Do you have any trouble with seagulls?

On Friday 25^th January, Sabine, Jin and I attended a meeting organised by Hanover Action for Sustainable Living in Brighton. Over 60 people squeezed into the Hanover community centre to listen to neighbours discuss opportunities for solar energy in our homes.

After some scene setting in terms of feed-in-tariffs and solar energy basics from local installers Southern Solar and Solar Trader, we heard from two local households who had installed solar electricity and solar water heating in their homes. Clare and Paul explained their experiences and answered our questions. Some participants in the audience contributed with their own experiences of installing solar energy too.

A third resident discussed switching to green energy supplies, for those who cannot afford their own energy generation. He reflected upon his bewilderment at the shades of green (and grey) offered by different utilities; all of whom, he discovered, are regulated to supply an increasing proportion of renewable energy anyway. He wondered whether the best thing was to invest in local sustainable energy, and a representative from Brighton Energy Co-operative was on hand to explain their scheme for doing precisely that. There was a lot of discussion in small groups afterwards, as people asked more specific questions and dropped money in the collection bucket.

This was the kind of community energy meeting that takes place in many localities up and down the country. The act of coming together and sharing experience has a value in itself. Sharing know how about everything from which insurance companies give discounts for households with solar energy, through to getting perfectly good performance from roof spaces not facing south, through to dealing with seagulls on the roof (important in Brighton), or getting the utility to make pay for your electricity exports.

People were invited to join a new solar club for bulk purchasing discounted equipment and services. Some may have been encouraged to do so through face-to-face discussion with neighbours, and with experts on hand but not on top. Obviously, others will not. But they might go along to the screening of ‘Age of Stupid’ next week at the pub nearby. Or they will tell friends about the meeting last night. In multiple ways and through countless meetings, they can help contribute to a culture more open to sustainable innovations. This is a long-standing form of community energy that is impossible to render instrumental and whose pay-back is incalculable.

A Time to Move Up? The Community and Climate Sector

If the success of an event is measured by the diversity of participants and the level of their enthusiasm, the Communities and Climate Action conference was certainly a success. The two day conference held in London on 16-17 January 2011 was organised by the Low Carbon Communities Network (LCCN), on behalf of the Communities and Climate Action Alliance (CCAA). In spite of the pouring rain, over 200 people gathered to share their experience and get their voice heard. They were not a homogeneous group of community activists. You would easily find yourself talking to people from local authorities, various intermediary agencies, researchers, investors, campaigners and, if you are ‘lucky’, even government officers. Overall, the conference was more centred around English and Welsh contexts, but a Scottish counterpart was also present by a manager at Keep Scotland Beautiful as one of conveners and a development officer at the Community Energy Scotland as a speaker.

Two days were packed with group discussions, seminars and workshops as well as speeches by a variety of key people. Just looking at the list of these sessions and speakers would make you realise the complexity of community climate action in terms of their areas of working and the ways in which community action is run and managed not just by communities themselves but also by other stakeholders. Overall, the main questions addressed on Day 1 were whether and how communities’ climate action can be recognised as a sector and how to work better with other sectors. Brainstorming sessions produced communities’ responses to the issues arising from the relationships between communities and their relationships with the rest of society, for example, communities’ visions and barriers, lessons they want to learn from other communities, guidance for novices, the ways in which their added-value can be demonstrated, what they want to see happen in infrastructure for behaviour change and in the media to change social norms, etc. Thoughts were also given to communication and networking as a means of forming common visions and presenting their potentials and influence to other sectors. Day 2 was spent on discussions about the key areas of work, e.g. housing and home energy services, community renewable energy, engaging with people and promoting behaviour change, and transport. Workshops run by exemplary community groups and intermediary agencies at the local and the national levels show that the community and climate sector - if it exists- has certainly developed in collaboration with other sectors and partners. Furthermore, one cannot help noticing that supporting agencies and networks themselves are evolving and more specialised in terms of the services they provide. Not surprisingly, no one dared make any conclusive remarks on either the fate of community action or that of climate change.

One of the strongest impressions the event made on me was the scope, whether a sector or not, for community climate action to give its priority to members of communities, rather than community activists or community agencies. In this way, they can maintain their integrity whilst moving up to the mainstream and working with other sectors.