Kinglake residents came out of the fire and into a plan – it just wasn’t theirs.

LAST Sunday, over seventy people gathered in the renovated, rebuilt hall at Kinglake Central. David Engwicht, a placemaking expert, told the audience that the fire was an opportunity “to burn the triviality” from their lives. They could create community, relationships and “systemic resilience”, however they wanted.

It was the first week of a free, two-part event called Regenerating, sponsored by RMIT University, Australian National University and CSIRO.

The speakers – under the themes of people, place, prosperity and preparedness – covered an extraordinary range of disciplines, from firestorm physics and vulnerable ecosystems, to regional economies and social media.

The event was organised by Daryl Taylor, from the Kinglake Ranges Community Resilience Committee. He says a common thread emerged: the need for communities to take back control of decision-making. And that’s a lesson relevant for citizens elsewhere, with many towns and suburbs facing uncertain futures.

The latest report by the Climate Commission, The Critical Decade: Extreme Weather, stated that climate change is already increasing the intensity and frequency of heatwaves, droughts, storms and sea-level rise. “The southeast of Australia, including many of our largest population centres, stands out as being at increased risk,” it said.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

In Kinglake, Mr Engwicht said no one could be sure which challenges will come first. Planning only for specific threats can, counter-intuitively, make you more vulnerable to unexpected ones.

The second day of the event will be held on Sunday May 5. The speakers include historian Bill Gammage, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, and psychiatrist Paul Valent, author of From Survival to Fulfillment.

Mr Taylor says that, in organising the event, the committee members were motivated by their experiences since the fires – especially the contradiction between locals’ willingness and capacity to act, and the stifling nature of the assistance they received.

“A disaster is a tragedy, but also an opportunity to regenerate, to rethink and redesign. We lost unique opportunities because state government, corporations and NGOs had pre-determined agendas and one-size-fits-all strategies,” he says. “‘Engagement’ was too often about engaging with someone else’s prefigured plan.

“Our communities were incredibly creative after the fires. We self-organised to meet our fundamental human and social needs – often without external help, and by flying under the radar. But as we became exhausted, it became difficult to act outside the government matrix.

“People don’t really need welfare and command-and-control directives. They need empowerment. They don’t really need donated undies and toothbrushes. They need to be supported to collaborate and make critical decisions about their communities’ futures.

If he could, he’d bypass the idea of “recovery” altogether. “Recovery can be a dog-whistle for counselling, welfare agencies and dependency. It’s backward looking and doesn’t address what makes communities truly flourish,” he says.

This year, Mr Taylor and his family are renting in Eltham. They’d been living in temporary housing until a few months ago. His daughter can now walk to high school, but it’s been a difficult transition in other ways.

“I’m really feeling the anonymity of the suburbs,” he says. “In Kinglake, when I came home, it was nothing to see several cars at our property and people everywhere. We got through the last four years on the strength of our social relationships – we did everything together.

“The experience has been extraordinary. While you wouldn’t wish it on anyone, it’s been rich with learning.”

Read this article at The Age online

Living local includes shifting your shares too.

IT’S Friday evening, and four residents are sitting around a broad wooden table in Thornbury, talking money. They’re at the regular monthly meeting – bring a plate – of the “community economics” group from Transition Darebin.

The organisation is part of the worldwide Transition Network, in which local volunteers begin to “adapt to diminishing resources and a rapidly changing global climate”.

The March meeting was held at Serenity Hill and Kirsten Larsen’s house. They’ve already retrofitted their home – solar panels angle down the north-facing roof and veggies grow in their front yard – so Ms Hill reported on their latest sustainability scheme: self-managed superannuation.

“We’ve done all these other things – our lifestyle and even our work – everything is about trying to change the world,” she says. “It doesn’t feel right for our money to be locked up doing stuff we don’t control. Between us, we have $100,000 and we can now decide where it goes.”

They began investigating self-managed super after the global financial crisis. “We worried that it could easily vanish. We wanted to get it out of that system and also, to invest it in concrete things in the community.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Self-managed superannuation doesn’t get much press, but it comprises nearly a third of all super assets. Until now, it’s been the province of the wealthy – the rule of thumb is that it’s too expensive to be worthwhile unless you have more than $200,000 stashed away. (In June 2010, the average self-managed super fund was worth nearly $900,000.)

Ms Hill found a way around the high costs. They use an online business called Esuperfund, which provides streamlined documents for $700 per year. There can be up to four members in a self-managed fund, so they can split the fee between them.

The couple haven’t decided how they’ll invest all their money, but they’re considering options: a community solar energy project, a small share in a dairy farm in the Goulburn Valley, and taking a commercial lease to house a local food hub.

“On the Australian Tax Office website there’s a long list of things you can and can’t invest in,” Ms Hill says. “You need to have a well thought out, audited investment plan. If you’re going to do it, you need to take responsibility to do it properly.”

