Monthly archive for March 2014
Showing results 1 - 5 of 23 for the month of March, 2014.
28 Mar 2014
Today we have a guest post from Luis, an active member of a Transition Initiative in Portalegre em Transição in Portugal.
“We are in a semi-rural area, with a quite old population. There are still a lot of people we know who lived all their lives in direct contact with nature and, often, in my group, we tell stories about enlightening conversations each one of us had at a certain point with old people about changes in climate and its effects around them.
Some of these conversations talk about strong changes, strong effects of the lack of respect human beings express towards Earth. We thought at various times that it would be good to capture one of these conversations and I finally did it! I recorded a conversation with my parents: they are in their eighties, still living in a village near Portalegre and they talk about the changes they perceive in nature, throughout all the seasons they lived.
I will not do a full transcription – I will just share with you some of the highlights of the conversation, I hope it is ok!
I introduced the conversation by saying that we all currently hear talking about climate change but the real question I would like them to answer is if, during their lives, they sense a change in the climate and in the nature. My father answered in a very assertive way confirming that there are changes. He thought, seconded by my mother, that the strongest sign of change he sees is the way now weather is extremely unsettled in the various seasons.
Seasons are not as well defined as they were before – weather varies extremely one day to the next, now… My parents have the clear impression that changes in weather, as seasons went by, were more smooth and permanent. My mother thought that there is a big difference in the frequency of thunderstorms – in the past, thunderstorms were very common. Not anymore.
I asked them about animals and plants. Maybe not as clear and the changes my parents identified in the weather, but they still pointed out some interesting effects: my father said that he has the impression birds are afraid to sleep in the fields. In the end of the day, birds all come to spend the night in the villages. Now, if one walks out, in the nature, when the night falls, you do not hear the noises of the animals. They find that very strange. After I questioned about variations in bird species, they said that now there are many many more storks than before. They are not migrating anymore. Most of them stay all year round here.
Concluding the conversation, my mother pointed out how important is the experience and the empirical knowledge of local people, that changes are not clear in every element of rural live but the truth is that they feel, in the weather and in their body, that, yes, climate changed.
It might be a good idea to keep capturing these conversations. It can be a rich collection of knowledge.
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28 Mar 2014
I live in Marlborough, Wiltshire, England. From 2006, there was an organisation called Marlborough Climate Pledge, which worked to raise people’s awareness around the issues of peak oil and climate change. In 2011, at a Green Drinks, there was a visiting speaker from Romsey, Hampshire, talking about how they had started a Transition Initiative. This led directly to our starting one in Marlborough. This filled me with excitement!
I have been interested in living holistically all my life. The way we have always done things is not necessarily the best way of doing them, when viewed from the perspective of all life on this planet and with an understanding of people and psychology. We have this amazing challenge – step up to create a viable, sustainable future for all of life on the planet, or be destroyed in one of any number of unappealing ways.
Last year, working with the Environment Agency, the Town Council installed a flood protection scheme on the River Kennet, which winds through the centre of town. This worked beautifully this winter, and the only flooding was due to drainpipes backing up, not due to the river. With all the problems of flooding sewage systems, perhaps we should all build composting toilets, that can then go to be composted, instead of wrecking the water system. However, people living here still find it impossible to get buildings insurance because they live by the river; so from that point of view, it was useless.
Personally, we live on higher ground, so our main experience has been a massive increase in wind. Fence panels have blown down. Luckily, the roof is sound. For planting, we are thinking more and more in terms of creating a windbreak (trees) for the prevailing south-westerlies. However, the wind has come from all directions recently, too!
I wish to create a future with dignity and respect for all, where we may reduce the amount of planet we visit, but we live more deeply and meaningfully on ‘our patch’ in relation to everyone else.
For me, being a part of Transition is an act of revolution – the structural inequality of our culture needs to be radically changed, the banking industry needs to be radically changed. The goal should be maximum benefit for the many, and not the few. In my day job, I am a benefits & money adviser, as well as being a transpersonal counsellor and psychotherapist, and an astrologer and teacher.
On an individual basis, I deal with the fallout in financial and mental health issues generated by our current economic climate and culture. I work to change and improve our experience of the world, one person at a time.
