Local Environmental Projects Deliver Carbon Cuts

Community Environmental Activism, Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction

Sep 22, 2008 Laurence O'Sullivan

Top down environmental policies are necessary to curb climate change, but community owned environmental projects have huge potential to curb global warming.

To be successful, the battle against global warming has to be multifaceted. International organizations, governments, states and corporations must set environmental standards, devise energy efficient laws and research new more eco-friendly technology to help to wean the planet away from fossil fuel and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Irrespective of the amount of such top down environmental solutions from these organizations, it is ordinary people, in local communities that have the potential to make a significant contribution to combating climate change.

Encouraging Local Environmental Action

In the UK the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) set up a challenge to encourage local communities to get involved in projects that help cut greenhouse gas emissions. The “Big Green Challenge” was instigated by NESTA and its press release of October 10, 2007, titled “A Million Reasons for Communities to go Green” states “Run over two years, the competition will see NESTA challenging people from across the UK to work together to demonstrate new ways to reduce their CO2 emissions. These ideas could either be brand new or a fresh way of applying existing solutions. The group with the most imaginative – and proven – approach at the end of the competition will win the lion's share of the £1m fund.”

Community Environmental Activism

Sir David King, Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, speaking in The Telegraph (UK) on the Big Green Challenge in an op-ed article published on Sept 10, 2008, said “The entries provide a glimpse into a world of low-tech climate change solutions that, crucially, have been devised by the community for the community, and when scaled up can make a dramatic difference to local levels of carbon emissions.”

The Big Green Challenge

The NESTA website, “Big Green Challenge” lists some of the finalist’s efforts in community owned environmental projects.

The Three Green Valleys, Brecon, Wales is a group that aims to develop small hydro generation on steep valley sides to produce enough electricity to finance further installations and provide capital for habitat restoration, efficiency measures and community food and transport projects.

Used Cooking Oil Alliance, Arundel, Sussex is setting up a bio-fuels production programme in conjunction with Ford Prison in Sussex, collecting used vegetable oil from other prisons in the region to help run the prison heating system. If successful this could be repeated throughout the prison system.

The Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust, Scotland, plans a range of innovative initiatives including community biodiesel use, generating the island electricity from renewable sources and using the excess heat from this generation to heat community buildings and new recycling schemes for paper and oil.

The Green School Bus project, run by St Bedes School, Lancashire, England, aims to set up a Green Bus for the school and community that would use biodiesel, be equipped with solar roof panels and have charging points for pupils' laptops, mobile phones and iPods/MP3 players.

Oxford Community Association 'Low Carbon West Oxford' is planning to reduce CO2 and deal with flooding via a community sustainability trust. Key projects will include on-farm anaerobic digestion, water cycling and harvesting, and community food production.

Small environmental projects, if replicated across an entire country can deliver large reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Community involvement breeds community ownership and this “bottom up” approach to global warming reduction can often deliver better results than the “top down” approach. Sir David King, in his article in The Telegraph, argues that although climate change is a huge challenge, governments, by supporting and encouraging local ownership of community environmental projects could go a long way to meeting their Kyoto Protocol targets at a fraction of the cost.

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