Transition Culture

8 Apr 2014

The impact we’re having: Nicola Vernon of Transition Town Greyton

Greyton Transition Town has been in existence for just over two years and is beginning to have a significant impact on our community.  The one way which stands out for all of our community is what a great vehicle it is to bring about social integration.  The context of Greyton is worth noting here as background.  When the village was founded 150 years ago, it comprised long narrow plots of land where a house could be built at one end and the rest of the land was for livestock and crops.  Leiwater channels brought water to every plot and people of all cultures lived sustainably and peacefully side by side.  The Group Areas Act of the 1950s declared some of those people, with a darker skin than the others, to be ‘coloured’ and therefore to be removed to the outskirts of the town where they were placed cheek by jowl in mean little houses on a rocky slope with little soil. 

The division this caused is still tangible and visible today, as in most of South Africa.  Greyton has become an affluent  English style village of oak tree lined streets and thatched cottages whilst Heuwelkroon, that rocky escarpment, continues to house most of the ‘coloured’ population and many of the social ills that result from poverty and oppression (economic now rather than legislated).  Neighbouring Genadendal (3 kms away) fared worse. 

In its day it was larger than Cape Town was at the time.  It was a stopping off point for travellers moving from West to East.  It housed cartwrights, wheelwrights, knife makers and other fine craftsmen, the first primary school in South Africa, the first teacher training college, the first printing press.  Its mission station is still a place of peace and beauty but the surrounding town suffers from poverty and a lack of resources.

Into this situation let’s put the Transition movement.  As a driver for social integration it’s the best I’ve encountered in 30 years of working in social welfare.   I’m still working out the reasons as to why it is so successful.  Part of the reason must be that we are all equal in the face of global challenges like peak oil and climate change.  Even if the big picture is scarcely acknowledged there is an awareness that we’re all in the dwang when the shift hits the fan. 

Secondly, those skills that our poorer community members have had to maintain in order to survive are regarded as desirable and valuable in Transition.  Instead of being ashamed of having to make chutney because she can’t afford to buy her own, Auntie Dora proudly presents her organic, locally grown vegetable chutneys at our weekly Wednesday fresh products exchange table where they are swooped up by all and recipes, advice demanded. 

A local natural building team is always in work now that the benefits of working with clay are becoming treasured once again – for insulation, availability and cost.  Gardeners growing their own vegetables because they can’t afford to buy from shops are now having to produce surplus to meet the demands of a village becoming increasingly aware of food miles, toxicity of pesticides/herbicides and the benefits of supporting the local economy.

Our mantra is ‘Hands-on, heart engaged’.  Whatever we do, it’s interactive or it just doesn’t take.  We hold very few meetings, seminars or presentations but we do a lot of events and activities like our upcoming Trash to Treasure festival  when all sectors of our community come together for an afternoon of music, workshops, competitions and enjoyment.  We parade from the busy Saturday farmers’ market through the village to the rehabilitated part of the town dumpsite where each visitor can engage in activities such as composting, making biochar, building a permaculture swale, stuffing eco-bricks (plastic bottles stuffed with clean dry non-recyclable waste and then used as building materials), building the eco-brick outdoor classroom (first ecobrick building in South Africa), plastering the straw bale stage wall or making clay bricks for the composting toilet block.

On July 3^rd we will become the first town in South Africa to be plastic bag free – with the full buy-in of the shopkeepers.  There’s nothing like watching a dead sea bird have its stomach cut open and half a kilo of plastic waste removed from its innards to inspire a horrified shop keeper to abandon the bag.

With the help of two building engineer students from Han University in the Netherlands, an urban designer, architect and structural engineer  (all working pro bono), we are drawing up the plans for a fully integrated eco-village comprising a mix of homes – sub economic housing side by side with affordable private homes, (for those able to manage a small mortgage), and with more affluent private homes.  Solar panels, biomass digesters, grey water systems, community gardens will relieve the burden on the already overtaxed village infrastructure as well as helping to build a community.  The ultimate residents are working with the professional team to help design and build their homes.

Our eco-crew school programme works both in the classroom and after school with nearly 80 children every week to engage the youngsters in environmental awareness and humane education.  It astonishes me how much the children enjoy putting on plastic gloves, picking up a large black bin liner and cleaning up a river bank.  They always ask when they are going to do it again!

We have swop shops where people bring clean dry recyclable waste and exchange it on site in a small shop for basic necessities such as fresh organic fruit and vegetables, clothing, school uniforms, stationery and toiletries.  This uses up high end waste from the supermarkets as well as giving our local recycling entrepreneur over 700 kgs of recyclable waste from each swop shop.

Transition in Greyton has created 18 jobs – four of them through direct employment.  We have a project co-ordinator, PA, eco-crew co-ordinator and a trainee.  The others have been created through our mentoring scheme.  We are currently mentoring four green businesses –

Pure Home: House cleaning/management agency using only environmentally friendly, non-toxic cleaning materials which are also sold through its own retail outlet.

Pure Café: Vegetarian and vegan café serving only locally produced, organic, seasonal fresh food and drinks.

Tabularasa Natural Builders: Natural building company, currently supporting the eco-crew children and adult volunteers to build the eco-brick outdoor classroom.

Greyton Green Park: Chipping, composting, biochar of garden waste on the rehabilitated part of the dumpsite.

Future schemes in the planning stages include placing solar panels on the roofs of local schools, building a green economy with job creation and local currency, and establishing a training centre for other communities wishing to adopt the transition model or a version of it.