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27 Mar 2014
In the market town of Totnes in Devon, a small group of volunteers are redistributing produce that would have otherwise gone to waste, with inspiring results (an article I wrote for the Live Better section on the Guardian’s website).
It’s a Thursday afternoon and I’m in a large and gloomy food storage shed at Riverford Organic Vegetables near Totnes in Devon with a small group of volunteers called Food in Community. We’re working in the small corner of the shed that has been allocated to us, sorting ‘grade-out’ produce not quite perfect enough for sale or nearing the end of its shelf life, into boxes for local distribution.
There are avocados, carrots, cauliflowers and apples. Broccoli and bananas, spinach and peppers. There are even some kiwi fruits. And one solitary leek.
Each box has a card stating who it’s for. There’s the Totnes Food Bank, the Drop-In Centre, Cool Recover – a local charity working with young adults with mental health issues, a local primary school, Rainbow Nursery, as well as several boxes for individuals and a few other local projects. One box goes to a community radio station offering volunteers and vulnerable adults the chance to make radio programmes. If we weren’t doing this, it would all be fed to the farm’s extremely fortunate pigs. Amid reversing forklifts and vast crates of organic produce we fill the boxes, and within an hour we’re loading volunteers’ cars for the trip back to town.
Food in Community started last year and is the brainchild of Laurel Ellis and David Markson. Initially imagined as a food gleaning project, wanting to mobilise volunteers to gather perfectly edible but uneconomic produce from local fields, their current focus sees the distribution of grade-out as “a catalyst for creating more cohesive communities and building community confidence and resilience”.
One recipient of Food in Community’s boxes is local primary Grove School, which had until recently outsourced its school dinners, with only 30 out of 200 pupils taking them. When the PTA decided to take over the catering, employing a chef, take-up doubled. When Food in Community showed up and was able to bring weekly deliveries, the PTA no longer needed to buy in prepackaged and frozen produce, and could spend more on better quality local ingredients. Take-up rose to 100.
On arrival in town, we deliver boxes to people in recovery from cancer, and to others struggling to make ends meet due to the impacts of the bedroom tax. We drop four to Rainbow Nursery, housed beneath the town’s library. I ask Julie Tweed, pre-school co-ordinator, what difference the weekly deliveries make to them. “Although Totnes looks like an affluent area,” she tells me, “it’s an area of rural deprivation. We feed 50 children here every day. These deliveries mean our menus have become more seasonal, more experimental. We are a charity, so free and quality produce helps us hugely. We work with families that are hungry. Some of my staff team are hungry. We can support them with free bags of fruit and vegetables, which are very deeply appreciated.”
Food in Community’s thinking goes beyond just delivering produce. They have started running cookery classes at the local family centre and also in the newly-established community kitchen in the town’s Civic Hall, for people with mental health issues and older men living alone. On the drive back from Riverford I asked Laurel, where does she think this could all go?
“To really make the most of this, we need cold storage”, she tells me. “I’d love to be able to do catering for local schools with a strong training and employment element, and perhaps an evening cafe.”
But how replicable is this model? It may work in Totnes, with the input of small amounts of funding, its wider ‘transition town’ context and a dedicated team of volunteers, but elsewhere? “This could be done in most places”, Laurel tells me, “there is surplus everywhere.”
Guy Watson of Riverford Organic Vegetables loves it. “It is always painful to see good produce being wasted. It’s great to see it find a home. I especially like the way they’ve just got on with it.”
Food in Community aren’t the only people looking beyond food banks, as Pam Warhurst, founder of Incredible Edible Todmorden, told me. “It doesn’t start and end with the food bank. They’re a necessity, an immediate response. But they’re the first, not the final response. It’s about providing opportunities for people to feed their families well.”
If Food in Community are anything to go by, rethinking our relationship to the 15mn tonnes of food the UK discards every year could unlock much more than food, it could also be a source of health, education and community involvement.
Back at Rainbow Nursery, Julie Tweed is telling me what several other recipients of boxes have told me. “It’s like christmas when the boxes arrive, the joy of finding out what’s in the box that week.” She cradles a celeriac, a root vegetable unknown to most of her young charges but which they are eyeing with fascination. “It’s like a character from Doctor Who.”
