Public Services Lab Blog

Supporting community-led responses to climate change

Peter Capener - 17.07.2009

If we involve communities as active partners in the battle to fight climate change, they will respond with approaches that embrace changing behaviours and lifestyles.

We are at a critical point in determining the UK's response to climate change, time is not on our side.

Approaches to reducing carbon dioxide emissions have primarily focussed on individuals as consumers. Such interventions have yet to make the widespread societal impact required to alleviate the worst impacts of climate change. Community responses to climate change are increasingly valued, but are still poorly understood.

NESTA has launched research that reviews the wide range of over 350 community led approaches to climate change submitted to the Big Green Challenge.

Mapping the Big Green Challengers provides a rare opportunity to characterise the nature of community led responses, so that we can learn more about what they can offer and what they need to flourish.

Enhancing our understanding in this way is both vital and timely, given the welcome emphasis in the Government's new Low Carbon Transition Plan on the importance of mobilising communities.

This research flags the importance of being able to engage and support the less formal community groups already embedded within our communities and highlights the importance attached by these groups to a collaborative approach to developing ideas and projects. The research also highlights the importance of social interaction across a wide range of social networks to the delivery of community led ideas.

This suggests that if government is to effectively mobilise communities, then initiatives flagged in the Government's Low Carbon Transition Plan, like the Community Energy Saving Programme and the new eye catching, 'Green Villages, Towns and Cities' challenge will need to take a proactive approach to building active community partnerships.

Too often community networks are regarded simply as passive recipients of information or routes to market for household energy efficiency. Supporting community led responses to climate change will require a different way of 'doing business'.

The research suggests that if we are able to involve communities as active partners, communities will respond with approaches that chime with government priorities around climate change and in particular provide approaches that embrace changing behaviour and lifestyle, something more difficult to achieve through top down communications.

It's a massive step forward to see that Government and some ministers in particular, seem to 'get' the importance of a strong community dimension to our collective response to climate change.

We now all need to work hard to make sure that the implications of this commitment work through into the way that carbon reduction programmes are designed, delivered and evaluated in the future.