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8 Apr 2014

Nic Marks on measuring wellbeing and happiness

Nic Marks founded the Centre for Wellbeing at the London-based think tank New Economics Foundation and also more recently founded Happiness Works. Much of his work has focused on measuring wellbeing and happiness, as captured in his excellent talk from 2010.  When thinking about how a Transition initiative might measure the extent to which it is successfully helping to building wellbeing and happiness, he felt like the best place to start. 

Your current area of work is around wellbeing at work. What have you learnt from that and from your previous work that could help measure wellbeing at a community scale?

The first thing to say about measuring happiness and wellbeing is that we can create measures of them but you’re never going to precisely measure them. You’re asking people to assess their experience of life really when you’re into the realm of wellbeing. What’s the quality of their experience of life? We use structured questionnaires to do that. There are lots of different precise methodologies, but basically you’re asking people their feelings on a daily basis or over the last month, and you’re asking them to assess the quality of their life and use those to create measures of happiness and wellbeing. There are some standard scales that people use and we also create them specially for the workplace.

So what does wellbeing look like at a community scale? What would a happier, more resilient community look like and how might we be able to measure that?

At a community level, probably the best measure is something called the Warwick Edinburgh Wellbeing Scale. This is used to ask people both their feelings and also how functional they are; whether they’re able to make decisions, whether their relationships are strong and things like that.

What would it look like? Well, the currency of wellbeing is time and relationships. A community with high levels of wellbeing and happiness is going to be one where there are strong relationships, where people get along well, accept each other’s differences, are able to be themselves, and they have time to nourish those relationships in both ways really. You have to give as well as receive in relationships.

The heart of happiness and wellbeing is relationships. There are obviously other things, particularly personal things about how much we’re learning, how much we’re able to spend time in nature and how active we are. But the core of it really is relationships.

For groups who are doing Transition who want to in some way monitor and evaluate the work that they’re doing, what would be the useful places to start? Obviously if you’re a university department and you have a big research budget you can do much more extensive research, and if you’re a community initiative you don’t want to spend all the time you would otherwise spend actually doing things just measuring stuff. What would seem to be a doable place to start in terms of measuring your impact?

As I said, the Warwick Edinburgh Scale does a short version, I think it’s 8 or 9 questions and the longer one does about 14. It’s free to use, you can download the questionnaire and you just tot up the score.

Really you want to be tracking the same people through time to see whether they get happier through the project. Unfortunately there aren’t very strong online tools you can use. I’d like to build them one day. We’re building online tools for businesses at the moment, but it would be nice to be able to give something free away to communities which is an ambition but right now we don’t have that.

The other thing to frame it with is some work we did at the New Economics Foundation called the Five Ways to Wellbeing. This is something we did for the UK government office of science, their Foresight Project, which was basically trying to identify positive actions people could take to promote wellbeing. Like a piece of social marketing in a way, they’re an invitation into a wellbeing space.

And they are:

• Connect: because social relationships are the strongest part really of happiness and wellbeing
• Be active
• Take notice: noticing what’s going on around us and within us
• Keep learning: learning through your life course
• Give: volunteering, generosity, altruism are all really good for our own wellbeing as well as other people’s.

Those five things I think are just enough unpacking of the idea of wellbeing and happiness to not over-confuse but to open up a space. If people are doing projects they might like to think, are they taking the boxes of connect, keep learning and give. Maybe they’re got something focused a bit more on activity or mindfulness and taking notice, or one on learning, one on volunteering, on making relationships. It can help them bring the energy of the others into those projects. So that’s a useful tool but it’s not really a measurement thing. It can guide. A lot of local authorities, local projects use the five ways as just a way to inform their wellbeing work.

Quite early on in the life of this government they announced they were going to be taking wellbeing and happiness and using indicators around wellbeing and happiness. Is it possible to have an austerity agenda that actually increases happiness? How do the push to save money on such an urgent, profound scale run alongside the need to build happiness? Are the two inherently mutually incompatible or could you have a happy version of austerity?

[Laughs] It’s unfortunate timing that that’s what the coalition government was doing, as they started to introduce wellbeing. It does feel like “we’re going to fob people off with the idea that we’re going to have austerity but they can be happy”. It sound rather a disastrous combination.

What is sure is that once you’ve got past financial insecurity which is probably more due to the level of indebtedness than income. If you’ve got high levels of debt that’s really troublesome for wellbeing. Obviously low income doesn’t help at all. You have to have enough money to enter into the space that you can participate in society and there are lots of people that are excluded, so that is very problematic. But if you can get into the space of thinking about those five ways then money, as in more income, doesn’t become exceptionally important.

There definitely is a way and there definitely are people who are living on not exceptionally high incomes and are happier than people on much higher incomes. As a general rule of course, having income protects you from particularly bad things. It’s a difficult nuance to strike there without sounding very paternalistic and very cut off from the difficulty of some people’s lives.

To go back to the question, is it possible to have an economy which is contracting and cutting back on public spending and one that is growing in happiness at the same time?

Theoretically. To give you an example, Iceland which has gone through a much tougher transition than we have, actually Icelandic people got happier during that, and I think that had a lot to do with the fact they were living in a bit of a stressed out economy.  They had 15% unemployment almost immediately. Because everybody was in the same boat together there was a community spirit around unemployment.

