ACTION PLAN: Step One: Developing a Framework

[Travis Linds]

Here is the discussion proposing our Framework (aka table on contents, outline) for our Action Plan.

 

From http://www.transitiontowntotnes.org/EDAPwebversion:

Themes and Pathways for Energy Descent

Working With Nature:

1. Food Security - Can Totnes and District Feed Itself? 

2. Food Production and Farming

3. Health and Wellbeing

4. Supporting Biodiversity – The Web of Life *

5. Water Matters *

Creative Energy Systems:

1. Energy Security

2. Renewable Energy Budget

3. Transportation

4. Building and Housing

Resourcing Localisation

1.  Economics and Livelihoods

2. Consumption and Waste *

Nurturing Transition

1. Arts, Culture, Media and Innovation

2. Inner Transition *

3. Education, Awareness and Skills for Transition

Empowering People

1. Local Governance *

2. Community Matters *

3. Youth Issues *

 

FROM http://transitionculture.org/wp-content/uploads/kinsaleenergydescen...

 

1 The Practical Sustainability Course at Kinsale FEC

2 The Kinsale Energy Descent Energy Action Plan – an introduction.  by Rob Hopkins 

3 The Dawn of the Second Half of the Age of Oil by Dr. C.J.Campbell of ASPO Ireland. 

4 The Scenario of This Report  by Rob Hopkins

5 Food by Deirdre Barry and Rob Hopkins

6 Youth & Community by Michael O’Callaghan, Rob Hopkins,Michelle Walsh, Carmel Geary

7 Education by Diana Good and Pernilla West

8 Housing  by Jan Brady, Anna Aherne and Abbie North

9 Economy and Livelihoods by Michael O’Callaghan and Diane Carton

10 Health by Michelle Wash, Ben Girling,Carmel Geary and Rob Hopkins

11 Tourism by Becci Neal

12 Transport  by Becci Neal and Bridget Hannan

13 Waste  by Jan Brady and Anna Aherne

14 Energy  by Pernilla West and Bridget Hannan

15 Marine Resources  by Diana Good and Stephen Keaveny

 

FROM http://transitionus.org/sites/default/files/ForestRow_In_Transition...

 

1 Foreword

2 Forest Row in Transition

3 Forest Row Transition Times

4 The big issues in brief

5 What are Transition Initiatives?

6 Forest Row in 2025

7 Meet the Foresters

8 The Foresters at home: domestic energy in 2025

9 The Foresters on the move: travel in 2025

10 Buying and growing food in 2025

11 Staying healthy in 2025

12 Make, mend and exchange: the local economy in 2025

13 The Forest Row community in 2025

14 At the end of the day: looking back to 2009

15 Forest Row Transition timeline: steps to the future

16 Headlines from the future

17 Transition Initiatives

18 Business and Peak Oil

19 Resources

20 Forest Row - origins and expansion

21 Appreciation

 

[Tris Shirley]

At yesterday's meeting, David suggested that our Resilience Action Plan might be viewed as an extension of the ERSPO report.  I agree that we would be foolish not to take full advantage of the excellent work that was done on that document.  For reference in this discussion, here is the table of contents from the ERSPO report:

 

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1.1 Sense of Urgency

1.2 Findings

1.3 Climate Change

1.4 Recommendations

2. WHY PEAK OIL MATTERS

2.1 Energy Resource Scarcity/Peak Oil

2.2 Supply, Demand, and Price Volatility

3. ENERGY & WATER .

3.1 Local Energy Supply

3.2 Energy Supply Vulnerabilities

3.3 Energy Supply Mitigation

3.4 Recommendations

4. LAND USE & TRANSPORTATION

4.1 Transportation Fuel Alternatives

4.2 Recommendations  

5. FOOD & AGRICULTURE

5.1 Energy and Agriculture

5.2 Energy and the Food System

5.3 Focus on Whatcom County

5.4 Recommendations

6. PUBLIC & SOCIAL SERVICES

6.1 Energy and Demand for Social Services

6.2 Recommendations

7. ECONOMIC TRANSITION

7.1 Oil Prices and the Current Economic Climate

7.2 Impacts of Energy Resource Scarcity and Peak Oil

7.3 The Rebound Effect  

7.4 Recommendations

8. COMMUNITY EDUCATION & PREPARATION

8.1 The Need for Community Engagement

8.2 Recommendations

9. ERSPO REPORT SUMMARY

[Kyler Boyes]

This is Great- NEXT STEPS?