Interested in finding out more about how you can live better? Take a look at this month’s Live Better Challenge here.
The Live Better Challenge is funded by Unilever; its focus is sustainable living. All content is editorially independent except for pieces labelled advertisement feature. Find out more here.
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27 Mar 2014
Through Transition I’ve been active in my community for years, trying to help people understand the importance of climate change and how it could impact on the lives of them and others in the future. I’ve seen all the hard data, digested all the scary graphs, seen all the heartbreaking photos from the Arctic. I’ve heard reports from other people across the world what impact climate change is having on their lives and there’s nothing that I haven’t believed. But up until this winter I hadn’t really felt the full effects myself. I was fairly confident that the weather patterns were changing and that this was directly linked to a warming global climate, but it was hard to pin point one event that solidifies those beliefs. This winter changed all that and one event in particular made me sit up and think very carefully about the future.
I grow organic vegetables on the Isles of Scilly. “That must be a great climate for growing” is usually the response I get from most people. “It can be” I say, “mild in winter, warm but not hot in summer, good light levels. But you wouldn’t want to be growing here during a storm.”
Some of my vegetable fields are literally just behind the beach. A great place to be in summer and the best ‘view from the office window’ you could hope for. But in a winter storm this position is something of a disadvantage! There is a decent sand dune between the fields and the beach in most places, but on one stretch there is not much more than a moderate hardy evergreen Pittosporum hedge between fields and beach.
1st February brought an extraordinarily large and deep low pressure across the UK. The barometer dropped to 965mb on Scilly, the wind reached 80-odd mph and, to make matters worse, it was one of the biggest spring tides of the year. At high water the sea was reaching places you couldn’t really imagine it ever getting to. The swell was ferocious, driving walls of water in to the coast.
As I looked on, the fragile coastline between my fields and the sea was getting eaten away before my eyes. The trees making up the hedge, the only windbreak I have, were just toppling over and ending up on the beach.
Three days later on 4th February another enormous low pressure steamed in from the Atlantic, this time bringing winds of over 90mph (and I think over 100mph in west Wales). The tides weren’t quite as high but the coast again took a pounding, and I feared what would happen to my fields.
After further storms, lasting in to late February, the upshot is that I have thought about the future use of my fields in a very different way up until now. One more storm like 1st February will destroy the hedgerow and some fields will be completely open to the wind – and therefore unsuitable for growing vegetables. This could happen in 20 years or next winter. How do I plan my business around such uncertainties?
I could plant hedges inland from the existing hedge line, but these could take easily 10 years to establish, by which time the coast may have eroded back to there anyway. The island I live on is getting smaller by the year and some of its resources are being threatened – farmland, fresh water and potentially even transport links.
You could say that such events were freak weather events, perhaps a ‘one in 50 year’ storm. That could be right, but all the evidence points to this becoming a more regular occurrence and that the winter we’ve just had could be a taster of what we have to come regularly. If that’s the case then I have to seriously look at what I grow and where, because the most vulnerable fields are simply going to be victims of climate change before long.
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26 Mar 2014
While the ecological and infrastructure impacts of climate change are becoming ever more self-evident, what about the social impacts? Do the impacts of climate change show that “we are all in this together”, or are its impacts unevenly felt across society? Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) recently published a report called Climate Change and Social Justice: an evidence review which looked at this in more depth (as did a recent Oxfam report). It coins the term “climate injustice” and offers some very useful insights on community resilience in the face of climate change, and what that means for different communities. We talked to Katherine Knox, Programme Manager at JRF, who co-ordinates the Foundation’s work on climate change issues.
From your research and from the recent floods, who can we argue will be most impacted and affected by climate change?
There are going to be impacts in many ways across the country. We’re looking at the UK in particular rather than internationally, and obviously there are different issues that might apply internationally from in the UK. What we’ve been thinking about is the multidimensional nature of vulnerability. If we think about flooding specifically, it’s easy just to focus on who lives in the floodplain areas, but not to think about the nature of how peoples’ wellbeing might be affected by the impacts. What JRF research has suggested is that there are particular factors that may make people more vulnerable and affect their wellbeing more.