The real problem is if you were made unemployed and had high levels of debt, then you were really suffering. If you didn’t have high levels of debt then people actually got happier, probably because they were spending more time with loved ones and relationships. How long that would last it’s difficult to know. The economy’s obviously picked up again. But there definitely was evidence that people got poorer and happier in Iceland over the last 4 years.

Do you find that the concepts of happiness and wellbeing cut across the political spectrum? Are they something that appeals as much to the left as to the right?

The biggest takeup’s been in the centre. But there are interesting ideas from the left and the right that meet the happiness agenda. So from the right, what’s classically called the Right, family, autonomy would be things that are really important for happiness and wellbeing. On the Left fairness, justice, respect, tolerance all are. So in some ways it’s not a left-right agenda.

I think in some ways the way that we at the New Economics Foundation and at Happiness Works think about happiness and wellbeing is a mix between individuals and the environment they find them in, the context they find them in. The Right places more emphasis on individuals and the Left places more emphasis on conditions and so how they come together is a new way of thinking about a synthesis between those two things.

The point really is some people do thrive in difficult circumstances, and people do sink in benign circumstances so there’s two things going on. But it’s also clearly true that more people thrive in good circumstances and more people sink in bad circumstances so you can decide where you put your emphasis. There are things that can appeal on both sides.

Our theme this month is around the impact of Transition. What’s your sense, from where you’ve sat over the last few years of the impact that Transition has had?

I see Transition popping up with interesting groups saying things and I’ve been to a couple of Transition meetings and talked to people, but I haven’t been deeply involved with the Transition network. What I’ve seen when I’ve been in Totnes or once when I was in North London groups is a very vibrant community where a lot of people are passionate about it.

Not always in the mainstream, so I would think the challenge must be – Totnes less so, in Totnes it is fairly mainstream – but in lots places how to get more involved with the mainstream I’m sure is a challenge. That’s a challenge we all face in this agenda of getting people to take climate change seriously and to take social challenges seriously, how do we take them mainstream.

In the Happy Planet Index, Costa Rica had the world’s highest score. What have they got that we haven’t?

First of all, Latin American cultures generally do pretty well on happiness and wellbeing. They have a similar level of life expectancy and a similar level of GDP per capita as the Eastern European transition countries but they have much much higher levels of happiness and that’s really to do with their attitude, their joie de vivre rather than a more Eastern downtempo sort of thing, but most importantly they have very strong communities, very strong social connections, social participation which simply isn’t present in central Eastern Europe. So they’ve got these very strong relationships which is one really important thing.

Costa Rica specifically has done some very interesting things. It abolished the army in 1947 and has invested that money in social projects so education and health are really good and that’s shown in their life expectancy, which is higher than the USA and their literacy rates are spectacularly higher than the USA so they’ve actually got really good social and health outcomes there. They also have a geographical strategic advantage in that they have hydro.

From a carbon perspective they can be much more renewable than many other places. Iceland is the same, having geo-thermal energy. Where I live part of the time, Norway, similarly has hydro so their actual use of energy themselves is more sustainable. I call them fossil fuel pimps because they basically live off the earnings of fossil fuels in Norway. So Costa Rica does have a strategic advantage in that way. It all adds up really. If you think of the Happy Planet Index really as saying what’s the environmental efficiency of delivering wellbeing, as they end up delivering higher life expectancy, more happiness on a quarter of the carbon footprint of the USA. That’s interesting.

Kevin Anderson is often heard to say that staying below 2°C and economic growth are incompatible, but at the same time the push is always for more and more growth. Is there any way you see that we’ll ever choose as a society, as a culture, to leave the growth-based economy behind and if so, what role might a narrative based around happiness play in that?

In a sense that’s been the thrust of my work over the last 15 years, which is that I started working on alternative measures to GDP in 1992-93. Me and Professor Tim Jackson at Surrey University who wrote Prosperity without Growth, we worked on an early version of something called the Index for Sustainable Economic Welfare. Basically we were trying to add up the cost of climate change and the costs of other things and take them off GDP.

For me, that is the point of wellbeing. It has to change the discourse which is to say that economic indicators of progress are always saying more is always better. Actually I think we need to think about the quality of the experience we have and that’s why I’ve got interested in wellbeing. It was my driver. My driver was a sustainability driver to get into happiness and wellbeing in the first place. Humans are the problem in the system, so how do we think about that.

It becomes an intractable problem. If you think that GDP growth is a measure of the wellbeing of society, we all know that if you grow GDP you grow the throughput of materials and resources through the economy which is going to inevitably create sink and source problems – where does the carbon go and where do you get it from.  That throughput is hugely problematic and I think the only escape out of there is quality of life, and not thinking that quality of life is everybody on the planet having Mercedes and widescreen TVs and all of that.

How do we actually do that in a way that is sustainable? It’s this tension between good lives now, because everybody wants quality of life now. No politician can go to the poll and say we’re going to make life worse. Perhaps they’d do that in a war scenario, maybe Thatcher managed that a little bit, but you can’t really do that. The tension between quality of life now and quality of life in the future – it’s too easy, particularly with our short-term cycles of government, to avoid issues.

The governmental equivalent of nimbyism, not in my back yard, is NIMTFO (not in my term of office). Climate change gets pushed off into the future, it’s someone else’s problem. Regrettably, that’s where we remain stuck, and that’s why I’ve certainly been dedicating most of my adult life to thinking of new ways of measuring progress because I think we get it wrong. I think if we got it right we wouldn’t be so frightened of having to not have future gains in consumption. That’s probably the way to think about it, rather than giving up consumption. It’s actually how do we stabilise it first and how do we de-carbonise it.

