The world's coolest towns

Local solutions to climate change are emerging all over the world

The Ecologist, April 2007

There’s nothing special about Chew Magna. There’s nothing special about Blisland either, or Belstone or Harlow North or Ashton Hayes. You've probably never heard of any of these places, and until recently there was no particular reason why you should have done. They are ordinary, unspectacular British communities, inhabited by people like you and me. Paradoxically, this is precisely what makes them so exciting.

All of these places are notable for one thing: they have decided to take action on climate change. They have decided to do so not by signing petitions, going on marches, joining Greenpeace or writing furious letters to their MPs demanding action on the Kyoto Protocol. They have decided to do so by – well, by doing so. By doing so at local level, in their villages and towns, on their streets. By changing the way they live and work as people and communities. They have decided to stop waiting for permission.

In doing this, they have found that they are not alone. They have found many other communities like them – not just in Britain , but all over the world – which have also decided that action on climate change begins at home. They have reasoned that if we have to wait for business and government to sort out a problem that, after all, they have created, we will probably be waiting until it’s too late. Can people power save the day instead? Nobody knows. But it may turn out to be our best hope.

Chew Magna is a small village near Bristol . Last year, a couple of villagers concerned about climate change and interested to see what they could do about it set up a project called GoZero. The aim was to turn Chew Magna into a zero waste village. The work they would do – and have been doing – to achieve this was unglamorous, gritty but vital stuff. Home energy audits for everyone in the village. Restoring the local watermill with eco-materials and turning it into a zero carbon base for the project. Producing a local food guide. Researching home-made biofuels. Organising car share schemes and negotiating with the local council for better public transport. The ultimate aim is to make the entire village both carbon neutral and zero waste.

‘I hope that this bottom-up approach can work all over the place’, says Ian Roderick, one of GoZero’s key players. ‘I think there is a groundswell of opinion that it's time to take control ourselves instead of waiting to others to do it. I think there is a perception that any real action will take a long time to come from the top down, and that even when it does come it will just be in the form of taxes, financial incentives – that sort of thing. People are anxious about climate change, and there is an understanding now that it's a case of changing all our lifestyles. The key thing about a project like ours is that it gives people the chance to come together to do it. They don't have to feel like they are alone. There's a kind of strength in numbers.’

Ashton Hayes is a small village too, near the Welsh borders. Here, a similar process took place – a handful of keen people set out to persuade the rest of the village that going green was a vital part of their future. Last year they launched an ambitious scheme to become the first carbon neutral village in the country. They have teamed up with academics, in Britain and abroad, supportive local councils, local schools, renewable energy companies, MPs, and other supportive and interested parties. As in Chew Magna, what started as a relatively small-scale project has ballooned, and has also inspired many other communities around the country to do something similar.

Leading lights in both Chew Magna and Ashton Hayes can barely keep up with the invitations to speak, to, lecture and advise other communities on how to do the same. And other communities seem to need little encouragement. Blisland, a small Cornish village, recently opened a village centre, shop, post office and cafe, which was entirely carbon neutral, and has inspired villagers to try other similar projects. Belstone, on Dartmoor , is subjecting the entire village to an ecological audit. Harlow North, near Chester , is to be the country's first carbon neutral town. In Nottinghamshire, the Sherwood Energy Village has been under way for years. Constructed on a former pit site, now owned by a co-operative of former miners, this too is to be a carbon neutral community – a genuine green village, but one aimed not at career environmentalists or alternative lifestylers, but ordinary people. The aim, as with all these other projects, is clear and vital: to show that being green can be – indeed has to be – something that everyone can do.

This is the crucial point. There have been eco-villages and alternative communities around for decades – indeed, centuries. But they’ve always been fringe concerns, inhabited by people who have deliberately set themselves apart from wider society, or whose politics are perceived to be so extreme that they will never have more than a minority impact. The people involved in these recent projects, in contrast, are not self-aware green activists. They don't have dreadlocks, they don't drink soya milk and they've never heard of the Big Green Gathering. As a result, they’re likely to be a hundred times more effective in persuading the average Briton to take climate change seriously.

But there's something else about these projects too. Small though they may be, they are not just local, or even national, concerns. They are international. Not just in the sense that climate change is a global issue, but in the links they are making with other such projects all over the world. As they do so, they are highlighting what may be the start of a global movement of sorts – a movement of people who are already acting on climate change at local level. For the more you look, the more you find. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of such communities all over the world – and they are growing in numbers all the time.

It's not just other British communities, for example, that have taken an interest in what is going on in Ashton Hayes. Last year, a delegation of people from the town of Castlemaine in Victoria , Australia , visited to find out what was happening in the village. Castlemaine plans to become Australia 's first carbon neutral community – a significant step in that most gas-guzzling and un-green of nations. Castlemaine and Ashton Hayes have since become unofficially twinned, and the university in the nearby Australian city of Ballarat has instituted formal links with the University of Chester , near Ashton Hayes.

