by Cliona O Conaill. New Consumer magazine.

LocalMoney is so inextricably woven into the fabric of our lives that it has become fundamental to our survival in the West. It affects almost everything we do, and yet we actually know very little about it. However, understanding of the nature of money will empower us as consumers. Money is not an actual thing. It is only an agreement between businesses, banks, governments, communities and nations to treat something as though it has value. It is “like a marriage, like a political party, like a business deal”, says Bernard Lietaer, author of nine books on money and finances and an economist for over 25 years who was involved in designing the Euro. **THE HISTORY & POLITICS OF GLOBAL FINANCE** How this “agreement” has assumed a mythical power, that dominates us and, as money expert Marjana Kos says, makes us “dance for money,” is the recent history of money. At the beginning of the First World War Britain stopped using the gold standard it had adopted in 1816. Then at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, Western leaders met to design a post-war financial structure to allow global free trade. They established The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Jointly these organisations designed the conditions for millions more Western-style consumers and unlimited access to the resources of the Third World. Transnational corporations were nurtured to the detriment of local economies as globalisation took off and many of today’s problems are a result of this legacy After this conference, the US dollar, became the ‘reserve currency’ for world trade so other countries pegged their currencies to it, and the dollar took on the role that gold had previously played, which explains how the US began to become a superpower. When US President Nixon “closed the gold window” in 1971, money stopped being backed by gold and became a free-floating entity backed only by our “agreement” to treat it as though it had value. “This is the first time in the history of the world that every major country has a currency that is not based on gold or silver or some commodity,” says Lietaer. Money became an abstraction, a numerical figure on a computer screen, existing in a fantasy land where the amount being traded on the foreign exchanges is 150 times larger than the total of all international trade put together, and is 100 times larger than the quantity trading on the global stock markets, according to Kos. Six decades after Bretton Woods, global financial, social, political, economic and ecological problems are rife. There is a widening gap between the rich and the poor, family and community breakdown, a politicized food-distribution system, skill loss as more and more people move off the land and into cities, causing competition for jobs, high unemployment, housing shortages and over one trillion pounds of consumer debt – while leaving the worlds’ eco-systems in the hands of the multinational corporations. The politics of poverty become clear when you realize that in the last 25 years, 87 countries have suffered currency crises due to the financial policies of the IMF. “If the United States had to live by the rules that are imposed on, say, Brazil, it would become a developing country in one generation,” says Lietaer. The modern banking system adds to the problem by perpetuating a debt-based economy, which makes us prey to debt repayment and fluctuating interest rates, disenfranchises people with limited access to money, and increases the drain on the earth’s resources. (See www.moneyasdebt.net and New Consumer Nov/Dec 05). **LOCAL CURRENCIES – THE WAY OUT** But there is a way to short-circuiting mainstream banking and get more oomph out of our wallets. Using local, or complementary currencies is a way of promoting local businesses, rebuilding community, and promoting relocalisation. You may already be using complementary currencies without realising it in the form of airmiles and supermarket loyalty points. But there is much more to them. These currencies have been gaining momentum over the last 15 to 20 years: from Bali, where they have had a dual currency for centuries; to Curitiba, in Brazil, where pre-sorted rubbish earns you bus tokens. There is even an electronic currency in Japan called ‘Love’ accrued through doing social welfare activities. Over 4,000 communities worldwide use them according to Lietaer. Local currencies are part of the Slow Money Movement because they are physical money and require face-to-face contact to use, which slows down the speed that the money circulates. They complement rather than compete with national currencies and could not replace them. In the US there are several hundred “time dollar” systems including 31 states where people are being paid to set them up according to Lietaer. The most well known of these is Ithaca Hours, in New York, which can even be used to pay a proportion of your rent. In Japan there are 300 to 400 private currency systems called “fureai kippu” (caring relationship tickets) enabling people to pay for care for the elderly by ‘banking’ hours that they do the same for others. This is similar to how LETS – Local Exchange Trading Schemes, one of the most established complementary currencies in the UK, works. At its peak around 1996 there were approximately 40,000 people active in 450 schemes, exchanging childcare, transport, food, home repairs or equipment. James Khan, a holistic therapist in London who used LETS for five years says, “LETS takes away the limitation from a lack of money. The community creates wealth from the services and products that it provides rather than being dependent on money issued by the banks”. This sums up the value of local currencies not linked to the national currency like the ones above. Some local currencies are directly linked to the national currency including Berkshares in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts and Totnes Pounds in Devon. Susan Witt of Berkshares quotes Bob Swann*, “‘When a region begins assuming the power to support their own business needs by issuing their own currencies, then we will have taken great strides toward regional self-reliance, greater security, full employment, and an economy of permanence’. There is great excitement in watching BerkShares begin living up to these visionary statements,” she says. Totnes Pounds have been around since March this year and by the end of 2007 there will be £10,000 circulating in the town of 8,500 people. They are accepted in over 60 shops and businesses and I even pay ten per cent of my rent with them. My landlady uses them to pay for her dance classes or her shopping in a health food shop and I get to feel that I am doing my bit to promote the local economy, say “No” to globalisation and feel mildly subversive once a week. Noel Longhurst one of the developers of the Totnes Pound with a background in local economic development says, “Local currencies are a great way of opening up discussion about the money system, which is often treated within both politics and economics as something that is just ‘there’ rather than something is created and shaped by people.” The success of these local currencies depends on a critical mass of people using them. So eco-villages like Damanhur in Italy who use the Credito and Findhorn in Scotland where the 450 residents use the Ekos are the most successful. Findhorn even has its own ethical banking system. **OTHER MEASURES** If there is no local currency scheme near you there are other things you can do to promote your financial resilience and that of your community. For example, learn to live within your means, consume less and use cash for all your transactions. Longhurst advises, “Try and avoid getting into debt. And use institutions and banks, which support positive causes, for example, the Co-operative Bank and its internet arm Smile, Triodos and the Ecological Building Society or credit unions”. If you are already in debt, Steve Meakin, Money advice coordinator for Devon and Cornwall, and a Member of the board of trustees of the Institute of Money Advisors, says, “Budget – itemise everything you buy; distinguish between wants and needs; deal with priority debts first – debts that threaten your home or mean you risk imprisonment; and take FREE impartial advice from an agency like National Debtline or the Consumer Credit Counselling Service or Payplan. We need to vote with our wallets and invest and spend our money ethically. We need to arm ourselves with education, to see beyond the label to the living conditions of the fair trade farmers, and the Third World producers growing food for Europe at the expense of food for themselves. Money is one of the most powerful political tools available to us today. Our consumer choices can shape the destiny of nations and they can create a world that is fair, equitable and sustainable. **Resources** Dancing for Money – a dissertation for Schumacher College in 2006, by Marjana Kos, who was part of the team who launched the Totnes Pound and has a background in economics. * The Role of Local Currency in Regional Economic Development, essay by Bob Swann, 1984. Nexus – Colorado’s Holistic Journal, Complementary Currencies for Social Change, an Interview with Bernard Lietaer, By Ravi Dykema, July/August 2003. www.nexuspub.com/articles/2003/july2003/interview.htm Consumer Credit Counselling Service: www.cccs.co.uk or 0800 138 1111 Payplan 0800 917 4298 www.payplan.com The National Debt Line: www.national-uk-debtline.co.uk or 0808 808 4000 Totnes Pound: http://transitiontowns.org/Totnes/Main/TotnesPound Transition Town Totnes: www.transitiontowns.org/Totnes/ Berkshares: www.berkshares.org Ithaca Hours: www.ithacahours.com/ Findhorn Ekos: www.ekopia.findhorn.com/ LETS: www.letslinkuk.net/