There’s relative poverty and there’s absolute poverty, the relative poverty would get less bad if we didn’t have people who were super rich at the top of the income spectrum. The absolute poverty absolutely needs dealing with. For the rest of us, money only buys us a bigger car and a bigger house and a dew holidays, but actually if we had less and we had more time then it probably would be a better life. People hang on to what they’ve got. They hang on to what they know, and it’s quite difficult to move beyond that.

Lastly do you think there is an evidence base building now that more localised, more resilient economies would be happier economies?

I don’t know of very specific studies that show that absolutely, but if you take a reading of the literature of it, everything about wellbeing and happiness is proximal, is close to us. So the logic of everything being local is absolutely playing into the logic of happiness and wellbeing. I can’t believe that that is not a good outcome and not a good possibility. There definitely are big differences between communities in terms of happiness and wellbeing. Even independent of things like the Index of Multiple Deprivation and things like that. There are places where things are going great and things that are going less well that are independent of financial matters. There’s lots and lots of potential to do things independently of that, for sure. 

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4 Apr 2014

The impact we’re having: Stephanie Hofielen of From the Ground Up

From the Ground Up (FGU) was launched in March 2010 by Transition Town Kingston with the mission to bring affordable, local organic fresh food to our communities.  Dissatisfied with the limited variety, variable quality and high cost of fresh organic food from our conventional sources, Transition Town Kingston took action.

FGU was built on these principles:

• Supply a wide variety of fresh fruit & veg and more that are either certified organic, in conversion to organic and/or naturally produced without pesticides
• Offer food below market prices, making it affordable to most, not a luxury for the few
• Only sell food that is seasonal and local when possible with preference given to UK suppliers and nearby European countries only
• Provide a positive shopping experience by having an online shop and not requiring a minimum purchase or needing to buy a box. This minimises food wastage by customers only buying what they want, not what is given them
• Customers collect their food rather than FGU delivering it, minimizing the need to build an expensive infrastructure
• Build a community of like minded individuals through public engagement, social activities and voluntary working 

Four years and over 350 supporters later, FGU has not deviated from its original mandate.  Today we work from two venues on alternate weeks with teams of enthusiastic volunteers lovingly packing customer orders. 

We believe FGU’s main impact on the community is the breaking down of financial barriers to buying organic food.  Many of our customers have told us that whilst they agree with the principles underpinning organic food, the prices in the shops make it prohibitive to support organic farming.   Our proximity to London makes it very difficult to either find and/or buy from a local organic farm.  So, FGU with its main supplier, Choice Organics, bring the farms to Kingston, making quality local organic food available.    

FGU is also selling items from local producers (e.g. honey, bread) and is a buying group for SUMA, the UK’s largest wholesaler of ethical products.  This combined with the fresh food from FGU can offer a person the opportunity to not buying as much from other conventional shops.  

Overall, FGU’s impact on the community is a positive one.  We earned ‘Commended’ from the Time & Leisure Eat & Drink Awards 2013 for SW London & Surrey, and from the Kingston Business Excellence Council for “Best Green Business 2013”.  Here is a video about us: 

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3 Apr 2014

Sir David King on climate change as "the biggest diplomatic challenge of all time"

We are really honoured to be able to share with you today an interview with Sir David King.  Sir David is currently Special Representative to the Foreign Secretary in the UK on climate change. For 7 years, between 2000 and 2007, he was Chief Scientific Advisor.  Much of his current role is focused around the negotiations for an international treaty in December 2015 in Paris, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21).  He calls this “the big moment to achieve a global agreement”, adding “I believe this is the world’s biggest diplomatic challenge, I’m even going to say the biggest diplomatic challenge of all time”.  He spoke to Transition Network’s Sarah McAdam. 

As you engage with governments around the world, where do you see the most positive action being taken to address climate change?

Britain set in train the process and I think it’s fair to say that we lead the world through our Climate Change Act in 2008. I was one of the players behind the generation of that Act and in that Act, the British government with an all-party agreement agreed to reduce its emissions by 80% by 2050 and also agreed that we should have four yearly carbon budgets going out towards that date so that we could make sure that we were on target. The carbon budgets are set out by a Climate Change Committee and a Climate Change Office and we have carbon budgets to date until 2028. They’re currently working on the budget for 2032.

Britain, I would say, leads the world because we’ve got this very detailed parliamentary process built in. It’s worth saying that for us, it was very heavily pushed on us, the carbon budgets into the future by the private sector, saying that if they invest in low carbon energy they want certainty that that is going to be the process into the future.

When we look outside Britain, the EU has adopted very close to the British position. The European Commissioners have agreed to recommend to the council, which happens to be meeting today – the council of prime ministers and heads of state, that we should across Europe reduce our emissions by 40% by 2030 and that will be our contribution that we will take forward to the international negotiations. So the 27 nations of Europe are leading the way with that announcement.

Mexico, you may be surprised to hear, has in effect passed a parliamentary process which is very similar to the British process and also commits their future governments to long-term programmes of reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.

We are beginning to see actions in many of the developing countries around the world. Countries that include South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil. Many countries are already enforcing low-carbon futures and avoided deforestation actions. That’s not to say there isn’t more to be done but countries are aligning themselves. Russia, for example, president Putin in November last year made the first ever announcement of a presidential decree on climate change, stating that Russia will reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide by 27% by 2020 compared with 1990 levels.

