Transition in Action: Engaging the Totnes Businesses Community – Some Emerging Thoughts
Totnes Market (© Lou Brown)
By the TTT Economics & Livelihoods Group
This section aims to set some context around which we can start to engage with more local businesses and organisations in order to begin the Energy Descent Planning work for this area. We need to work together to produce a collective vision of how our local economy could survive and indeed thrive, in a low-energy, volatile oil-price future, and then plan the pathways that could best take us there. Please note that from here on when the term ‘organisation’ is used it includes private, public and voluntary sector.
Our community’s needs
The community of Totnes & District creates demand for a wide range of goods and services to meet its needs, both essential and non-essential items, including food, water, transport, education, homes, household items, clothing, leisure, energy and so on. Organisations exist to meet these needs and in turn create needs of their own. Of course they also provide employment so that we can earn money to buy the goods and services. These organisations from which we buy things may be local, regional, national, European and global. Even if we are buying goods from a small independent local shop, they may well have been sourced from a major corporation and manufactured on the other side of the world. In fact most of the goods we buy are imported to the UK and created using long, complex supply-distribution chains. For example, 80% of the UK’s annual consumption (by weight) of clothing and textile products is imported.
The challenges
Obviously businesses and organisations are a key component of our community. For our community (and our nation) to build resilience, our local organisations must also work to reduce carbon emissions and fossil fuel dependence. As the pressures from peak oil and climate change become more apparent, organisations of all types and sizes will need to assess their own risk exposure and understand what mitigating action could be taken short-term, as well as exploring how their own business strategy and operations may need to fundamentally change to succeed in the future, where the economic playing field and its rules will likely be drastically different.
The opportunities
For our own community then, this raises one key question – how can organisations continue to meet our community’s needs (including provision of employment) in an increasingly energy, resource and financially constrained world?
To answer this question we need to further understand our needs, and how they could be met:
- What are our essential, important and luxury needs? How are they being met today?
- What must be or could be substituted? With what? From where? (Of course, not everything can be provided locally and some trade will always exist, as it always has done, across the region, the country or the globe for those items that we can’t provide here).
- Of this, what could be provided locally that isn’t at the moment? What local resources and assets do we have (energy, material, human etc.)?
- What skills and labour will we need that’s different from today? How might we best re-train, re-skill?
- How can this major shift in our local economy and livelihoods be financed? What options exist besides global banks/financial markets?
Peak oil and climate change-related issues are providing a fantastic opportunity for our local economy to provide an increasing percentage of our community’s goods and services, particularly as the resource/energy constraints and true prices come into play, and it is no longer always cheaper to make things out of plastic in China.
Supporting our transition to the new economy
Once this kind of mapping work has helped to highlight the best economic opportunities, support needs to be offered to existing businesses and organisations to help them to make a well-planned and proactive shift. The Transition Network is building a set of services specifically aimed at the organisations already operating in our communities. These services will help the management and employees to understand how peak oil and climate change will likely affect their operations and their profit margins, and help them to explore potentially more viable, sustainable operational models that make the most of the opportunities, while minimising the risks. These services are being offered by Transition Training & Consulting. For example, the Energy Resilience Assessment service helps a business or organisation to understand and quantify its own risk to rising oil/energy prices, and starts to identify possible solutions.
At the same time new business start-ups and entrepreneurs will need to be nurtured and supported. Within the TTT E&L group a sub-group called ‘Growing New Businesses’ has been identifying what these needs might be. The aims of the sub-group are to (1) foster and support transition-related commercial opportunities and businesses and (2) encourage resilient, sustainable business operations in line with the transition ethos. – see link for more info http://totnes.transitionnetwork.org/economicsandlivelihoods/growingbusiness/home
Having great working examples is also important to help provide further incentive to act. Dartington’s Landscope project is already providing tangible evidence of how businesses (commercial and not-for-profit) can successfully and sustainably add value to local resources and rural assets, while at the same time working together in a mutually supportive relationship.
Where do we go from here?
This section aims to provide some context to the work of the TTT E&L group and share our initial thinking about how we might transition successfully, and as smoothly as possible, to a new economy here in Totnes & District. We believe there are great opportunities that go hand in hand with the challenges and uncertainty that peak oil and climate change bring.
To do this it’s essential that we form an effective, representative working group made up of people who run local businesses and organisations here in Totnes & District, and which can build on the TTT projects already undertaken with the local Chamber of Commerce and other partners. Together we can plan the activities that will give us all the best chance of surviving and thriving in these times of change, and helping contribute to the resilience of our entire community. This will form the basis of our Economics & Livelihoods Energy Descent Action Plan and initial activities are likely to include:
- Build a ‘Transition Action Group’ of local businesses and organisations
- Mapping the local community’s needs for products and services
- Import substitution analysis
- Inventory of all local assets and resources – create database so all can see what is available locally already
- Identify skill gaps
- Explore alternative financing systems e.g. mutual credit clearing, alternative currencies, localisation of savings and investments, local banks and bond issues, community ownership,
If you run or can represent a business or organisation locally, and would like to find out more about our group then please contact us at economicsandlivelihoods.totnes@transitionnetwork.org
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