“Stop making cr*p” Allan Chochinov, Core77, 13 April 2007

The climate crisis is coinciding with a crisis brought about by decades of throwing up disposable, un-loved and short-lived buildings in what are increasingly becoming non-places and anyplaces. We think that resilient and adaptable places and spaces supported by whole-life financial and broader economic models are the way to go. So what are these places like and what’s the economic and business model that will make them not just possible but the norm? Here’s a game for a cold Monday afternoon. Think of your favourite street in your favourite city. Now list the three main reasons you like it. We guess they’ll include some of the following: It’s always busy, but also restful. There are lots of people there for different reasons regardless of the time of day. Every time you walk along it, something’s different – maybe a new shop or cafe – but the same buildings adapt and the street never really changes. It’s beautiful, grand even, but also quite ordinary in the context of the neighbourhood. The buildings are mostly old, well-detailed and with different fronts and finishes that make them interesting to look at individually and as a piece. The pavements are wide and nicely finished. Thanks to the mature trees and shop canopies it’s great even when wet and windy. People live there; it’s someone’s home. You may have in mind the street where you live or work – in which case, lucky you. Chances are, though, you’ll be thinking about a city you visited – perhaps Amsterdam, Berlin or Paris (or indeed London, Edinburgh or Newcastle) or any of the other destinations many Britons routinely head for in search of a weekend fix of the cultural authenticity they find lacking in their everyday environments. They (or rather we) don’t make them like that anymore. In Britain in 2009 we’ve grappled with the end of an extraordinary 15-year boom which literally altered the landscape, generally not for the better. Construction boomed, and buildings became commodities for short-term, quick-win trading. In the rush to make windfall gains from the cycle of cheap credit, high demand, restricted supply and apparently inexorable price rises, the idea that the underlying social function of land and buildings is to provide shelter and accommodate real social and economic activity was forgotten. But the last few years were the denouement of decades of building for ‘the market’ in a roughly similar way. The proliferation of glass-and-steel business parks and red-and-brown housebuilder estates, and in city centre regeneration areas office buildings and blocks of flats that are transparently cheap and nasty compared with the converted warehouses and merchants buildings with which they often share river- or canal-front, is the modern British property market embodied (literally). Buildings are constructed to maximise the margin between development cost and the price for which they can be sold on and forgotten about as quickly as possible and capital recycled into the next project. No value is accorded to beauty, longevity, adaptability or sustainability and there is no pretence of building for posterity. A basic form of spatial literacy – the understanding that sophisticated economies and societies need proximity, interaction and continuity to function effectively and that individual acts of building must therefore be co-ordinated for the good of the whole – has been eroded. Planning has become an exercise regulating the worst excesses of the market rather than the means by which elected local governments exercise their legitimate role and responsibility to describe – and shape market forces to secure – a vision for their city or town. Indeed, the public sector bears some of the responsibility for the culture of short-termism. Public funding for regeneration and development has often taken the form of what Jane Jacobs called “cataclysmic money”: funding for big infrastructure, iconic buildings or comprehensive site regeneration schemes (never for ‘place’), usually with tight spend-by dates and always with value-for-money criteria including a discount rate that renders any lifetime beyond 40 years or so practically worthless. We urgently need to replace the culture of short-term gain with one of whole-life value, and not just because it’s giving rise to environments that are fractured, disposable, dull and unloved and which in turn make for hollowed-out societies and moribund economies. The act of building itself incurs huge carbon emissions, from the extraction and production of building materials to the energy consumed in construction; recent estimates suggest that in a very energy-efficient building this ‘embodied carbon’ can account for half of a building’s whole-life carbon emissions. But how? Well, we know that the best old places and buildings keep getting better with age, repaying the investment that went into them many times over, generating higher prices and creating social value in the form of terrific, vibrant, popular neighbourhoods. Many of these places were built out of paternalism, noblesse oblige or a desire for posterity, norms and values largely (and for the most part thankfully) consigned to history. Others came from vested interest: a realisation that building once-and-for-all-time could turn land into a permanent, reliable and generous source of income – the ‘estate’ in its original meaning. We need to make land and buildings once again the province of long-term patient money, so that a greater initial outlay on design quality, robustness and adaptability gets its reward and developers have a vested economic interest in the performance of the whole neighbourhood – its schools, local economy and public spaces – rather than seeing them as burdensome accoutrements to whose costs they are forced by planners to contribute. What, aside from a new Victorianism, might enable this? One answer could come directly from the bust: with average incomes and house prices massively out of kilter and credit harder to come by, it’s likely that many more people will need to rent or part-own their home, making room for new estate-type models of ownership and management and new opportunities for pension and other long-term funds to invest in solid, reliable assets as we meet latent demand for hundreds of thousands of new homes across the country. Second, we should look afresh at how property is taxed. Because council tax and business rates tax buildings rather than land values they punish anyone who builds a decent, generously-proportioned building made of durable materials, reward speculators who sit on land or use it wastefully, and thus create upward pressure on land values which drives development out-of-town and makes land in more sustainable locations expensive, in turn squeezing build cost margins. Third, government – especially city government – needs to rediscover its sense of vision and purpose and combine it with a renewed role as an acquirer and assembler of land, but which chooses investment partners on the basis of a shared vision for long-term social outcomes, not design contests or generation of capital receipts. Then it won’t need planning policy to do quite so much – and perhaps in time the Dutch and Danes will come to British cities to see how authentic sustainable development is really done.