Their plan is just what US economist Michael Shuman is promoting. Last month, the author of Local Dollars, Local Sense spoke in Melbourne and Ballarat about finance and local prosperity, sponsored by the two councils.

In Australia, he says, small businesses provide two-thirds of all jobs, but receive precious little investment. Most rely on debt for funding, which adds to their costs.

“Your whole system of superannuation is a massive subsidy for capitalising global companies to the disadvantage of local business – even though we know local businesses are more common and more likely to produce jobs. It’s a terrible skew in the system.”

Local businesses are better options for green-minded investors, he argues: they tend to buy inputs and sell locally, so their products have a smaller footprint; and they’re less likely to flee at the prospect of strict environmental standards.

Mr Shuman’s book details the growing trend of local investment in the US, including peer-to-peer investing, crowdfunding, pre-sales and local stockmarkets and investment clubs. “Most of these tools can be used in Australia too,” he says.

Read this article at The Age online

Read a related article about superannuation’s carbon footprint

If you insulate your home against the climate, insulate your money too.

YOUR carbon footprint comprises emissions from household energy use, transport, food, shopping and waste. But is that all?

A new social media campaign called The Vital Few argues there’s something we’ve overlooked: “Are you accidentally investing in climate change?” it asks.

“Maybe you reduce, reuse and recycle. Maybe you’re into using renewables… But are you even remotely aware of how your pension contribution is being spent on your behalf?”

The campaign is coordinated by the Asset Owners Disclosure Project. It’s a not-for-profit organisation, with board members including John Hewson, the former Liberal Party leader, and Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.

Dr Hewson says The Vital Few is about “empowering superannuates to contact their directors and trustees, and ask them why they are investing so intensively in carbon-heavy industries”.

He says an average pension fund now invests about 55 per cent of its portfolio in “high-carbon intensive industries” and only 2 per cent in their low carbon counterparts.

But those numbers must change: “These asset owners have a long-term, not a short-term, horizon,” he says. “Their responsibility is to maximise the returns to superannuates over time. How are they going to manage the risk of catastrophic climate change going forward? The best way is to put a higher percentage of their funds in low–carbon intensive industries.”

Julian Poulter, the executive director of the Disclosure Project, says it’s not only a worry for the environmentally concerned. It’s also about protecting your nest egg.

In the finance world, “climate risk” translates as the prospect of reduced earnings or devalued assets, caused by climate change. That could come by way of physical impacts – say, a flood that destroys infrastructure – or cheap clean technology, or tough policy measures, such as robust carbon pricing and regulations.

Last December, the organisation launched an index of the world’s largest pension funds, rating them on their management and disclosure of climate risk in their investment portfolios.

The highest rating fund was Local Government Super, in New South Wales. There were five other Australian funds in the top ten: CareSuper, Cbus Super, VicSuper, UniSuper and AustralianSuper.

Even so, the report concluded that no fund had “accurately assessed or managed its climate risk”.

Mr Poulter says the average fund member is 20 years from retirement. “By 2030 our climate and energy supply are going to look very different, under any scenario. Either the climate will be in such trouble that we’ll be into panic mode, or the fossil fuel industry will be in trouble,” he says.

Switching away from fossil fuels might mean a short-term sacrifice on returns, he says, but it’s the only way to avoid a long-term loss.

“When it comes to retirement, most baby boomers think they’re going to escape the climate crisis. Unfortunately, they’ll probably just be moving into the retirement home or the hospice by the time the impacts kick in. Economically, climate change could be very inconvenient for their superannuation,” he says.

He says that for most people, their home is their largest asset – followed by their super. There’s no sense in greening one while the other is actively brown.

“We think that once people join the dots, as customers of these funds, they will be in a position to influence the debate and drive change in the industry.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Read this article at The Age online

Read this related article: ‘Bursting the carbon bubble’.

If you want to go green, is changing your household habits enough?

IN The Story of Change, an animated short film by Annie Leonard, a shopper is hauled before a judge for the contents of her trolley. “Wait a minute,” Ms Leonard says, in the voiceover. “My fault?”

The typical story of “going green” by shopping smarter has serious shortcomings, she argues. If we’re really going to make change, it’s our “citizen muscles” we need to exercise, not our “consumer muscles”.

Last month, Ms Leonard visited Australia from the USA to speak at the Sustainable Living Festival in Federation Square, sponsored by the phone-recycling program MobileMuster.

In 2007, Ms Leonard – a long-time environmental advocate – made her first video, The Story of Stuff. The 20-minute clip was an astounding success: it’s now been viewed over 15 million times. Altogether, the eight animations in her series have been seen more than 36 million times. They cover topics from electronics, cosmetics and bottled water, to the economic crisis, cap-and-trade policy, and corporate funding in politics.