Chew Magna's international links are even more intriguing. A couple of years ago, one of the founders of GoZero came across an Indian grassroots charity called Social Change And Development (SCAD). SCAD began life over 20 years ago, when an Indian priest decided to give up worldly things and do something for the poor. ‘Doing something’ involved listening to what the villagers actually wanted and needed, and working with them to allow them to get it – creating a sense of ownership and independence as they did so. These days SCAD, which works in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, supports over 300,000 people as they struggle to drag themselves out of grinding poverty.

GoZero decided to set up a formal links with SCAD, to bring together the interests of the very different communities of Tamil Nadu and Chew Magna. What they came up with was a scheme to reduce carbon impacts and poverty at the same time. A charity called The Converging World was set up in Chew Magna. The Converging World approaches large businesses and wealthy individuals for funds to erect wind turbines near to SCAD’s communities. The turbines generate electricity, and consequently income. That income is spent on sustainable livelihood projects in SCAD’s villages, and carbon credits generated by the fossil fuel that is offset are sent back to Chew Magna. The Converging World then distributes them to businesses and individuals which have become paying members. SCAD gets the income for its poverty reduction projects. Paying businesses get carbon credits with which to offset their fossil fuel use. And the money raised from those paying businesses is spent both on more community turbines in India , and on large-scale carbon reduction projects in the UK .

The Converging World hopes to expand its activities, linking up with communities elsewhere in India and in other places – Africa is a target for future years. The process sounds complicated, but the principle behind it is beautifully simple. Communities from different countries and cultures, thousands of miles apart, co-operate to tackle both poverty and climate change. The initiative comes purely from local people in both countries, who define the terms and decide what they need.

When you start to look for them you can find many more projects like this, on virtually every continent. The scale and the level are often very different, but the intention is always the same: to act now before it's too late. And to do so regardless of the position and policies of national government.

Take, for example, the USA . The world's most polluting nation by far, the US produces 25% of the world's greenhouse gases despite accounting for less than 5% of global population. It is home to some of the world's largest and most rapacious fossil fuel corporations, many of whose ex-board members make up the current government – an administration so representative of the vested interests of the oil industry that it has only recently, and reluctantly, accepted the existence of climate change at all. America , then, is not a place often looked to for good news on global warming. But there is hope to be found there – it all depends on where you look.

The decision of the governor of California , Arnold Schwarzenegger, to take climate change seriously, regardless of what his political allies in the White House might think, is well-known. But other states are following on. California and Oregon are working together to jointly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. New Mexico has set strict greenhouse gas emissions targets at state level. The governor of North Dakota has signed an executive package encouraging the creation of renewable energy technologies. Massachusetts aims to reduce its emissions to 1990 levels by 2010. And a group of nine states in the north east are working together on a carbon trading scheme, which will go ahead regardless of Bush and his oil cronies’ actions.

Meanwhile, action at lower levels than this is increasingly common across America – a nation which, whatever the many iniquities of the Bush administration, has a strong and proud tradition of independent local government. Mayors in the United States , for example, have considerably more power than any of their equivalents in the UK . In 2005, Seattle Mayor Greg Nichols took advantage of this, launching the US Mayors Climate Change Agreement. In March that year ten mayors, representing over 3 million citizens, signed a pledge to take action on climate change in their areas.

As well as promising to put maximum pressure on the Federal government to get moving at international level they promised action locally, from carrying out audits of their areas’ greenhouse gas emissions, to investing in clean energy, energy efficiency measures, recycling, green transport and education in schools about climate change. The Mayors Agreement has taken off across the United States – at the time of writing 402  mayors, representing almost 60 million American citizens have signed up too.

At even more local level, nationwide organisations like the Network for New Energy Choices, the Small House Society and the Institute For Local Self-Reliance are helping to link up communities and families who are greening their lifestyles. Tens of thousands of people are involved all over the country, and numbers are growing. Austin , Texas , plans to go carbon neutral. Salt Lake City is aiming to become the first genuinely ‘green city’ in the US . None of this will gladden the heart of George W. Bush, but he is going to have to live with it.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the rich world, you can find similar initiatives. A good guide to their scope is the growth of an organisation called ‘ICLEI’ – ‘Local Governments for Sustainability.’ Founded at a UN conference in 1990, ICLEI has more than 475 cities, towns and local councils as members all over the world. All of them commit to reducing their climate impacts, and together, each small action adds up to something bigger. The city of Kobe in Japan , aims to make its annual street festival energy efficient. Greater Geelong in Australia aggressively promotes cycling. Ponferrada in Spain introduces a citywide environmental education strategy. And over 650 local governments from around the world – from Australia, Canada, the USA, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden, France, and plenty more – participate in ICLEI’s ‘cities for climate protection’ programme, committing themselves to genuine local action on climate change.

