Environment & Poverty Times


06 2009


Building resilience


Building resilience by empowering individuals in communities is a key process in bottom-up growth. Capacity development comes in many shapes and sizes, but a critical factor is giving people a sense of personal belonging, ownership and collaboration.


Transition towns By Tomas Marques and Anne Solgaard


Poor communities are particularly vulner- able to climate change risks and to the impacts of rising energy costs. Climate change is already posing threats to commu- nities in the poorest regions of the world. As oil prices will increase in the future due to the peaking of global oil production, poorer countries will suffer more because they have lower resilience to change and fewer resources to cope with rising energy costs. Arguably the ability of communities to respond to these threats will depend on how resourceful and cohesive they are in adapting to a changing climate, and reduc- ing their carbon emissions and dependency on fossil fuels.


The combined threats of peak oil and climate change have spurred the emergence of the Transition Towns network that addresses fossil fuel dependency and aims to reduce communities’ carbon emissions by moving towards decentralized low-energy systems, localization, and increased community resilience. The Environment and Poverty Times (EPT) interviewed Mr Ben Brangwyn, co-founder of the Transition Town Network based in Totnes in the UK. This article is based on the interview.


Peak Oil and Climate Change The 2008 edition of the World Energy Out- look published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) stated that it is becoming increasingly apparent that the era of cheap oil is over1, and that the world is rapidly ap- proaching a peak in global oil production. Peak oil refers to the point in time when the maximum rate of global oil extraction is reached, after which the rate of produc- tion will enter a plateau before entering a sustained and terminal decline.


As transportation, manufacturing, and food production directly and/or indirectly rely on oil, peak oil will pose serious energy, economic and food security problems for communities in both the developed and the developing world. Energy security problems will be further aggravated by the fact that alternative energy systems are not yet avail- able or deployed on a scale required by the current economic model.


James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has warned that global warming will reach an irreversible global tipping point around 2016, if current levels of greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated. In the short term, runaway cli- mate change will cause serious disruption to communities worldwide, followed by mid-term chaos and potential long-term societal collapse.


Developing countries, and especially the poor in these countries, will be the first and most affected by peak oil and climate change. For example, well before oil hit $147 a barrel in July 2008, several hospi- tals in developing countries were forced to switch off their generators. In some developing countries the spike in oil prices also resulted in food crises as money and land were poured into large-scale initiatives for the production of agrofuels. To prevent these impacts, decentralized and local solutions – such as local production and distribution networks for fuel and food – are starting to be acknowledged as important elements for cutting fossil fuel dependency and tackling poverty, while building com- munities resilience to rising fuel prices and climate change risks.


According to the Transition Network, if communities collectively plan and act early enough, they may create a way of living that is significantly more socially connected, more fulfilling, more equitable, and more in harmony with the environment. This vision of sustainability is to be achieved by applying the Transition Model, which follows 12 steps for moving communities towards re-localization3 and non-fossil fuel energy self-reliance.


The birth of the Transition Network The Transition Model came out of Rob Hopkins’ experience with implementing Kinsale’s Energy Descent Action Plan. The plan sought to determine how the Irish town of Kinsale could shift from being a high to a low-energy consumption town in response to the challenge of the impending peak in world oil output.


Building on the same principles, the Transi- tion Town Totnes in the United Kingdom


Cuba’s shift to a low-carbon society


Transition Town Network in brief Its mission is to inspire, encourage, support, network and train communities as they consider, adopt and implement a Transition Initiative


The four recognitions:


1. Life with dramatically lower energy consump- tion is inevitable and it is better to plan for it than be taken by surprise.


2. Our communities presently lack the resilience to withstand the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil. 3. We must act collectively and must act now. 4. By unleashing the collective genius of those around us to proactively design our own energy descent, we can build ways of living that are more connected and enriching, and recognize the biological limits of our planet. For more information: transitionnetwork.org


was launched in autumn 2006. Soon after, Rob Hopkins and Ben Brangwyn started talking about the potential surge of de- mand for an organized support facility for transiting initiatives around the country and beyond, and the idea of the transition network was born.


Transition towns north and south Asked if the Transition Town model can be applied to communities in developing countries, Ben Brangwyn replied that the approach has not yet been tested there. Ac- cording to Brangwyn, “The focus of the ap- proach is on cutting dependency from high- carbon lifestyles, which is more a problem of developed nations. Still, there is certainly a rationale for considering the key principles of Transition in developing nations, instead of replicating the unsustainable patterns of developed nations. It would be interesting to look at possible twinning initiatives to support north-south cooperation, joining communities in developed and developing nations that are facing the same type of problems, due to geographical, climatic, or other conditions.”


Nonetheless, the Transition Network website is getting hits from internet users from all parts of the world, including developing nations and fast growing economies such as China, Pakistan, Kenya and Senegal. In 2009 the Transition Network counted 186 “official” transition initiatives, with well over 1,000 communities all over the world now in the early stages of setting up their own initiatives. These include communi- ties from developing countries, from small towns to cities.


EPT asked Brangwyn about the difficulties of implementing the Transition Model at city- scale. In his opinion, some key differences of city-scale initiatives relate to the need to reach out to diverse social groups, and to greater challenges for local food production. “In a scenario with no or very little fossil fuels, people living in cities will have to de- vote time and effort to local food production, which must be localized due to the impossi- bility of transport over long distances for lack of fuel. Availability of space for urban food production, particularly in the inner city, can pose a significant problem. Nonetheless, and particularly on the issue of urban food security, very successful case studies such as the one in Havana6 point to the feasibility of such approaches at city level.”


The Power of Community Teaser - http://www.powerofcommunity.org/cm/index.php


Training for change With the swift spread of the Transition Model, several train-the-trainers workshops have been held in the UK, United States, Australia, New Zealand, China and Japan,


to establish a pool of transition trainers to disseminate the approach further and sup- port local initiatives.


In addition to background information on the need for transition, and training on the Transition Model, the train-the-trainers workshops address inner transition and psychology of change. According to transi- tion trainer Sophy Banks, “Our outer world is created by our inner world. These are re- lated and completely interlinked. Our beliefs shape our behaviour, priorities, and what institutions and organizations we support. These in turn shape the world around us.” One key point promoted by the Transition Model is that fostering the transition to a low-carbon world will also require a personal transition to a less materialistic and less energy-intensive lifestyle. This in turn has the capacity to foster increased psychological well-being, or happiness.


This seems to be the case in all countries. The New Economics Foundation’s Human Happiness Index (HPI) shows that high lev- els of resource consumption do not reliably produce high levels of well-being around the world. At a time of global economic and environmental crises, it is important that at- tempts at jump-starting the global economy take full account of the need to limit resource consumption, and seriously question the paradigm of endless economic growth.


Going for the real green new deal Asked if the Transition Model could be a vehicle for a new green deal, Brangwyn emphasized that insisting on the paradigm of economic growth without acknowledg- ing physical limits is not a good idea. “Ap- proaches to a new green deal should aim at promoting conditions for moving towards a steady state economy. Globalized economies do not allow for people to fully see where the limits are. On the other hand, as we move forward with this re-localization project, we will be more able to see the limits to growth because we’ll be using resources that are much closer to home. That way we’ll be moving towards true sustainability, as op- posed to sustainable development, under which endless economic growth continues to be promoted.”


Brangwyn would like the Global Green New Deal and the forthcoming Green Economy Report to recognize ecological limits to growth, and to mention social resilience and sustainable ways of living. This would also include emphasizing the need to secure lo- calized food sources. In addition, debt relief and waiving developing countries’ debts to richer countries should definitely be includ- ed in the report as a recommendation.


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