“When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race”

H. G. Wells

UK transport is in crisis. Getting around is increasingly difficult and unpleasant, we’re producing ever more carbon en route and meanwhile becoming fatter and less healthy. Our transport policies seem to be in denial on carbon and other pollution, and planners are still determined to build more road capacity to ease congestion (often seeking to compensate for appalling land-use planning) while the evidence shows this has the opposite effect. ‘Natural’ increases in vehicle movements are embedded in government models, and transport policies and practices are rabidly defensive of car parking and at best sceptical and at worst cynical about railways and cycling. So what’s to be done to get us out of this tangle? Can electrification alone really solve all these problems? We think not…

As delegates to the Copenhagen climate conference take a break from plenaries and working groups to wander through the city’s streets, they might be struck by something.  Where are the cars?  Pondering, they might pull up a seat at one of the 7,000 outdoor cafe chairs available in this city on a similar latitude to Edinburgh.  Watching the thousands of ordinary Copenhageners enjoying just strolling around, they ask themselves, frowning: why isn’t my city more like this?

British delegates might frown more than many. We’re in a terrible jam, and it’s going to get worse, with a 35% increase in delays from a projected 32% growth in traffic over the next 15 years according to the Department for Transport’s model.  Not to worry, some say: there might be more cars on the road, taking longer to get from A to B, but improved engine efficiency and alternative fuels – including, perhaps, electric vehicles – mean we’ll be emitting less CO2. But only 3% less, and overall emissions from domestic transport have risen 12% since 1990, and now represent 21% of total UK domestic emissions – of which road transport makes up c.92%.

Clearly allowing DfT’s model to transpire simply isn’t going to achieve meaningful cuts in carbon emissions, sustain efficient movement or enhance quality of life.  But try suggesting an alternative vision, where the majority of journeys are by foot, cycle or public transport (as in many of the Northern European cities we like visiting) and you’ll hear that the problem isn’t cars, it’s the internal combustion engine; people aren’t prepared to give up their cars; people won’t cycle when it rains so much and it’s so hilly; and anyway we’re not Danish or Dutch and this isn’t Amsterdam or Copenhagen (or Berlin, or Freiburg, or Basel, or Malmo, or Groningen, or…).

But cars are damaging more than the biosphere. In its 2006 report on the urban environment, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution identified 24 environmental, economic and social problems arising from increased car ownership and use of which only three – CO2 emissions, air pollution and noise – relate directly to the internal combustion engine. The rest – including loss of local shops and amenity, decline in physical exercise, rising accidents and congestion – will remain even in a world of low-carbon vehicles. The internal combustion engine is only one part of the bigger and more complex problem of society’s dependence on the private car as our primary means of transport.

Copenhagen shows it doesn’t have to be this way. In the early 1960s Copenhagen was on a similar trajectory of car-oriented growth to many other European cities, yet between 1995 and 2005 the number of bike journeys doubled. 55% of commuter journeys in central Copenhagen are now made by bike (37% for Greater Copenhagen). This modal shift was achieved through a series of complementary actions, including major investment in cycle lanes (and reducing lanes available to cars), reducing city centre car parking, developing shared surface streets with pedestrian and cycle priority on secondary routes and investing in public transport. The result is one of the world’s best cycling cities that consistently tops liveability surveys and has a street life and cafe culture you wouldn’t expect to find outside the Mediterranean.

In the UK the benefits of encouraging a shift away from the private car and towards cycling are now widely accepted, but a responsive and consistent policy framework eludes us. We have plenty of rhetoric on and initiatives to encourage cycling, but we seem willing to try just about anything other than the one thing proven to actually work: building a comprehensive network of safe and convenient cycle routes, taking space and priority away from cars not pedestrians. The mantra remains ‘no restrictions on cars in the absence of good alternatives’ yet it is obvious that you cannot improve the attraction and viability of alternatives without making car use less attractive.

