July 2011 Archives

At last I can report that St Mary's Church has received full planning approval, the PV panels have been installed and they are producing electricity for the Church plus the Feed In Tariff.

I visited the Church today and, in spite of a cloudy sky, the meter on the back wall of the nave recorded an input of 2.640 kw. SusMo will check the reading again on a sunny day.

The predicted output for a year is 7000 kWh - 19 kWh/day.

British Gas installers are now working on the roof of Hamza Mosque. The installation should be complete well before the start of Ramadan (Aug 1^st) so a significant saving in their electricity bill should be noticed straight away.

If you are interested in detailed information about PV, check an online excerpt of a book by Hemmerle Weller and Unnewehr Jakubetz.

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that blog posts have been less frequent recently, and that I have not posted a blog for eight weeks. I returned from holiday in mid-June - very fit from cycling in the Hebrides - but since then I have been focussing my time on family matters.

This blog will soon cease to be "Esther Boyd's Lighter Footprints and will become "SusMo's Lighter Footprints".

The SusMo core team: Phil Beardmore, Maggie Fennell, Kathy Hopkin, Sarah Napier, our Chair Claire Spencer and I will take turns in contributing blogs.

I look forward to reading their contributions.

This week The Institute of Public Policy and Research (IPPR) published the final evaluation of the British Gas-funded Green Streets project, in which SusMo was a finalist.  IPPR's report makes a number of good policy recommendations to government about how to support community action on climate change, and also some points about the unsustainable burden that falls on volunteers in such projects that will echo with some of SusMo's hard-working volunteers.  In this article I want to focus on three insights, two of them quite original, that IPPR have made in their report into the advantages of a community led approach to tackling climate change, and their relevance to us in Birmingham.

Pat Dade and Chris Rose have suggested that values rather than economics are the key factor in determining people's environmental behaviour and attitudes.  Using theories developed by the psychologist Abraham Maslow and used by marketing and team-building people in many contexts, Dade and Rose divide the population into three segments - Pioneers, Prospectors and Settlers.  Briefly, Pioneers are the type of people who worry a lot about climate change as a global emergency and think everyone has a responsibility to do as much as they can about it, and quickly.  The problem is that the other two groups, Prospectors and Settlers, have a different set of values.  Pioneers tend to be poor at convincing the other two groups about Pioneer values, because they use a language that does not resonate at all with the other two groups.  Pioneers, for example, will talk about 'getting the message across', but Prospectors and Settlers do not respond to abstract reasoning.  So the problem we face is that Pioneers are good at convincing other Pioneers to take action, but not at convincing the other two groups.

The IPPR evaluation suggests that some of the community organisations participating in Green Streets have found strategies to overcome this, SusMo among them.  The evaluation found that the thirteen Green Streets projects have had pronounced impacts on attitudes towards energy efficiency and renewable energy in their wider communities.  Forty-one per cent of people questioned in those neighbourhoods had heard of the Green Streets project.  Thirty per cent had changed their attitudes, and sixty-one per cent said they would be more likely to take action in the future.  This means that Prospectors and Settlers, who are more numerous than Pioneers, are being influenced by the Pioneers through Green Streets. 

I think there are three factors involved in this.

1.       The visibility of energy efficiency and renewable energy measures in community buildings creates a 'seeing is believing' effect.  This is particularly important for Prospectors, who are the biggest group, and who are not convinced by abstract reasoning.

2.       In the case of SusMo, we went out of our way to recruit householders to the project who were representative of Moseley as a whole, and not from a hand-picked group of activists.  This meant that the 18 households included Prospectors and Settlers, and more importantly, that they had friends, neighbours, family and workmates who were also from those two groups.

3.       In some cases, such as the Beccles Lido Green Streets project, it was possible to link the energy efficiency issue to a cause that is currently more popular, namely the battle to rescue that community's swimming pool, through using renewable energy and energy efficiency as part of the solution to making the lido viable.

The second insight that IPPR have made concerns drop-out rates.  What they found was that where community volunteers made appointments for British Gas staff to come and carry out surveys or install measures, the householders were more likely to keep the appointments than where the appointments were made by British Gas themselves.  I have written elsewhere about the importance of Messenger in environmental behaviour, that is, the tendency for people to be influenced by the status of the messenger at least as much as by the content of the message itself.  Here in the IPPR report, we have more evidence that people are more likely to trust and believe someone with whom they share a demographic characteristic than someone from a multinational corporation - and this in a report that was commissioned by such a corporation.  This has important implications for the delivery of Green Deal projects such as Birmingham Energy Savers and is particularly significant for social enterprises and co-operatives planning to bid for work on such projects. 

The final insight that I want to talk about from the IPPR report is about decision-making and accountability in low carbon community groups. Groups who had chosen committee structures for making decisions about Green Streets believed that the openness and transparency that came with this structure was important.   In interviews with project leaders later on in the projects, it was observed that large committee structures were ineffective for making decisions.  As one project leader observed;

"You can't have everybody making all the decisions all of the time, it just doesn't work."

As SusMo moves towards a more formalised structure, we need to find a governance model in which responsibility for decision-making is delegated in order to ensure future projects are delivered in a timely way. 

Although SusMo was not the overall winner of Green Streets, the achievements so far compare very favourably with those of other finalists, with more carbon savings to come from work in progress.  SusMo achieved an average carbon dioxide saving per household of 963 kg a year, the highest in the whole Green Streets project.  This is a tribute to the detailed work that SusMo volunteers and intern, and staff from M&D did in analysing the most cost effective measures to install with a limited budget and diligently liaising with the householders, supported by Lee Barlow from British Gas.  This excellent result puts SusMo in a good position to embark on a new exciting venture, setting up a community renewable energy co-operative, supported by our friends from CORE, and in partnership with Balsall Heath Is Our Planet and Kings Heath Transition Initiative.  Watch this blog for more news on that!