There is a good deal of action, but as I say, a considerable way to go before we can be confident about an agreement in Paris in 2015 that matches up to the nature of the challenge.

Do you still believe that it is possible for global warming to stay below 2°?

Let me answer that by saying what is needed to keep within that target because the scientific panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the several thousand scientists who have recently put in their latest report, have phrased this in very dark terms.

At the moment, globally greenhouse gases are increasing by 1.8% per annum and have been doing this for the last 10-15 years. If we carry on burning fossil fuels and increasing greenhouse gases at that rate, by 2043 we would have completely consumed our carbon budget and would have to drop to zero immediately by 2044 if we were going to stay within that 2°C limit.

What this means is this is now a very urgent problem. If we do get good agreement in Paris in 2015, and if that agreement really produces the results in 2020, starting in 2020, then we can reduce emissions starting in 2020 at a rate of 3.2% per annum and stay within our carbon budget. That’s the nature of the challenge. By 2020, we have to switch from increasing emissions across the world at 1.8% per annum to decreasing at 3.2% per annum. That’s a very big challenge, but that is what margin we’re left with in managing this very very important problem.

Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre argues that it’s impossible adequately to respond to climate change and have economic growth. Where do you stand on this?

It’s impossible to have economic growth if we allow climate change to continue. I would say this with a great deal of certainty. If we look at the world we’re likely to go into as we move forward, if we don’t manage this problem, we are looking at a world in which, by the end of the century, we may have reached a 4.5°C temperature rise, sea levels rising by 75cm to a metre. We would be seeing major cities around the world, including London, under severe threat of continuation. The loss of farming and hence the ability to produce food and many other parameters, fresh water challenges, all of these challenges mean that it is simply pie in the sky to talk about growing our GDP under those circumstances.

Let me just paint a picture around the issue of environmental migration. For countries that are low-lying such as the small island states such as Britain and Bangladesh, as the sea level rises the civilisation on those areas of land populations will have to withdraw to higher areas of land. In Bangladesh we’re talking about an area of the world that is very densely populated and it is highly likely therefore that from all these island states and countries like Bangladesh, there will be an environmental migration at a level we have never seen before. This is going to cause all sorts of disturbance to the global economy.

We see the beginnings of this kind of action in the Arab Spring, where this rapid rise in food prices coupled with the rise in mineral prices and oil prices, all giving a threefold increase in a few years in these prices, caused real concern about people’s ability to buy the food that they need to continue to live. The notion of continued GDP rise in the face of the impact of extreme weather events is very unrealistic.

You paint a very stark, a very clear picture, but one that is very difficult for governments to take on board or acknowledge. Do you think politicians are recognising the description that you just gave?

There’s some good news there. The Foreign Secretary certainly recognises that and in making my appointment to this role, he was in a very clear position of saying “I want to underline my commitment to this challenge”. His counterpart in the United States, John Kerry, has been making around the world some quite remarkable speeches about what he considers to be the biggest challenge our civilisation has been faced with.

He’s describing this just to catch the attention of people as rather like a very large nuclear weapon that we’re sitting on. He feels that this is something that the world needs to act on. As I say, President Putin, and this may be a big surprise, has made a clear statement about climate change. Our own Prime Minister recently underscored the British all party agreement in 2008 with his statement about the floods and the impact of climate change here in Britain. There are good signs.

Amongst the developing countries I would say there are some extraordinarily good leaders who see the problems very clearly. Ban Ki Moon has called for a meeting of heads of states in September in New York, and this is going to be an opportunity for those voices who are at the helm, those people who are in a leadership position to express their views clearly to the international community.

In our recent interview with Myles Allen, he argued that only a huge roll out of carbon capture and storage could keep global warming below 2°. Is he right to put so much faith in a relatively untested and still experimental technology?

I don’t think he’s right. I think Myles is wrong on this issue because I fear that we should not pursue a technology as a potential solution before we know we can deliver it as a solution. We know that carbon capture and storage from power stations that are run by coal is a do-able process, and in particular we know that we can capture the carbon dioxide, and we can store it in oil fields that are depleted of oil. The oil companies have been using those oil fields to store carbon dioxide, but in particular to extract the remaining oil from them.

That’s doable, but there’s not enough room in those particular underground caverns to contain the amount of carbon dioxide that we are emitting. We therefore have to shift over to saline aquifers. We need non-saline aquifers for the fresh water which we’re rapidly running into short supply across the world for. We need to be using saline aquifers for carbon dioxide capture and storage and that’s as yet an untested business. In other words, we don’t really know, once we’ve put the carbon dioxide down there, whether we can securely cap the stores.

Incidentally, and I think this is another important part of the story, the cost of carbon dioxide capture and storage is so high and the energy used in the process so high, we’re talking about 30% of the output of a coal fired power station going into the capture and storage process. The cost is so high that it would probably mean that coal fired power stations would have to be shut own because other forms of energy are rapidly becoming very competitive.  This is the bit that I think Myles Allen is completely missing out on.

If we look at the cost today of the installation of photovoltaic systems, it is five times cheaper to install PV systems today than it was 10 years ago. What has happened is that the feed-in tariffs first introduced in Germany in 1989 and then rapidly spreading across the European Union has meant that the volume of production of photovoltaics has increased year on year. With every year of production the cost has come down 17% on average.