Ms Leonard says that while the details of our dilemmas are complex, the big picture is straightforward: “We’re simply using too much stuff. Our use of fossil fuels has dangerously altered the entire planet’s climate, threatening millions and millions of people immediately and potentially destroying the planet’s ability to sustain life. That is a really big problem.”

The trouble with responding only by altering our consumption – the idea that our dollar is our vote – is that corporations have much more money and influence.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

That’s where her latest film, The Story of Change, comes in. It explores the steps beyond greening your home, with reference to great social movements such as the campaigns for civil rights and Indian independence, and against apartheid in South Africa.

“We stress about buying the least toxic products, driving fuel efficient cars and changing our light bulbs. While those are all good things to do, they aren’t commensurate with the scale of the problem,” she says.

“The decisions that have the greatest impact are not those made in supermarket aisles, but those made in halls of government and boardrooms of businesses – and that’s where we need to be using our citizen muscles to work for bigger, bolder change. We can’t shop our way to sustainability.”

Even shopping less isn’t sufficient. Sharing instead of buying, growing your own food and composting at home are all “good places to start, but they are terrible places to stop”.

“We need to move from making change in our kitchens to making change in our communities,” she says.

But how? “Pick an issue that excites you,” Ms Leonard suggests. “Better bike lanes? Ending government subsidies for the super-profitable coal industry? Figuring out how to reduce packaging? Investments in clean energy? It’s always easier – and more fun – to do things with others. So once you have figured out what you want to work on, join with a friend or call an organisation working on this issue.”

Ms Leonard recalls that as a university student three decades ago, she thought working on environmental issues was just one option among many ways to contribute in the world. But since then, the problems have grown so dramatically that “we all have to be environmentalists wherever we find ourselves”.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck moment; we need to work together in every way we collectively can.”

Read this article at The Age online

To get to zero emissions, residents need to walk and talk.

IN 2008, the City of Yarra set a target to be carbon neutral by 2020. Not just council headquarters – the entire inner-city municipality.

But how does a whole district go carbon neutral?

It can’t rely on government subsidies, or an unforeseen technological breakthrough, says Alex Fearnside, CEO of Yarra Energy Foundation, the organisation established in 2010 to make it happen.

Instead, it needs to start with residents pounding the pavements, knocking on doors and sharing their knowledge. That’s the cornerstone of the foundation’s campaign, called Yarra Project Zero.

“We have some very active citizens already. We know that about one-in-ten households and one-in-twenty businesses are well on the way to zero emissions,” he says.

“Yarra Project Zero is about recording those stories and making them known to others. It’s about amplifying them, and showing that retrofitting is a normal and practical action to take.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

As a baseline, the foundation calculated Yarra’s carbon footprint from electricity and gas use in 2008-09. About a quarter of those emissions come from households, and the rest from businesses, large and small.

(The zero emissions target also includes the impact of transport, consumption, food and waste – but the project starts with electricity and gas.)

To cut out the carbon, Mr Fearnside has a rule of thumb: one-third will come from efficiency, one-third from low-carbon energy and one-third from offsetting.

In time, he expects efficiency will play a greater role. He says four simple improvements – installing efficient lighting, windows, heating and cooling, and hot water systems – could cut household energy use by more than two-thirds.

Retrofitting those measures across the municipality would cost about $350 million, or $12,000 per home. “We believe the vast majority of that must come from the private sector,” he says. “It’s about getting people to engage, learn and share their learning, and invest wisely and strategically.

“Over a period of eight years, homeowners could choose to invest that amount to get a more comfortable, efficient and affordable home.”

Since 2008, Yarra’s emissions have fallen by nearly one-fifth, but most of the reduction came incidentally, from the closure of Amcor’s paper mill at Alphington.

Getting all the way to zero won’t be so easy, and that’s why the project involves some old-fashioned community organising. “We’re getting trusted sources in the community to carry the message for us. That’s where people get their information from,” Mr Fearnside explains.

He’s encouraging residents and local workers to register online and participate any way they can. One option is by studying: employees can learn about carbon auditing, and budding communicators can enrol in a multimedia and sustainability course, in which they’ll document the stories of citizens who are taking action.

Meanwhile, corporate volunteers have begun spruiking the project to businesses up and down the area’s busy shopping strips: Swan, Victoria, Brunswick, Smith and Gertrude Streets.

It’s a model many councils could follow, but there’s a catch. Under the federal government’s cap-and-trade system, the City of Yarra’s target won’t reduce Australia’s overall greenhouse emissions. It’ll just free up permits for polluters somewhere else.

Mr Fearnside is undeterred. “The people who work, live and play here will reduce costs, increase comfort and build a stronger more resilient local economy.

“We’ve talked to businesses and households in Yarra and they’re very excited about accelerating change and getting to zero as quickly as possible.”

Read this article at The Age online