Posted 21/2/09
A Taste Of Transition Towns
http://www.transitiontowns.org/
Nottingham City Council Motion
What is a Transition Town (or village / city / forest / island)?
It all starts off when a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?
They begin by forming an initiating group and then adopt the Transition Model (explained here at length, and in bits here and here) with the intention of engaging a significant proportion of the people in their community to kick off a Transition Initiative.
A Transition Initiative is a community (lots of examples here) working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:
"for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?"
Nottingham City Council Motion
"8-December-2008. Nottingham City Council unanimously passes Peak Oil motion!
It might just be a coincidence, but a mere 10 after the Transition Cities Conference took place in Nottingham, the City Council there unanimously passed the following motion today....
This Council acknowledges the forthcoming impact of peak oil. The Council therefore needs to respond, and help the citizens it serves respond, to the likelihood of shrinking oil supply but in a way which will nevertheless maintains the City’s prosperity. It acknowledges that actions taken to adapt to and mitigate against climate change also help us adapt issues around peak oil.
It will do this by:
developing an understanding of the impact of peak oil on the local economy and the local community
encouraging a move across the city towards sustainable transport, cycling and walking throughout the city
pursuing a rigorous energy efficiency and conservation programme through its carbon management plan, the work towards EMAS accreditation and on leading on raising energy awareness across all sectors to reduce dependency on oil based energy in the city
supporting research and production within the city which helps develop local effective alternative energy supplies and energy saving products in order to encourage a move away from oil based fuels and also in order to create local ‘green collar jobs’
co-ordinating policy and action on reducing our city’s carbon dependency and in response to the need to mitigate and adapt to climate change and peak oil.
In this way Nottingham City Council will not only be helping the city to rise to the challenge of peak oil but also encourage the city to grasp the opportunities which peak oil offers.
Some may recall that it was Nottingham who signed the first City level climate change "declaration", (henceforth dubbed the "Nottingham Declaration"). Looks like they're pioneering again...
FYI, the unanimous motion received cross party support and it's worth saying that Transition Towns were mentioned as having an important role to play!"