Today, in many parts of the world where solar energy is available, in other words in sunny climates, the use of solar photovoltaics is already competitive in producing electricity on the grid. So who would use coal with carbon capture and storage if you could rather use a renewable such as PVs?

Now there is a problem with PVs, as with wind, that these are intermittent sources. A much more important piece of technology to focus on is the development of large-scale energy storage. That in my view is the Cinderella of research. I would focus heavily on developing large scale energy storage because it would be transformative. If you look at India today, I believe that India would rapidly switch across. They could use deserts in Rajasthan as a source of electricity from PVs, they would rapidly move across to that development rather than continuing the process of coal mining; coal miners still dying every year and at the same time pollution levels in the atmosphere in India and in China are so high that both countries are trying to see how they can avoid coal usage. I think this is a danger that we focus on the wrong expenditure in terms of technologies that can be transformative.

Given the benefits that you’ve just described that can be derived from storage technology, why is the focus not going in that direction?

That’s a very good question and I believe the answer is that feed in tariffs were meant to provide the solution that is appearing, which is the lower cost of installation of the energy sources. It’s not been as efficient as wind. With wind, the figure is more like 7 or 8% fall with every doubling of production, but I think that none of the mechanisms we’ve put in place have pulled energy storage technologies through into the marketplace.

A group of us are very keen to establish a major new programme, a global programme of research, publicly funded and privately, but I stress publicly funded research, aimed at developing the storage capacity we need. This should be an effort from the research and development end through the demonstration part of the process, and into deployment. In other words,  I would like to see heavily subsidised deployment of large-scale energy storage as it becomes available in the marketplace so that once again the cost can be brought down as the volume of deployment goes up, and that will then become a worldwide facility.

By the way, and I think this is very important, most villages in Africa and India are off the electricity grid. The people in those villages, hundreds of millions of people without any electricity at all. Getting those villages onto the grid is extremely expensive, which is why the governments of those parts of the world have not yet extended into those villages.

But the cost of installing PVs with micro grids in those villages is on average about three times lower, even at today’s PV prices. This means there’s another big market for PVs emerging in those two parts of the world. Once again, volume will keep going up and the cost of PV installation will fall well below the cost of installing energy systems based on fossil fuels. There’s a very real future for sun power to become the major form of energy production in the future. Now you couple that with the availability of large-scale energy storage and you’re moving to a position where you can say we can actually crack this problem.

Where should leadership on climate change be coming from? We’ve talked quite a lot about government but there’s also business and communities. I’m particularly interested in the role you see communities having.

First of all, let me say there are a number of really outstanding business leaders who get this whole message and who are advocates of action on climate change and who are doing it in their own companies. This is extremely important because it helps politicians enormously to be able to say that the private sector is supportive of their actions. In terms of the public, we talked earlier about individual leaders in the political scene. Leaders of the visionary capability of a Mandela or a Gorbachev are actually in short supply. There’s an almost empty stage for international political leaders to step onto and really show the way forward to the rest of us.

But what will generate people to move onto that stage, I have no doubt, is public opinion. And so it is critically important that the NGOs and the public voice is heard through the media. I think that one could hardly overemphasise the importance of this.

In the run-up to Copenhagen, we had a good position across the media in western countries. In many developing parts of the world, it’s still quite good. But the arrival of the lobbies against climate change has seemed to turn the media’s attention away from the enormous challenge of this position. We are talking about something that the planet has never had to face up to before, because it requires joint action by all communities, by all societies, by all countries to manage this problem. We’ve never been in that position before. I think that the challenge therefore for the political system is so large that it needs the push and back-up from the public voice.

In relation to that, we’ve found that having access to information about climate change doesn’t necessarily engage people in a response. Similarly, being exposed to extreme weather events also doesn’t have that impact. I wondered what you thought was the most effective way of engaging the public with this issue?

You’re quite right although there are many counter examples. It’s fair to say that many people understand the business of the floods and climate change being related in the UK and just to stress that for a moment, in 2004 I put in a report to government as chief scientific advisor from a very large scale study on flooding risks to the United Kingdom and what we needed to do about it.

That report was prepared by about 110 scientists, engineers, climate scientists, social scientists, and it took them three years to reach their conclusions. The conclusion was relatively stark. It was that we needed to improve our flood defences, we needed to improve water management because the biggest risk to the British Isles from climate change would be from flooding this side of the end of the century.

The floods that recently happened were just the kind of event that we were talking about managing risk to. It’s fair to say that many of our proposals were put in place and most of the country’s major assets were actually saved as a result of that. Anyone who studies this ought to know that that is the case. We probably have 10 to 15 billion pounds’ of damage, but it could have been hundreds of billions of pounds’ of damage if we hadn’t stopped the floods from going into our major cities such as London and into our major assets. It is quite important to somehow dig that message out and get it into the public domain.

But if you take a counter example, the new government in Australia has maintained the commitment to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide by 2020 by 5% but nevertheless are at the moment very slow to take action on climate change and to recognise the relationship the extraordinary hot summer that they’ve just had in South Australia, the highest temperatures ever recorded in South Australia, Melbourne. This follows 10-15 years of drought and high temperatures in that region which is, if you go to the climate science predictions, precisely what they were predicting.

You’re quite right, extreme weather events don’t always lead to the conclusion that people understand the nature of the challenge. Russia, on the other hand, are swinging around now. The severe summer in Moscow and the melting of the permafrost in Russia has been a wake up call. We may say that the hot summer in Russia was such an extreme event that it can’t all be attributed to climate change – of course that is true.