New development ought to act as a catalyst for enabling cycling culture, but this requires spending as much time on assessing improvements to/provision of cycle infrastructure as modelling the need for increased road capacity. We need to ask not how we accommodate the additional traffic generated by a development, but how the developer, local authority and highways authority can work together to ensure no net increase in traffic by making it easy and attractive to no longer own or regularly use a car.

Freeing people from car dependency will of course require more than just a few cycle lanes. New developments need to be designed and existing places retrofitted to reduce the need to travel, creating walkable neighbourhoods where daily needs can be met without recourse to the car. Car clubs offering a variety of vehicles need to be provided for journeys that are impossible or impractical without a car, and parking ratios need to be set at a level that will make the car club viable. The frequency, quality, coverage and integration of public transport, particularly buses, needs to be improved to reverse the trend of declining use everywhere outside Greater Manchester and London. The role of streets as primarily places of human movement, interaction and exchange needs to be rediscovered, taking precedence over – not “traded off” against – the need to keep traffic flowing.

Peak oil and carbon taxes may eventually spell the end of mass private car ownership and use, but the urgent need to cut carbon emissions, reduce the £11 billion economic cost of congestion and the £10 billion cost of obesity means we can’t afford to wait. Electric and plug-in hybrid technologies, eco-driving and lower speed limits will all play a role in reducing carbon emissions, but if we’re to transform our towns and cities for the better they must be accompanied by meaningful efforts to reduce car traffic.

Copenhageners don’t choose to cycle because they’re physically different to us.  The difference is political. The city has spent 40 years challenging the dominance of the car. When the process began in the 1960s the cry went up that “Danes aren’t Italians”, but civic leadership and social progressiveness overcame the kind of cultural relativism that helps maintain the UK status quo. Let’s hope our delegates in Copenhagen have time to take a break from the conference and see for themselves how enabling a culture of cycling, and all that comes with it, is a crucial element of creating vibrant and sustainable places that are well placed to prosper in a carbon constrained post-oil world.

“Never before has place had such profound or strategic purpose. We used to build shelter to save ourselves, now it must be re-built to save our species”

Jonathan Smales, Chief Executive, Beyond Green

There’s no such thing as a ‘sustainable’ building – so much of the built environment’s impact is down to how we use it. If we’re really going to re-shape the way we live we need to stop making ‘developments’ or ‘projects’ using silo policies and partial economics and focus much more on place.  Place has seldom, perhaps never, been more important. Successful places in the future will be superbly connected, and yet have distinctive identity, capacity for self-determination and containment, sufficiency, and provide a deeper sense of belonging. Meanwhile the actions we propose to address global warming – in mitigation and adaptation – can in themselves help make places work better.

When as a society we’ve worked out how we should live and as individuals, families and friends how we shall live, we can turn our attention to where we might live. What kinds of places will suit both the lifestyles we can have and the lifestyles we want and make them easiest and most rewarding? Which kinds of places acknowledge and address both natural ecological limits and human aspiration?

Never before has place – the environments, districts and neighbourhoods we live, work and play in – had such a profound or strategic purpose.  We used to build shelter to save ourselves, now it must be re-built to save our species. Place now needs to inspire and enable sustainable ways of living. It needs to make it far easier for us to live well and within climate and other environmental limits and so much harder to live badly and without due regard to climate impacts.

What sorts of places and which features and facilities found in place enable the freest, healthiest and most pleasurable living while also being in tune with the new ethical choices and realities of an environmentally constrained world?  And how might we re-design places – especially towns and cities and their infrastructure – so that we can make the very rapid transition to a low-to-no-carbon economy and a vibrant society given that we’ve already tested these limits to their maximum? We now have as little as 30 years to put the necessary radical changes into place locally and across the world.   In built environment terms this is no time at all.

We’ve tended to think of town planning, urban design and development as being ends in themselves, maybe even value-neutral. It’s analogous to Francis Fukuyama’s now infamous claim that we had reached or were near to ‘the end of history’; that somehow, liberal democracies had achieved a stage and a state of maturity where all that was left was continuous refinement. The world was almost at one with itself. Or in denial.

We’ve allowed fatuous propositions such as ‘this or that is a good design’ and ‘he or she is a good designer’ for 25 years without questioning that which is most important about design. We have endless plans for ‘rational, efficient and deliverable urban form’ to accommodate growth and change but without interrogating its most significant impacts. Still today we make grand designs for our ‘vital’ road infrastructure to ‘improve vehicular flow’ without questioning why we need to travel in the first place and, again, with what climate or other impact. And suddenly we see that this way of thinking is now if not irrelevant then certainly beside the point.

We’ve come to believe that we inherit place – it doesn’t seem to be the product of any choices we might make; those least fortunate lack the opportunity and sometimes the capacity to move far if at all from the place they were born. Others more fortunate nevertheless feel that urban spaces and places are inviolable and most probably immune to our own modest powers of influence. The built environment is somehow bestowed – declaimed and given – a fait accompli. There’s an assumption that places are like markets – determined by an ‘invisible hand’.

And yet, like markets, place is the product of myriad conscious choices: hundreds of policies, great plans and physical frameworks conceived and administered by elites and then millions of small choices made by the mass. In fact we can go further and say that culture and place are as inter-related as big plans and small choices; they make manifest a form of reciprocal determinism where one shapes the other and in turn is shaped.

Winston Churchill famously said, ‘We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us’; how much more true is this of whole places? Now we need to re-shape our buildings and our places to meet a new and quite shocking imperative – the reality of climate change.

