of mental revolution: We are slowly reconnecting with the planet. We are beginning to recognize that humans are part of the biosphere, simultaneously shaping it and fundamentally dependent on its functioning. This thinking is present in an accumulating body of work on ecosystem services, like the 2005 UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, that surveys the capacity of the world’s natural systems to support human development.

Transformation of the Great Barrier Reef – an exemplar of human collaboration to be emulated globally

Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability, and transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. How can societies persist and adapt in order to avoid tipping over critical thresholds into undesirable situations? When a shift into an undesired regime appears inevitable (or has already occurred and is irreversible), how can social-ecological systems transform to fit the new circumstances? One example of such “transformability” is the recent shift in governance of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Here the challenges of climate change, eutrophication, and overfishing have led Australians to begin treating the reef as an invaluable, embedded part of their economy, and to begin managing it through collaborations between citizens, scientists, and policymakers. The current search for alternative energy sources to build a society that is less dependent on fossil fuels is another example. Overturning petroleum—the very foundation of human development thus far— will require unprecedented creativity and social innovation. In other words, it will demand a new ethic of social-ecological resilience.

Ending on a hopeful note, expect the unexpected and transform crises into opportunities

Don’t be too alarmed by unexpected events, be prepared for them, and make use of them to improve negative circumstances. These actions will require trust and collective effort, a theme brought into focus with the awarding of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom, a key player in resilience thinking. Ostrom’s work gives evidence that grassroots, cooperative action can be enormously successful when it comes to caring for public commons—resources that benefit all, and that are traditionally vulnerable to exploitation. This message is at the core of the resilience framework. That the global community is now recognizing it provides hope that resilience will be the new lens through which we face the turbulence, and opportunity, of the coming decade.

One can’t help but question how many climate scientists would share author Folke’s concluding hopeful outlook.

RELATED READING

• Any or all thirteen posts numbered 18-30 on this blog by Professor William Rees, all of which begin with the main title: Is humanity inherently unsustainable?
• Any or all seven posts numbered 117-123, also on this blog, by Professor Joseph Tainter, all of which begin with the main title: Can Joseph Tainter save us from ourselves? 

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog, Citizen Action Monitor, may contain copyrighted material that may not have been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material, published without profit, is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues. It is published in accordance with the provisions of the 2004 Supreme Court of Canada ruling and its six principle criteria for evaluating fair dealing