But it is nevertheless an indicator to the Russian population that climate change is a severe threat to the Russian people. It’s not just that a warmer climate is going to be nicer for them. It’s going to mean longer growing seasons which is what was said before. Just as in Britain we can’t say that climate science will be better for us because we’ll grow wine that will be competitive with France and Spain, however nice that will be, we’ve seen that the floods are so counter-productive that the impacts are more severe.

Extreme weather events, which are likely to increase in frequency as we move forward in time, are a wake up call but aren’t always read in that way just as you say.

You mentioned the importance of getting this issue discussed in a meaningful way in the mainstream media. The BBC’s recent coverage of climate change seems still to be labouring under the assumption that balance means giving a platform to climate sceptics. Is this still appropriate?

Of course it’s not appropriate. We’re in a situation where 99% of the climate science community believe that climate change is happening and is due to mankind’s influence over the last 50 years. They’re able to say this with 95% certainty. If we said this, say, about a new vaccine arriving to prevent some transmittable disease and the scientific community said they were 95% certain that this would stop the transmission of that disease, I doubt that you would have an outcry against the scientific community of the kind which happened here.

It is, in my view, quite extraordinary that we can still try to get a so-called “balanced view” between the clear scientific opinion and the people who, mostly, are not even close to the science themselves. I find it quite remarkable.

As you know, our theme this month has been “living with climate change”. As someone who works with this issue every day, how do you deal with it? How do you cope with the depth and the enormity of the issue and deal with it emotionally?

I cope by having a very exhausting schedule. I met with delegations from 10 different countries this year and so my waking hours are actually spent in negotiations and working with leaders in other countries, negotiating teams, talking to leaders of NGOs. When I make visits to other countries, so for example, to India, I met with leaders of major NGOs. I spoke to the parliament, the Indian parliament; I met the head of the planning commission in India, met the key ministers. I also met with a whole range of other leaders including people at the Bombay stock exchange where I gave an address. So I don’t confine myself to the political leaders but I try to meet as many of the influencers as I can on these trips.

And you’re saying that you find emotional support from seeing that breadth of interest in the issue and the commitment to the issue?

Yes, exactly. And I think because I’m so deeply involved in the actions and I think obviously what is critical is getting positive feedback and I am getting positive feedback wherever I go. But this isn’t a stress-free life I’m describing. I might also add I’m a bit of a stress-free zone. I still sleep well at night.

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2 Apr 2014

On Transition’s impact and reimagining the road to Paris 2015

Monday’s IPCC’s report presented a stark and focused reminder that business as usual will lead to “severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts”, and that the impacts of climate change are already “widespread and consequential”.  Our theme for April is “what is the impact of Transition, and how do we know?” In this piece, I want to explore three questions.  What is the impact we hoped Transition would have when we first came up with the idea, what impact are we actually having, and what could we be doing differently to increase that impact? Big questions, especially in the light of the IPCC’s report.  Although we’ll go into them in more depth as the month goes on, let’s make a first stab at them here. I also want to run an idea past you. 

What impact should we be seeking to have? 

The draft Strategy for Transition Network captures this quite nicely: 

When we use the term “Transition” we’re talking about the changes we need to make to get to a low-carbon, socially-just, healthier and happier future, which is more enriching and more gentle on the earth than the way most of us live today.

In our vision of the future, people work together to find ways to live with a lot less reliance on fossil fuels, much reduced carbon emissions, improved wellbeing for all and stronger local economies.  The Transition movement is a social experiment, in which communities learn from each other and are part of a global and historic push towards a better future for us and the planet.

The idea has always been to serve as a ‘detox’ for the West, as an approach that makes the process of reducing carbon emissions and oil dependency feel like a move towards something rather than a move away from something.  It has sought to be a depoliticised and viral approach.  A call to a mass rolling-up of sleeves and getting to work.  It has been an exploration of the extent to which it is possible to influence change from the bottom up in a constructive and solutions-focused manner.  The intention has been to be one of the ideas “lying around” in Milton Friedman’s famous quote: 

“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

In The Transition Companion, Transition is framed as being a number of things simultaneously, an inner process, leading by practical example, an approach rooted in place and circumstance, a tool for turning problems into solutions, a cultural shift, an economic process and a storyteller.  Ambitious?  Yes.  These are times that demand ambitious responses.  As does the IPCC report.  But how are we doing? 

What impact are we actually having? 

This is a big question.  We shall be exploring it this month in some depth.  We’ll be talking to science historian and author of The Merchants of Doubt Naomi Oreskes.  We’ll talk to Gill Seyfang, the academic who has probably done more Transition-related research than anyone else and to Jo Hamilton, a researcher at the Environmental Change Institute, who is currently developing ways to enable Transition groups to measure their impact.  We’ll ask Michael Shuman for his thoughts on how to evaluate the success or otherwise of any resilience-building/localisation process.  We’ll discuss resilience/happiness indicators with Nic Marks and Lorenzo Chelleri.  

We’ll ask Eamon O’Hara, author of the recent Local communities leading the way to a low-carbon society report from AIEDL for his sense of the impact Transition is having in the European context.  Various researchers who have done interesting research on Transition/community resilience will share their findings, with the only stipulation being that they do so in as plain English as possible.  

We will also be hearing from Transition initiatives around the world their answers to the question “tell us one way Transition has affected you or your community?”  We’ll also hear, as we do every month, from Sophy Banks on her thoughts on all this from an inner Transition perspective. And if there’s anyone else you think we should be talking to, please let us know. 