An exaggeration? No. In the experience of Beyond Green and our sister company Blue Living in place strategy in new development and regeneration across the UK there’s almost no serious regard to or rigour in assessing and addressing likely climate impacts. The planning system simply doesn’t work in this regard and nothing else obligates landowners and developers in ay sector – private, public or third – to implement very low-to-no carbon place-making.

We believe this is a huge missed opportunity. Not just because in planetary terms it’s dangerously irresponsible but because places that are conceived, designed and managed in tune with climate realities are better – far better – than those that are not. It’s a huge win-win.

When we look closer at what kinds of city forms, characteristics and qualities inspire and enable sustainable ways of living they’re curiously close to those which, for many, define great urbanism. To wit:  compact places with a diversity of land uses and activities housed in short city blocks connected by plentiful direct connections; walkable, mixed-use, more ‘sufficient’ neighbourhoods; finely-grained blocks and active frontages to buildings animate streets and make them a pleasure to walk along and cycle down rather than race past in the car;  climatically adapted streets with street trees, open rills and streams, green balconies and roofs will be cooler in hot summers, stimulate insect and bird life and look great; well-proportioned and founded, resilient and adaptable buildings acquire the wonderful patina of age and character come to be cherished (while reducing the overall carbon ‘embodied’ in the building sector) features of every real place; well-planned urban intensity facilitates movement and ‘exchange’ and in combination with superb green open space and other high quality public realm – ‘where society lives’ – creates liveability and city-ness…it’s a long and alluring list.

So, there’s every reason to transform our city places and spaces to cut carbon, improve movement, develop a more enduring and agile infrastructure, enable healthier living, develop a more compelling aesthetic and strengthen community. There really is wisdom in place.

“Wisdom sits in places”

Western apache saying quoted in ‘The Plot’, Madeleine Bunting

From the age of plenty to the age of austerity without returning to caves “The joyride is over. What remains is the question of how we can make a transition to a saner way of living.” James Howard Kunstler, Geography of Nowhere (1993) Of course only a small minority of the world’s people have enjoyed the age of plenty. But what’s this new ‘age of austerity’ people keep talking about and what does it mean for us? Are we all going to be living in a cave with the TV switched off? Or are there opportunities for achieving real quality of life in very low-to-no-carbon economies and societies? This has been a sobering year. One in which we’ve suddenly had to grow up (or at least contemplate sober adulthood). After decades of partying like there’s no tomorrow, financial meltdown has exposed how far we’ve been living beyond our means and a barrage of environmental evidence shows how far we’ve eaten into the planet’s ecological capital. Austerity has suddenly become a buzzword everywhere from political speeches to fashion magazines. But not much is changing yet. Rather than being the first person to turn down the music and start clearing up, there’s lots of arguing about whose turn it is, who spilt what and who’s going to pay for the damage. Little attention is being focused on what happens after we’ve finished indulging in our last big blowout. We’re waiting for technological solutions to save the day, but there’s a growing realisation that whilst clever engineering may help smooth some rough edges, the trajectory we’re on is so wrong that nothing less fundamental than a profound shift in the way we live is going to cut it. Climate models suggest the carbon cycle could be brought back into balance (and runaway global warming avoided) if we each had a carbon footprint of around 1.5 tonnes per year – a global ‘fair share’. For us Brits with an average footprint of c.10 tonnes this means substantial cuts (now enshrined in national law). So what does this mean? Will a ‘sustainable lifestyle’ require us to live in a cave with the TV switched off? If so, it’s human nature to turn the music up and keep dancing. Should we be holding on so tightly to what we know? Years of technological advances have given us comfort beyond our ancestors’ wildest dreams. But we’ve long since passed the point where better material circumstances improve our wellbeing and happiness. Frankly, for all its pizzazz the way we organize out lives right now doesn’t seem to be doing us much good: as a nation we’re getting fatter and less healthy; we’re increasingly alienated and yearn for a sense of belonging. We’re concerned about our impact on the planet and fearful of the legacy we’re bequeathing our children. As Wendell Berry says, “The idea that freedom and pleasure can last long in a diseased world is preposterous”. At Beyond Green we’re regularly asked “what can I do to save the planet?” – hence the (ironic) title of this series – and the brutal answer is the planet itself will probably ultimately be fine whatever we do. The real challenge is to minimise the havoc we’re wreaking so the planet survives in a form that’s comfortable – even endurable – for the human species, to allow the complex web of life to recover its equilibrium, and to develop a way of living that’s in balance rather than at battle with the natural systems we depend upon. Designing our places, communities and way of life with the planet in mind is a new way of thinking and will require some ingenuity and application, but it’s not rocket science. And it’s not all about privation and hardship. Whilst major and urgent change is needed, the new way of living could actually be rather wonderful. Our homes and other buildings will be a bit different, but not space-age; natural lighting and decent insulation will make them comfortable and cheap to run. They’ll be powered by energy produced locally with minimal emissions or loss in transit, providing us with an income when we use it sparingly and the excess is sold on. Roofs will become prime real estate, hosting a beautiful productive mix of energy generation, food production and habitat areas. Our kitchens will be stocked with food grown more locally and eaten in season, so it’s fresh, tasty, economical, nutritious and minimally packaged. Rising fuel and food prices won’t seem so alarming when we’re growing more ourselves – in gardens, allotments, community farms or window boxes. Our lives will be less cluttered – we’ll seek out things we love and make them last, rather than housing an endless stream of stuff. We’ll spend more time closer to home, in neighbourhoods containing the shops, facilities and services we need day to day, or served by decent home deliveries. At work (perhaps downstairs or around the corner) we’ll reap the full benefits of technology to connect, transact and exchange to the full in the ‘glocal’ economy. Daily walking and cycling, more time with our families and in a real community and less time stuck in traffic should leave us fitter and happier and make our streets places to play, thrive and dwell rather than carmageddon hell. When we need to go further we’ll enjoy public transport that’s inviting not insulting, and well organized electric car clubs will seamlessly fill the gaps when private wheels are really needed. Sure we’ll no longer be able to roam distant parts so often or so fast – stag weekends in Iceland and New York shopping trips will become tomorrow’s historical quirks, but maybe we’ll realise weddings are romantic closer to home and clothes attractive in our own high-streets. We’ll need to rediscover the art of slow travel and make time for big once or twice in a lifetime journeys, and meanwhile seek luscious leisure closer to home so we no longer hanker for cheap airborne thrills. Relaxing with a book on a proper 21st century rail network we may well wonder how Easyjet and baggage carousels kept us bewitched for so long. Above all, perhaps our values will change. Maybe we’ll get prestige and fulfillment from winning arguments in the pub, flying a kite elegantly or cooking the most generous dinner rather than blowing the most cash on the most stuff. Living more of our lives in the public realm (literally and figuratively) maybe we’ll reap the benefits of reducing the space for private difference to breed one-upmanship and mistrust and making room for social complexity and difference. Who knows – perhaps we’ll rediscover the value of beauty, delight, vivacity and quiet contemplation. Sound utopian? This stuff’s already happening. Communities around the world are adapting to 21st century realities – from Copenhagen bike culture to Tokyo roof gardens. Nowhere’s yet brought it together in one joyful blend yet, and now’s the time to start. Let’s get it together – let’s plan a really enduring way of life.