These, of course, are all examples from what we continue to insist on calling ‘developed countries’; the countries responsible for the problem. Their populations are widely educated and increasingly aware of it, and they have the money and the time to try and do something about it. This is much less likely to be the case in the world's poorer countries. People in the poor world often have more pressing concerns –poverty alleviation, for a start – and are also less likely to be aware of the problem at all, as a result of limited access to information, and poor education systems. They have less money and time on their hands.

And yet, this is not the whole story. Take India . In most rural villages, the concern is getting access to electricity at all, not where it comes from. Yet some communities are trying to leapfrog the West and move directly to renewable energy, and the communities in Tamil Nadu working with The Converging World are not the only examples of this. In Andhra Pradesh, for example, the appropriately named village of Powerguda has managed to make a profit from selling carbon credits to the World Bank. The villagers have set up a business making local biofuels from the Pongamia trees that surround their village, milling it themselves. The project is controlled by a village-based charity, and the profits go to its people. Elsewhere, micropower projects, owned and controlled by villages, are providing local electricity through waterpower and even small hydrogen power plants.

This kind of response to climate change is increasingly common across the poor world. Providing electricity at a very small, low core level from renewable resources is often cheaper and more efficient than extracting it from massive fossil fuel power stations elsewhere. From China to Bangladesh , Sri Lanka to Indonesia , such projects are beginning to take root. Solar panels, waterwheels, community biogas plants, compost fired power stations – all are ways of avoiding the carbon trap that the industrialised world has walked right into, and which the rest of the world could perhaps still avoid.

Brazil is often touted as a future superpower by the sort of people who do that sort of thing. But it's clear that any future superpower, if there are to be any, are going to need to run their super economy on renewable energy; any major country dependent on fossil fuels is going to look as backward and destructive as North Korea does today. If the Brazilian political establishment is not showing many signs of doing much about it, again, at a more local political level, things are sometimes different.

Two Brazilian cities show what might be possible with a little imagination and – crucially – the intelligent use of genuine local power. Porto Alegre has been a revolutionary city for decades When the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) – now in government, but then very much a radical opposition – took power in the city in the 1980s it introduced something called the participatory budget. Nothing quite like it had been seen before; the city's spending was to be decided not by elected officials, but by the people themselves, through a series of public meetings, votes and long discussions about priorities. One of those priorities was energy, and discussions about making Porto Alegre renewable and more climate friendly have gained pace in recent years. As has the participatory budget process itself, which has now spread to 500 cities across Brazil , and is being touted in Europe , North America and elsewhere in the world as a way to rejuvenate local democracy. As such budgets spread, you can bet that local action on climate change will spread with them.

Meanwhile, in another Brazilian city – Curitiba – the local authorities have long focused on sustainable transport. Until the 1980s Curitiba was one of the fastest growing cities in Brazil , its population booming way beyond sustainable rates. One of the many problems this causes in the area transport, where chaos threatened. To prevent it, the local authorities instituted a sweeping transport masterplan. An integrated transport system, with over 2000 buses, train lines and underground systems ensured that Curitiba ’s transport system was not – and is not – car focused. Not everyone was happy about it – particularly car drivers – but the end result has been a mass transit system which can now look to change its fuel sources to renewables and provide something of a model for other cities as they struggle with the private car’s growing impact on the climate.

You could find, if you chose to look, plenty more examples of local power being used at any number of different levels all over the world to tackle climate change. There is no overall plan, and sometimes not even a real idea of where such initiatives will end up. They often have little in common with each other except a desire to do something about the most pressing problem that humanity has probably ever faced.

And they are easy to criticise. After all, climate change is a global issue which requires global action, and no amount of small local initiatives on their own going to prevent its disastrous impacts. But this is not really the point. No one is suggesting that Curitiba 's bus system, Tamil Nadu’s windmills or Chew Magna's community group are, in themselves, going to save the world. That's not what they're for. They exist to give ordinary folk a say in what happens. They exist to push the agenda forwards – taking the initiative from reluctant or downright resistant politicians and corporations and bringing it home. As they do so, they inspire others. The thing begins to snowball, and community responses to climate change start to become unstoppable. As they do, those politicians and corporations still reluctant to act have much less room to manoeuvre, because the will of the people is increasingly shown in the actions of the people.

In other words, all of these distant, different and small-scale activities are more than the sum of their parts. The actions people take, the links they make, and the awareness that they raise, amongst themselves and others, add up to much more than any number of placard waving marches, petitions or UN meetings between bureaucrats or low-level ministers. They add up to more because they are – that horrible word – empowering. They give people permission to do things. To take control of their lives, and the lives of their communities, rather than petitioning, pleading or demanding that those higher up the political food chain do it for them.

It also helps restore faith. Faith in the power of individual action, of action by communities and groups of people – of action by you and me. We don’t need to wait for Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, Sir Nicholas Stern or – God forbid – the President of the United States of America to get their acts together. After all, it's not as if it's just their problem. It's ours – and so can be the solutions.