 

 

 

1. Deduce each persons role in the project- organizer, promoter, researcher, action taker, leader/visionary, developer?
2. Refine group and meeting organization/structure.
3. Determine and delegate tasks (research, organizing, promotion, etc...) We will need to get people working to move this project forward quickly.

[David MacLeod]

Has the group discussed the idea of following the outline from the "12 Steps of Transition" document?

 

12. Create an Energy Descent Plan

At the moment there is only one completed Energy Descent Action Plan, the one done for Kinsale in Ireland.*  Although this was a student-led project, it did a very good job of producing a template that other communities could follow in designing pathways away from oil dependency. Some people find the term ‘Energy Descent’ too negative, and have chosen to call their EDAP an “Energy Transition Pathway" or a "Community Vision Plan".

Whatever it is called, the EDAP sets out a vision of a powered-down, resilient, relocalized future, and then backcasts, in a series of practical steps, creating a map to get there from here. Every community’s EDAP will be different, both in content and style. However, they will explore a wide range of areas as well as energy: energy descent is an issue which affects every aspect of our lives.

We have identified the following 10 steps in the process of creating an EDAP:

Step 1. Establish a baseline. This involves collecting some basic data on the current practices of your community, whether in terms of energy consumption, food miles or amount of food consumed. You could spend years collecting this information, but you aren’t trying to build a detailed picture, just getting a few key indicators around how your place functions in terms of arable land, transport, health provision etc. Your working groups may have identified some of this information.

Step 2: Get hold of any community strategy plans that are produced by your local government. Their plans are likely to have timescales and elements that you need to take into account, and they will also be a useful source of information and data. You will need to decide how to integrate your EDAP with their existing plans.

Step 3: The overall vision. What would your community look like in 15 or 20 years if we were emitting drastically less CO2, using drastically less non-renewable energy, and it was well on the way to rebuilding resilience in all critical aspects of life? This process will use information gathered in your Open Space Days, from Transition Tales and a range of other visioning days, to create an overall sense of what the town could be like. Allow yourselves to dream.

Step 4: Detailed visioning. For each of the working groups on food, health, energy etc.(although this is trickier for Heart and Soul groups for example), what would their area look like in detail within the context of the vision set out above.

Step 5: Backcast in detail. The working groups then list out a timeline of the milestones, prerequisites, activities and processes that need to be in place if the vision is to be achieved. This is also the point to define the resilience indicators that will tell you if your community is moving in the right direction.

Step 6: Transition Tales. Alongside the process above, the Transition Tales group produces articles, stories, pictures and representations of the visioned community, giving a tangible sense through a variety of creative media, of what this powered down world might look like. These will be woven into the EDAP.

Step 7: Pull together the backcasts into an overall plan. Next the different groups’ timelines are combined together to ensure their coherence. This might be done on a big wall with post-it notes to ensure that, for example, the Food Group haven’t planned to turn into a market garden the same car park that the Health & Medicine Group want to turn into a health center.

Step 8: Create a first draft. Merge the overall plan and the Transition Tales into one cohesive whole, with each area of the plan beginning with a short summary of the state of play in 2009, followed by a year-by-year program for action as identified in the backcasting process. Once complete, pass the document out for review and consultation.

Step 9: Finalize the EDAP. Integrate the feedback into the EDAP. Realistically, this document won't ever be "final" - it will be continually updated and augmented as conditions change and ideas emerge.

Step 10: Celebrate! Always a good thing to do.

This is a living process and we won't know how close it is to reality until a few groups have gone through it. The Transition Network is planning to support this process by providing elements such as a set of standard resilience indicators, and an overarching master timeline covering energy, climate, food etc.

 

*UPDATE: As of 2011, there are now at least 4 published EDAPs.

 

Kinsale, UK (the original, created as a student project, not by the community - it's very good, though perhaps too prescriptive in the implementation timeframe, which may need to be much quicker). Pdf of Kinsale EDAP.

Sunshine Coast Region, Australia (written by two people, incorporated into local council plan, for a whole region instead of one community)

Forest Row, UK (very good, user friendly)

Totnes, UK (very good, freely available online, interactive comments possible with online version)

 

[Tris Shirley]

Yes, I believe we did.  We also considered the criticism of the EDAPs that have already been produced. It appears the critics prevailed.  I think it is safe to say that the active members of the work group don't think an EDAP is what we really need just now. That is why we renamed the work group. 