“We must learn to see that every problem that concerns us conservationists always leads to the question of how we live”

Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community (1992), Wendell Berry

Thank goodness for politics.  With a deal at Copenhagen looking shaky and a climate that’s already becoming unpredictable and uncomfortable for millions of (albeit mostly poor and hitherto pretty uncomplaining) people and on course for well over two degrees of warming, you might expect riots in the streets, stock market crashes (again) and gridlock as we all head for the hills.

But politics has a knack of bringing people together, and the outstanding achievement of global climate politics is arguably in how quickly a consensus has formed. And it’s decided that the challenge of our generation is power generation.  There are some significant nods to deforestation, and plenty of exhortations to use less energy by lagging your loft properly, but the most energetic discussions are about clever new kit and the carbon targets and pricing mechanisms, subsidies and regulations that will increase the rate at which it renders dirty old (and new) kit obsolete all over the world.  It’s a reassuringly calm, mainstream agenda.  But this is not just a plan for planet-saving: it’s the dawn of a new low-carbon economy – an agenda for investment and jobs; maybe even some of the skilled, hands-on jobs that in Britain we’ve found ourselves a bit short of since we decided that money lending, property speculation and shopping were enough to keep a post-industrial economy going.

So what’s not to vote for? Well, unfortunately, even if we started in earnest tomorrow it’s unlikely we could install the capacity to generate the quantity of cheap, clean, plentiful and secure energy we’d need to meet projected demand quickly enough to avert climate disaster.  Between 2000 and 2006, energy use in the thirty richest countries – in which energy-efficiency standards have generally been tightening for longest – rose by nearly a quarter, setting a poor example to the developing giants whose growth of carbon emissions the rich world so urgently wants to cap.  This may in part be down to the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate: people often spend money they save as their homes, appliances and cars become more energy-efficient on something more energy intensive, like a faster car or an extra foreign holiday.  Meanwhile, debate still rages about the best way to meet our rising energy demand – just ask any wind-farm protestor.

Even if low/no-carbon energy were abundant, the technology-replacement theory of planet-saving has painful limits. As operational energy standards for buildings tighten it becomes clearer how much carbon is ‘embodied’ in their materials and construction. Almost no-one believes that a truly low carbon form of aviation is on the cards, and on projected rates of aviation growth flying could alone  account for more than 100% of Britain’s carbon emissions allowance under its own statutory target in 2050.

So if technology-replacement and decarbonisation aren’t enough, what’s needed?

Buildings and machines don’t use energy, people do.  So we need to think holistically and systemically about how we live. Total carbon footprinting can be used to calculate carbon emissions across the lifetime and the lifestyle of a person, a business, a neighbourhood or even a whole city. This way of accounting allocates emissions on the basis not of remote upstream energy generation but of localised consumption choices and behaviour – housing, movement, food, goods, public services and everyday goods and ‘stuff’ (whether made nearby or out–of-sight, out-of-mind overseas).

Thinking about total carbon footprints is intuitively ethically right: it corresponds with notions of personal choice and responsibility and with the ‘polluter pays’ principle.  People and places vary, but accounting for carbon in this way also helps us to make certain general principles evident.  One is that richer people and places have much more carbon-intensive lifestyles and as we get richer it’s our consumption of the hardest-to-replace-energy that grows fastest.  Another is that our carbon footprint is governed as much if not more by local economic and environmental circumstances than by what happens upstream: if you live somewhere without a nearby shop the chances are you also live somewhere without any workplaces or much of a bus service – three reasons to need to get in the car a lot more than in well-served neighbourhoods.  It also, incidentally, helps lay bare the absurdity of a policy agenda that, as in Britain, seeks to achieve ‘zero carbon’ buildings at any cost while making it progressively easier to build shopping centres and business parks out-of-town.

