What is the Transition Initiative?

A very important initiative that has sprung up in the south west in 2005 is the formation of the Transition Towns Initiative. A Transition Town can be best described as ‘a small collection of motivated individuals within a community who come together with a shared concern: how can the community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?’

The first Transition Town was set up in Totnes and today there are over 100 TTs around the world and over 600 who are ‘mulling over the idea’.

Transition Initiatives are based on four key assumptions:

• That life with dramatically lower energy consumption is inevitable, and that it is better to plan for it than to be taken by surprise
• That our settlements and communities presently lack the resilience to enable them to weather the severe energy shocks that will accompany peak oil
• That we have to act collectively, and we have to act now
• That by unleashing the collective genius of those around us to creatively and proactively design our energy descent, we can build ways of living that are more connected, more enriching and that recognise the biological limits of our planet.

Full details can be found in The Transition Handbook – from oil dependency to local resilience. Rob Hopkins (2008) Green Books. Totnes.

The table above helps to define the Transition Initiative. There are also six underlying principles that underpin the Transition model which are encapsulated in an Energy Descent Plan. The six principles are:

1. Visioning – paint a future without oil where life has improved and developed
2. Inclusion – we need to include everyone – not just the ‘green’ ones
3. Awareness raising – if we are not all informed of peak oil and climate change we won’t act
4. Resilience – the changes ahead will be very challenging so our plans need to include solutions which will survive at the local level
5. Psychological insights – many of the barriers to finding solutions lie within our heads – psychology can help us overcome these
6. Credible and appropriate solutions – we need solutions which are of a scale, resilience and sustainability to solve the problem

In producing an Energy Descent Plan a scenario is agreed by the group, for example, as a community we must be oil independent by 2030 and we must cut our greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2030.

A vision is then drawn up to illustrate the community flourishing in 2030 have achieved the above objectives. The final part of the planning involves ‘back casting’ from the vision date to the present and ascribing a series of actions that will be required every year across the following areas of daily life to achieve the objectives:-

• Food
• Youth & Community
• Education
• Housing
• Economy and Livelihoods
• Health
• Tourism Transport
• Waste
• Energy
• Marine Resources

There is a worked example of an Energy Descent Plan from Kinsdale in Ireland – the first produced in the world.