Note from a network meeting: how can we contribute to tackling climate change?

How we can contribute to tackling climate change

NOTE OF A BETTER WAY DISCUSSION HELD ON 9 MARCH 2020, LONDON.

1.       INTRODUCTION

The discussion was introduced by Stefan Haselwimmer from Cambridgeshire Climate Change Emergency. 

• Stefan reminded us of the scale of the climate change emergency, and associated events such as recent floods in the UK and fires in Australia and California.

• There is a need for urgent action but we cannot rely on governments. There is a tendency to see governments as all-powerful, highly organised, and capable of decisive action, and civil society as weak, disorganised and slow-moving. However, the reality is the reverse of this: governments have little power and are poorly organised and are slow to respond to emergencies of this nature. On the other hand, civil society can (potentially at least) mobilise significant power, and act in a co-ordinated and urgent way.

• We can learn from community organising models, such as the response by Citizens UK to the refugee crisis, which helped to achieve resettlement of 11,500 vulnerable refugees across the country.

• We need a ‘divide and conquer’ method. In other words, in the face of an overwhelmingly large problem, we should identify specific things where people can realistically take action, which taken together, when many people act in concert in many places, can make an important difference.

• Unlike fixed governmental programmes, community action has the potential to spread, without limitation.

• Across Cambridgeshire attempts are being made to mobilise local people in their own local communities, training them in community organising techniques, in other words to change perceptions of what is possible, help people discover their power to act, and to take action on their own terms, according to their particular context.

• This is supported by county-wide co-ordination, across civil society and the public and business sectors, as well as a climate leaders’ network and a bulletin.

• In St Ives, for example, over 80 people came together in a public meeting. They don’t want to wait for the public sector agencies to act.

• A methodology has been developed to undertake annual carbon audits at parish level. The intention is not to ‘name and shame’ but rather to discover what progress has been made.

In discussion the following points were made:

2.       Organising at community level

Extinction Rebellion has been hugely successful in mobilising very large numbers of people, not least young people, with its powerful messaging, its sense of urgency, and its effective use of social media.  However, we noted that environmental campaigns have not always been successful in appealing to people from low income and working class backgrounds, although the Green New Deal movement aims to address this by working for action to tackle climate change and to redress social inequality at the same time: the first of its objectives is as follows:

Totally decarbonise the economy of the United Kingdom in a way that enhances the lives of ordinary people, workers and communities and works to eliminate social and economic inequality.

We also observed that these big high profile campaigns don’t always ‘stick’ in local communities.  And there is a risk that the environmental movement, although very vigorous, is mainly talking to itself – it needs to be supplemented by people who know how to access communities. So methods of organising for a carbon zero future that connect more directly with people in their local community are very much needed at present.

A community-driven approach can and must work alongside efforts to change the practices of businesses and to strengthen government action.  All these need to happen, at pace, together.  And working in combination should make the scale of the challenge feel less daunting.

It was felt we don’t need more toolkits, the principles of community organising are well understood, but there is a need for more training in these principles, and the development of a ‘community curriculum’, so that people can learn how to organise effectively with others to take action in their own local context.

Citizens UK has been very effective in bringing the efforts of faith communities to bear in social change campaigns, and we can see that in many places faith communities have potential to be leading agents for action.

People need a sense that progress can be made and is being made and that they can contribute even in a small way to that progress. But there are barriers to engagement. We recognise that traditional methods of campaigning (meetings in evenings, establishing committees) are not attractive for many people. Moreover, framing the challenge as an emergency can be problematic. We felt we will achieve more if we can shift the framing from planet to people, and how tackling climate change can be a route to better lives for more people.  The dominant messages to date (don’t take flights, don’t eat red meats) reflect the lives of affluent middle class people who have dominated the narrative and these messages don’t always sit well with people from less affluent backgrounds, so there is a need for new voices and new messages to emerge more strongly.  If we bring other voices into the conversation this will change the conversation.

Shifting power and resources to local communities will not be enough if only a narrow group of people (the ‘usual suspects’) are involved.  ‘Door knocking’ methods, as a foundation for building wider and more diverse community leadership, are therefore very much needed.  Moreover, schools can be a gateway to reach much wider groups across society.  So we should consider how we can support schools to convene their communities.