Perhaps most attractively, however, thinking about carbon in a total footprint way offers a route out of the technocratic conceit of climate-change-policy-as-energy-policy and into a richer politics of human relations, happiness and the good life.  Whether or not you buy the argument (and evidence) that ever-rising, increasingly competitive consumption is making us miserable and unhealthy, decarbonising business-as-usual presents not a safe politics of orderly global adjustment but a dangerous one based on delaying the toughest choices until it may just be too late.  On the other hand, embracing the need to change not just how we power our economies but how we live our lives raises not just the stakes but the opportunities: from thinking about total carbon footprint we can work out how to build the Total (No) Carbon Economy – beyond new sectors and new jobs to a social and economic system for living prosperously and well, within environmental limits.

In the next few days we’ll explore the opportunities of the Total (No) Carbon Economy further, but here’s an idea for starters: in the built environment let’s get beyond the obsession with zero-carbon homes (there’s no such thing anyway, unless you build them out of air) and into the realm of low-carbon lives.  Specifically, let’s start using total carbon footprint modelling as the primary tool for understanding the sustainability of homes, places and lifestyles.  Once we frame the issue, debate and argument in this way, we can start to provide meaningful answers to the question of how we might live in a no-carbon world.  So go on then, how shall we live?

(Not) waiting for Godot – time to get on with it

“Lets go” “Yes, lets go” (They do not move) Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett Conferences won’t solve this global problem; they can create a compelling framework but unless you want massive, Orwellian government to impose change it’s time to get creative, strategic and bold and start taking decisions to re-build your values, your brand and your business. No development, no major event (not even the Olympics) nor even physical renewal and regeneration has a divine right to happen in the Energy/Climate Era; they have to earn the right by taking action to achieve profound carbon reductions, irrespective of the barriers. It’s time to get real, seize the opportunities and benefits and get on with it. Negotiations on the ‘new Copenhagen climate deal’[1] begin formally today. It’s a seminal moment in international relations. Ed Miliband recently described the challenge in the following terms – “Imagine if you knew 189 people, and you got them all together and said, ‘Here’s how we want you to run a significant part of your lives in the next 30 or 40 years – and by the way, you have to unanimously agree that that’s how you want to do it’.” Many good things will be agreed in Copenhagen. But rather than simply setting targets we need implementation mechanisms. We need government at all levels – locally, nationally and internationally – to set a common and consistent strategic framework of price and tax signals, incentives (and disincentives) for a rapid transition to a no carbon economy and society. And we need urgency and deep commitment. But governments find it difficult to galvanise society in any way still less on an issue that is still perceived as primarily environmental, distant, abstract and intangible. Governments need encouragement, partners, flagships, exemplars, common purpose and support in engaging and communicating with a distrusting and even alienated public. The window of opportunity on carbon emissions will close quickly. In simple terms, the more carbon is emitted year- on-year (29% more globally in 2008 than 2000!) the more difficult and expensive it becomes to keep atmospheric concentrations of carbon to amounts that will allow future wellbeing and prosperity. It is relentless and unforgiving. And since many of the biggest reductions will be achieved through new or renewed infrastructure such as railways, large scale renewable energy generation and grids it will take some time in any event before some of the biggest cuts in carbon can be made. Unless leaders across all sectors take comprehensive action now to invest directly and kick the market into strategic and widespread action it seems inevitable that tackling the problem further down the line will require autocratic government with hard-line measures introduced and enforced by diktat, draconian personal carbon budgeting and rationing accompanied by invasive policing. For anyone involved in the built environment this is a huge challenge. Not only does a vast amount of carbon arise from the heating and cooling of buildings but, as we will describe later in this series, development and re-development is profoundly impactful in shaping human behaviour. The form and operation of physical places and spaces can make it either far easier or much more difficult to walk, cycle, take exercise, be safe and healthy, play, build the bridges and bonds of community, travel efficiently, enjoy work, stay warm, cool down, grow food and provide ecological habitat. And the embodied energy and carbon used and emitted during the mining, processing and transporting of materials and in erecting buildings are increasingly important factors in measuring the impact of development. Simply by building something/anything, climate is impacted and social and economic impacts follow. Arguably, the impacts of every new large scale building project should be more than compensated for by investment in new renewable energy generation capacity, localised offsetting (through, for instance, green retrofits in existing homes and workplaces nearby), and the project should be required to demonstrate how it will otherwise help reduce the total carbon footprint of its host neighbourhood. All of this must (and indeed can) be achieved without excessive cost – or at least under a different whole-life and long term value financial model incorporating an internal carbon pricing regime; in this and other ways the good practice can then be replicated. Prestige public sector-led projects such as the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games and its regeneration legacy have a particular responsibility to re-think development and innovate, seek changes in policy where necessary and then achieve deep cuts in total carbon footprint. This means that the modal split of movement should be radically transformed, not just tinkered with; long-life resilient and adaptable buildings should be built, not short-lived, faddish and cheaply specified and built apartments of the kind we have seen in recent years. We need new housing typologies able to accommodate solar and other renewable energy generation; roofs and niche spaces should be used for urban ecology, cooling and food production and the whole process of creating and renewing neighbourhoods should be used with gusto and imagination to effect widespread cultural change. The Olympic project is also ideally suited to demonstrating the way forward in effecting behavioral change – showing how low carbon living and a more cohesive community can be achieved via a healthier diet, local food growing, active use of the Olympic Park and other planned green spaces and the creation of a Copenhagen style bike culture. We are entering an age when everything must be done somewhat differently, where the public sector must lead the way and create a new framework for rapid change and in which all large scale projects have to justify their existence by demonstrating their commitment to comprehensive reductions in carbon. Think of the innovation, creativity and opportunity that will stimulate and what superb projects and brands will emerge. [1] A phrase used by WWF to put a title to the Copenhagen talks A little bit about what we do in the Beyond Green group: Beyond Green Consulting: policy, strategies, plans, place-making and process for authentic sustainable developments which inspire and enable free, pleasurable, healthy and environmentally sustainable living. Offices in London, Newcastle and Auckland Beyond Green Living: advice on sustainable lifestyles, often through brands and communications; TV projects, personal appearances and publications (incl. Eco-Logical! (2009), How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint (2008), and 1,001 Ways You Can Save The Planet (2007), Duncan Baird Publishers) BlueLiving: a portfolio of strategic land and development projects with a view to building, owning and managing seminal sustainable developments across the UK Wilderness Wood: a beautiful ancient woodland, sustaining a woodland economy, demonstrating conservation and providing education, inspiration and outdoor play

What is the Copenhagen climate change summit?