There are some personal factors, so if you’re very old or very young you might struggle for particular reasons, ability and dependency on others might be an issue, if you’re in a care situation obviously you’re dependent on the care institution to support you in the context of a problem. But there are other factors. If we think about the environmental factors, it’s not just a case of whether you live in a floodplain, but also the nature of the built environment and natural environment around you.
If you’re in a basement flat you’re obviously going to be worse off than someone who’s in a highrise flat in terms of the impacts it might have upon you. Then there are questions about whether there are green spaces or “blue spaces” that might absorb water within your environmental surrounds which might make a big difference in terms of flood impacts.
Then if we think about the social factors which are perhaps the least well thought about at the moment, there are a range of things. We know for instance that people on low incomes are much less likely to take up flood insurance and so they might be particularly affected. Not only because they are affected in terms of the loss of their possessions, but also because they have less ability to then recover from those problems because they don’t have insurance and less of a safety net.
Other social concerns would be things like peoples’ social networks and if you’re isolated that you might be particularly at risk and more vulnerable, whereas if you’ve got social networks or people who can support you in the context of a crisis and help you recover from the event. We think vulnerability relates peoples’ ability to prepare for flooding and to respond and recover, as well as some of those other things that might be more familiar in terms of thinking about the impacts.
What does resilience to climate change look like, in particular for poorer communities?
It’s something that’s not really very well understood at the moment, and actually it’s the focus of work that we’ll be taking forward more in the next phase of our research here, but we do think that there’s a question of understanding how the social context and social fabric works in an area, so social links might be really important in terms of people’s ability to then get support from each other as well as thinking about some of the other provisions in place.
We’ve been doing some work in York in an area called New Earswick, initially first developed by Rowntree to provide housing for some of the workers in his factory. Over the years it’s an area that has grown and new housing has come on stream, but it remains a predominantly low income social housing area and we’ve been trying to work with people about some of the issues. What we found was that to awaken peoples’ interest in terms of what might be going on, in an area where there’s not a context of a threat from flooding or anything particular that’s happening at this point in time, people need to be connected through their local interests, rather than wider questions about sustainability and climate change.
The issue there was about tapping into local interests in nature and the natural environment, so there are lots of fruit trees that have been put in peoples’ gardens in these areas, which were not actually really well used, so one of the activities was done with the community was to support fruit picking and getting people working together in a natural environment.
There were some big initiatives to support tree planting and other activities in the environment that brought people together who didn’t necessarily know each other previously. The people we worked with were also very actively working in the schools in the area to support schoolchildren to start thinking about these issues. Those things that connected into peoples’ wider activities were really important in terms of getting people to start making links. So we think that might be a really important part of resilience to climate change, but again it’s not something that necessarily might be a focus, and it might need to take different forms in different places in terms of what you can actually do to engage people.
It sounds like research that very much supports and validates the approach that Transition groups have been taking for the past few years…
Yes indeed. In a context where there wasn’t a Transition group in that area. We were trying to support similar ideas I think.
Your recent report talked about the ‘Triple Injustice’, where people on low incomes pay more and benefit less from certain policy responses, especially energy bills, and are those responsible for the least emissions. In the context of that observation, was the government right recently to cut back on what it called ‘green taxes’, claiming that they were socially regressive?
That raises lots of questions actually. The general position here at JRF is that we recognise that we need to have a transition to deal with the consequences of climate change, and therefore we do need to provide funding to enable that change to happen. What’s happened is that some of the monies that are being raised to make that transition to a low carbon economy are being applied through peoples’ energy bills, rather than perhaps through general taxation. So, as a general principle, it’s more regressive to putting costs onto energy bills than paying things through taxation because lower income households pay a higher proportion of their income towards energy bills than people on higher incomes.
But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need to take the steps to make the transition happen, and indeed fund them. There are questions about how you pay for things, and that can be done in different ways. What is also interesting is what are different measures that have been put on peoples’ energy bills, and there are a range of different things that are being applied, and actually some of the levies that are being put through are actually being applied to fund measures that many people will benefit from, and others are being applied and will only benefit a smaller number of people, people on higher incomes.
Is it possible to suggest whether the current austerity programme is helping or hindering communities’ ability to build resilience to climate change?