The work in Cambridgeshire has potential to be an exemplar, because the principles of community organising to mobilise people to take action against climate change could be adopted by others right across the country.  However, Cambridgeshire Climate Change Emergency now needs to raise funds for the next stage of its work, to train more people in community organising techniques for this purpose, so while fast progress is being made the efficacy of the model is not yet fully demonstrated.

And we will need to develop a clearer narrative, with tangible examples, of what people can do in practice at community level, from small scale actions to more ambitious ones such as community-run energy schemes.

3.       Driving change through changing businesses

We should not underestimate the power of businesses, for good and for bad, as a generator of carbon emissions, but also to take action to reduce the climate change threat. Over the coming year Social Enterprise UK will be leading a campaign to encourage the 100,000 social enterprises in the UK, as well as SEUK’s corporate partners, to change their governing rules to include commitments to tackling climate change and moving to a zero carbon economy. The campaign will offer easy-to apply tools for companies to make the legal changes required. 

It will not be easy to get all social businesses to take this course, as many social enterprises, in the health and social care fields especially, have been slow to see the relevance.  A combination of top level change and a groundswell of demand from employees and customers will be needed.

Social enterprises are only a fraction of all businesses, but can be an influential role model for businesses as a whole, setting the pace and inspiring others to act. Moreover, most social enterprises are small scale, and a high proportion are rooted in place, so can make an important contribution to the place based community organising model described by Stefan.

4.       The role of grant makers and other funders

The Association of Charitable Foundations is considering how the £70bn of assets held by its members can be made to work to contribute to zero carbon targets, and how to move forward from the present situation where only 1% of grant funding is targeted towards environmental activities. 

A small group of grant makers in the Environmental Funders Network has led the way, and as a result of their pressure, the last ACF annual conference was entirely dedicated to this topic.  There is now the prospect of more concerted action in future with some leading grant makers committed to including the objective of tackling climate change in all their grant programmes, and taking steps to steward their investments for a post-carbon future.

Funders might achieve most if they were to co-ordinate their activities with those taken by the wider sector, and therefore NPC is bringing funders and charities into a shared space where they can learn to be more effective responders to climate change.

Funders have been wary of funding movements rather than organisations, and many are unwilling to fund those who are not established as charities. However, a few (e.g. Oak Foundation, Blagrave Trust, Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust) have shown that it is possible to push the boundaries on this.  Also the ‘Local Motion’ initiative has seen six funders come together to pool resources to work with local partners to find solutions to social, environmental and economic issues on their doorstep. 

5.       The role of the Charity Commission

It appears that switching to carbon neutral investments can be done without sacrificing the levels of returns needed to maintain grant-making.  However, work will need to be done to improve Charity Commission regulation, which requires charities to consider risk in investments and does nothing to encourage positive action in favour of tackling climate change through investment policies.  A new SORP Committee has been established (to review the rules for charities to report on their performance) and this might provide an opportunity to require charities to report on environmental impact.

6.       Bringing about national and international change

We should be mindful that the UK will be chairing the COP26 international climate change conference, in November 2020. This is an opportunity to influence the national and international debate on what must be done.  Political leaders will only act if pushed.  At present the fossil fuel lobby remains hugely powerful, in effect controlling the decisions of those in power – community action has to find ways to speak to power much more effectively.

7.       Using data as a tool for change

Data really matters. People need to see what difference they are making, in real time where possible.  We will need new methods for this (for example ‘carbon currency’ has been proposed as a way to establish a carbon value for everyday products).

Common data capture and reporting can build confidence not just among community activists, but also among businesses and institutions, and among funders as well, and the aim to should be to establish viable measures which can indicate how well the deployment of resources, and the work of organisations, can contribute towards the task of achieving the zero carbon goals.

This implies a fundamental shift in what we value and therefore what we measure. We have an urgent need to redefine what is meant by economic success, and build the data which can answer the questions ‘what’s in it for me?’ and ‘what difference can we make?’

8.       A final word

A final word from Stefan: the only way to tackle our big problems is to find new resource among the people who haven’t been involved up to now, and then get out of the way so that they can take action themselves.