From 7 December environment ministers and officials will meet in Copenhagen for the United Nations climate conference to thrash out a successor to the Kyoto protocol. The conference, held at the modern Bella Center, will run for two weeks. The talks are the latest in an annual series of UN meetings that trace their origins to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which aimed at coordinating international action against climate change.

What does COP15 stand for?

COP15 is the official name of the Copenhagen climate change summit — the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The COP is the highest body of the UNFCCC and consists of environment ministers who meet once a year to discuss developments in the convention.

Which countries are taking part in the climate change summit, and how many people will be there?

One hundred and ninety-two countries have signed the climate change convention. More than 15,000 officials, advisers, diplomats, campaigners and journalists are expected to attend COP15, joined by heads of state and government.

Who are the main players?

Developing countries, including China and India, believe it is the responsibility of wealthy industrialised nations such as the UK and US to set a clear example on cutting carbon emissions. Significantly, the US rejected the 1997 Kyoto protocol, with George Bush arguing that the 5% reductions required by Kyoto would “wreck [the American] economy” while making no demands on emerging economies. COP15′s chances of success have been improved by President Barack Obama’s stated intention to achieve an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

In April, the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, acknowledged the role the US had played in past climate emissions at a gathering of officials from the world’s 17 largest economies. She said the US was “determined to make up for lost time both at home and abroad”. “The US is no longer absent without leave,” she said. However, Denmark’s minister for climate and energy, Connie Hedegaard, has warned that American leadership on climate change will be undermined if the Obama administration does not pass laws swiftly to reduce carbon pollution.

What does the summit hope to achieve?

Officials will try to agree a new climate treaty as a successor to the Kyoto protocol, the first phase of which expires in 2012. According to Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, the four essentials needing an international agreement in Copenhagen are:

1 How much are industrialised countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?

2 How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?

3 How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?

4 How is that money going to be managed?

What are the sticking points?

The main issue is that of “burden-sharing”. Climate scientists say that the world must stop the growth in greenhouse gas emissions and start making them fall from around 2015 to 2020. By 2050 they estimate the world must cut its emissions by 80% compared with 1990 levels to limit global warming to a 2C average rise.
Money is also a major issue. The developing countries know they must hand over hundreds of billions of pounds to poorer nations, to help them adapt to the likely consequences. Earlier this year, Gordon Brown said this climate funding needed to reach $100bn a year by 2020. If the recent recession has made rich countries less willing to part with their cash, this could raise tensions in Copenhagen

But which countries must make the cuts and by how large should they be? For example, the rapidly growing Chinese economy has recently overtaken America as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Yet America has historically emitted far more emissions than China, and on a per capita basis Chinese emissions are around a quarter of those of the US.

The Chinese government argues that it has a moral right to develop and grow its economy — carbon emissions will inevitably grow with it. There is also the issue of industrialised nations effectively outsourcing carbon emissions to developing nations such as China. This is a consequence of huge quantities of carbon-intensive manufacturing taking place in China on behalf of buyers in the west. It wants consumer countries to take responsibility for the carbon emissions generated in the manufacture of goods, not the producer countries that export them.

Problems such as these have cast doubts on whether COP15 can succeed. There are also concerns about whether any action we take now to prevent climate change may be too little too late. A Guardian poll revealed almost nine out of 10 climate scientists do not believe political efforts to restrict global warming to an additional 2C — the level the EU defines as “dangerous” — will succeed.

Passivhaus – A dwelling which meets the Passivhaus standard will include very good levels of insulation with minimal thermal bridges; good utilization of solar and thermal gains; excellent levels of air tightness.  This means the home needs very little heating or cooling.  A dwelling is deemed to satisfy the PassivHaus criteria if the total energy demand for space heating and cooling is less than 15 kWh/m2/yr treated floor area.  The total primary energy use for all appliances, domestic hot water and space heating and cooling also needs to be less than 120 kWh/m2/yr.  For energy requirements of the code PassivHaus will usually meet code level four.

Code for sustainable homes level 5 – This is where net carbon emissions are 100% less than building regulations in 2006. The CO₂ emissions are from the energy used for heating, hot water and lighting, so code level 5 is achieved when CO₂ levels are reduced or generated onsite.

Zero carbon- This is where net CO₂ emissions resulting from all energy use in the dwelling is at zero or better. This includes energy used in the operation of space heating /cooling and hot water systems, ventilation, internal lighting and electrical appliances. It also takes into account contributions from onsite renewable/low carbon installations.A zero carbon home must also have a heat loss parameter of 0.8W/m²K or less, and net zero CO₂ emissions from the use of appliances and cooking in the homes.The table below charts the code level energy requirements each standard is likely to achieve.  To reach code levels other requirements will need to be met including but not limited to water efficiency; waste recycling and surface water run off.  For more information on code requirements of code levels do get in touch.    Note PassivHaus can be used as a base to go on to achieve higher code levels.