We have been thinking more about how to make it easier for people in the community to know what to do and how to do those things that will make the community more resilient. I believe this is entirely consistent with the anticipated effect of an EDAP.  It is just a different approach.  When we have worked out a few more details of our "Actions for Resilient Communities" proposal, we'll seek feedback from the rest of TW and see who all agrees. 

In my opinion, it is the actions of an "action plan" that are important.  If we have an evolving resource with lots of good, tried and proven actions available, people can pick and choose the ones that fit their needs of the moment.  The idea of planning out in advance what people should do - or more appropriately, will want to do - seems pretty futile to me.  But note that if someone here wants to work up all kind of vision stuff like Forest Row, nothing we are proposing would prevent that.  Indeed, if there are TW folks who think a "traditional" EDAP should be written, they should go for it. 

David MacLeod said:

Has the group discussed the idea of following the outline from the "12 Steps of Transition" document?

 

12. Create an Energy Descent Plan

At the moment there is only one completed Energy Descent Action Plan, the one done for Kinsale in Ireland.*  Although this was a student-led project, it did a very good job of producing a template that other communities could follow in designing pathways away from oil dependency. Some people find the term ‘Energy Descent’ too negative, and have chosen to call their EDAP an “Energy Transition Pathway" or a "Community Vision Plan".

Whatever it is called, the EDAP sets out a vision of a powered-down, resilient, relocalized future, and then backcasts, in a series of practical steps, creating a map to get there from here. Every community’s EDAP will be different, both in content and style. However, they will explore a wide range of areas as well as energy: energy descent is an issue which affects every aspect of our lives.

We have identified the following 10 steps in the process of creating an EDAP:

Step 1. Establish a baseline. This involves collecting some basic data on the current practices of your community, whether in terms of energy consumption, food miles or amount of food consumed. You could spend years collecting this information, but you aren’t trying to build a detailed picture, just getting a few key indicators around how your place functions in terms of arable land, transport, health provision etc. Your working groups may have identified some of this information.

Step 2: Get hold of any community strategy plans that are produced by your local government. Their plans are likely to have timescales and elements that you need to take into account, and they will also be a useful source of information and data. You will need to decide how to integrate your EDAP with their existing plans.

Step 3: The overall vision. What would your community look like in 15 or 20 years if we were emitting drastically less CO2, using drastically less non-renewable energy, and it was well on the way to rebuilding resilience in all critical aspects of life? This process will use information gathered in your Open Space Days, from Transition Tales and a range of other visioning days, to create an overall sense of what the town could be like. Allow yourselves to dream.

Step 4: Detailed visioning. For each of the working groups on food, health, energy etc.(although this is trickier for Heart and Soul groups for example), what would their area look like in detail within the context of the vision set out above.

Step 5: Backcast in detail. The working groups then list out a timeline of the milestones, prerequisites, activities and processes that need to be in place if the vision is to be achieved. This is also the point to define the resilience indicators that will tell you if your community is moving in the right direction.

Step 6: Transition Tales. Alongside the process above, the Transition Tales group produces articles, stories, pictures and representations of the visioned community, giving a tangible sense through a variety of creative media, of what this powered down world might look like. These will be woven into the EDAP.

Step 7: Pull together the backcasts into an overall plan. Next the different groups’ timelines are combined together to ensure their coherence. This might be done on a big wall with post-it notes to ensure that, for example, the Food Group haven’t planned to turn into a market garden the same car park that the Health & Medicine Group want to turn into a health center.

Step 8: Create a first draft. Merge the overall plan and the Transition Tales into one cohesive whole, with each area of the plan beginning with a short summary of the state of play in 2009, followed by a year-by-year program for action as identified in the backcasting process. Once complete, pass the document out for review and consultation.

Step 9: Finalize the EDAP. Integrate the feedback into the EDAP. Realistically, this document won't ever be "final" - it will be continually updated and augmented as conditions change and ideas emerge.

Step 10: Celebrate! Always a good thing to do.

This is a living process and we won't know how close it is to reality until a few groups have gone through it. The Transition Network is planning to support this process by providing elements such as a set of standard resilience indicators, and an overarching master timeline covering energy, climate, food etc.

 

*UPDATE: As of 2011, there are now at least 4 published EDAPs.

 

Kinsale, UK (the original, created as a student project, not by the community - it's very good, though perhaps too prescriptive in the implementation timeframe, which may need to be much quicker). Pdf of Kinsale EDAP.

Sunshine Coast Region, Australia (written by two people, incorporated into local council plan, for a whole region instead of one community)

Forest Row, UK (very good, user friendly)

Totnes, UK (very good, freely available online, interactive comments possible with online version)