I think in general, JRF’s work is indicating lots of problems with the emerging picture on that side. We are concerned about how peoples’ incomes are being reduced in general, in such a way that will also affect their ability to deal with things like their fuel bills. There is a wider problem really. We perhaps haven’t looked at the detail of how those things connect, in terms of austerity and the links to climate change. In general, peoples’ ability to deal with a wide range of challenges they face is being affected, economic and social questions as well as environmental questions.
What’s your sense of the balance between adaptation and mitigation?
Clearly there is a question about the need to mitigate as a first priority to reduce emissions. What’s concerning is that the scientists are basically suggesting we need to peak our emissions within the next 10+ years, so there’s not a huge window of opportunity to peak global emissions now. There are really big questions around what international agreements can deliver, and then how those play out down at different national scales and within countries.
The question then becomes how are we going to adapt as well, because we know already that there are so many emissions in the atmosphere that we are going to have the consequences of those emissions in terms of climate change already happening. We’ve already seen the devastating floods that we’ve had recently here, even though the attribution is difficult in terms of climate change we can expect to see more frequent flooding, so we are going to have to adapt.
There are really big questions about how we are going to protect different communities, who has a voice in decisions that are going to be made, which resourcing is going to be put in, which are getting more focused now than perhaps they have been in the past, but are really important questions nationally. There are real issues there about smaller and more rural communities and how they will be protected in the future.
Our theme this month is ‘living with climate change’. Can you give us a sense of what living with climate change will look like for the poorest communities in the UK? What would it look like if we responded adequately, and what would it look like if we didn’t?
Some of our work already indicates that the poorest and lowest income households, the most disadvantaged groups, are already likely to be among those worst hit, both from climate impacts themselves but also the consequences of policy responses as indicated in our energy work. There are potentially very negative outcomes unless action is taken.
The alternative is to try and engage people now and use processes that we have, whether that’s Neighbourhood Planning, or community action through Transition groups and other opportunities to try and galvanise people to understand what the implications might be, and try to engage them in developing responses. However, I think that’s not just an issue for disadvantaged communities, that’s a national issue that really need attention from central government and from different stakeholders and from local government and others too, rather than just being an issue for disadvantaged groups.
In Transition, one of our conclusions is that local economies are key to building community resilience. That localisation is a powerful part of that. To what extent do you think that appropriate localisation could have a role to play in building community resilience?
I think it’s a really valid question and I’d be really interested to see how the learning from the Transition movement can help us in that. There is a wider debate at the moment about the need for more sustainable prosperity, the question of how growth creates prosperity, or what the limits are to the current economic model nationally, and so it relates to some of those questions. There are opportunities to have more of an asset-based approach locally, where we think about what skills and opportunities exist within an area and how those can support local economic development. That’s a really interesting area.
If you had the ear of the current government, what would be two or three things that you would recommend them to do in terms of helping low income communities to build more resilience to climate change?
There’s something about looking at what the impacts are more effectively. Our work has highlighted where think some of the most disadvantaged communities might be across the UK in relation to both flood and heat, but I’m not aware of this kind of thinking being taken up nationally in terms of thinking about preparedness and how we respond and how we prioritise responses. There’s not enough fine grain thinking about which people and places we need to support most effectively, there’s more of a general approach being taken.
So I would suggest that first we need to have a better understanding of vulnerability, and how that might inform what we do. That’s the vulnerability to the direct effects of climate change. Secondly we need to look at the current policy position, and try to create a more fair policy approach. What tends to happen is that policies aren’t really considered in terms of their distributional impacts very effectively. So if you look at energy policies, what should be happening when they’re being put in place is that there’s a proper understanding of how those policies will impact on different types of households, and where we know there are going to be negative impacts on particular groups there should be steps take to prevent that, or remediate it in some way or to design policy differently so that those things aren’t so regressive.
Thirdly I think there’s something about a process of engagement and trying to bring peoples’ voice into this discussion. I don’t think at the moment there’s enough communication from centre to communities themselves to actually understand peoples’ views and to try and bring people on a journey of understanding collectively as to what climate change might mean for them and then what the opportunities are for action.
Some of that action needs to be driven from communities themselves and needs to more of a kind of dialogue really, from central government and down through local government and other organisations, and the voluntary sector to make those links and start saying “what do we do”, “what are we going to where the impacts may be really acute?”
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