Let’s do a few quick answers to a few impact-related questions.  Firstly, is interest in implementing the Transition model gaining pace?  This graph from the AIEDL study of Transition in Europe suggests so: 

Do Transition initiatives consider that the work they are doing is going well?  According to a recent study from the Walker Institute at the University of Reading, 75.7% of Transition initiatives considered themselves very or fairly successful.   

Is their work leading to practical changes at the community level? The evidence of that can be seen in the regular Roundups that we do on this website, and from the stories we’ll be hearing this month.  Also, the benefits people experience from getting involved might not always be what you might expect.  Research done on the Transition Streets initiative in Totnes found that:

Every person experienced the ‘feeling of taking positive action about issues that concern me’, and all but three had ‘better relationships with my neighbours’ as a result”. 

How does Transition contribute to the wider discussions around how to enable behaviour change on the scale demanded by climate change?  The AIEDL study concludes: 

These initiatives have been shown to be effective in bringing about behavioural change and in helping to establish new norms in society.  The wider application of these approaches must, therefore, be seen as an essential element of any broader strategy on climate change.  

What are the principal challenges Transition initiatives face?  Research by Blake Poland (who we’ll hear from later this month) looking at Transition in Canada, identified the three biggest challenges groups are facing: 

‘People’ were the challenge most often reported, including leadership succession, recruiting and retaining volunteers, getting participants out to events and maintaining momentum. Another big challenge was raising awareness, including the ability to reach new audiences, community complacency, lack of perceived credibility, and building partnerships. The third biggest challenge was a lack of available resources such as funding.

Can Transition’s approach of tackling big political issues in a non-adversarial way ever hope to work?  Research by Andrea Felicetti (who we’ll also hear from) at the University of Canberra suggests that Transition is: 

“…characterised by a markedly non-adversarial approach, and that, whilst pursuing radical objectives, refrains from using confrontational means … although Transition can be understood as a social movement, the above feature represents an interesting difference between Transition and other movements”.

Do we know yet what are the characteristics of a successful Transition initiative?  According to the Reading study, they are:

A large number of founders, a good representation of diversity in the broader community, the presence and size of a steering group, the organization in thematic subgroups, the official TN recognition, the acquisition of a legal statutory form, specific training in transition and permaculture practice, resources (time and external funds), location (rural, rather than urban), a favourable context (i.e. perception of the TI by other actors), and cooperation with other actors (e.g. local authorities, business, media, other TIs).

Can Transition work in the developing world? A study looking at Transition in the context of South African townships concluded that “there are also lessons to be learned from the Transition town movement in so-called developed societies”.

Does having Transition, or Transition-like initiatives increase the resilience of a community hit by a natural disaster?  Some research focusing on Lyttleton in New Zealand concluded:

There is significant evidence in this research that grassroots action can provide a unique perspective on the needs and requirements of the local communities they are based in. If community support networks such as Project Lyttelton were extended throughout other communities the resilience of wider urban areas and countries may be significantly improved.

Can the kind of bottom-up response Transition, focusing on getting people together to do stuff together, actually be a key tool in engaging communities in responding to climate change?  A recent study by Joseph Rowntree Foundation concluded that: 

“Improvements in community social capital, while being one of the hardest outcomes to achieve, may ultimately provide the greatest benefit and lead to local championing of pro-environmental change”.

That’s just a taster.  I plan to gather more from the growing evidence base during this month to reflect upon once we’ve heard from all our contributors, and they will no doubt throw more light on this question as the month goes by. So let’s move on to our last, and possibly most important question. 

What could we be doing differently to increase that impact? And an idea. 

So here’s where I want to try something out on you.  I have written previously here about some of the ways I think Transition could increase it’s impact, suggesting that key to that are creating a learning network, supporting and resourcing core groups, bringing forward investment for Transition enterprises, becoming better storytellers and building an evidence base (which is kind of what we’re doing this month). So what else might we do?

In Paris, in December 2015, world leaders will meet for COP21, the latest round in the UN’s pursuit of an international agreement on climate change.  In the interview with Sir David King which we’ll be publishing later this week he makes it very clear that there is a huge amount of diplomacy going on behind the scenes, and that he is hopeful that this time, finally, a sufficiently ambitious agreement is within reach.  I’d like to run past you an idea, still evolving, about what the Transition movement might be able to do to help this push. 

Every time these things have happened before, we have seen the standard campaigning response.  International campaigns to put pressure on delegates and politicians to “do the right thing”.  People in polar bear suits marching with banners.  Yet none of those approaches, at least so far as I can tell, have made any difference.  I am reminded of what Andy Lipkis said when we spoke to him last month: 

The Bush administration was ready for all Americans to be protesting to try to stop the Iraq war. They expected that, they built that into their design. I was so amazed that they could say they didn’t care what the people said, that I had to think through why they did not care about that. How did they make it resilient?  Because all they cared about was as long as people kept consuming, especially petroleum, their objective was being met. They were counting on no-one changing lifestyles. 

The most radical thing sometimes that you can do is actually vote with your feet and vote with your dollars. I was going – “wow, yeah, they’re counting on people complaining”. Protesting and not changing. I started thinking that even the Obama administration is still using the same metrics as the Bush administration was, saying people won’t change on energy. “It’s going to take 35 years to reduce our energy use by 30%”. Well that’s BS, because we can choose to do that in a week. 

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