COP after COP after .....

Maybe there is a better way forward?

The first conference of parties was in 1995. COP28 in the UAE will 31st. The Kyoto protocol was set down in 1997 and then came into force in 2005. The Paris Agreement was drawn up in 2015.

Lots of conferences and a Protocol and an Agreement over more than a quarter of a century. Lots of important people rushing around the globe to meet up and discuss what to do to limit global heating. At the COP26 there were more than 40,000 registered participants, including 22,274 party delegates, 14,124 observers and 3886 media representatives. It has been estimated that the event emitted about 102,500 tons of carbon dioxide.

So how well is it all going? How good are these important people at their job? Frankly if these important people had normal day jobs they would have been fired years ago. The latest figure for this years spring peak CO₂ level, as measured in Hawaii, was 424 parts per million (ppm), up by 3ppm from the previous year. This is the third biggest annual increase in recent times. As we all know pre-industrial CO₂ levels were around 280 ppm.

So CO₂ levels are rising and at an increasingly fast rate despite 23 years of climate conferences. It would seem that someone somewhere isn’t doing their job properly, or maybe there are some vested interests that are hindering things? Whatever the cause is inaction is taking humanity and the rest of the biosphere into unkown territory. We have to go back more the 4 million years to find CO₂ at today’s levels but a big difference between then and now is the rate at which CO₂ levels are rising, it was a much slower procees back in the day 4.5 million years ago.

CO₂ stays in the atmosphere for a while, between 65% and 80% of CO₂ released into the air dissolves into the ocean over a period of 20–200 years. However the slowing of the Atlantic meridional occilating current means that surface waters are not being mixed as much as before which is reducing their capacity to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. Anyway, the slow removal of CO₂ means that the gas released during the early part of the 20th century is still up there and we are adding to it.

It makes one wish that climatic heating was really just another conspiracy theory, but it’s not.

This all means that we have to actively reduce atmospheric CO₂ levels if we want to stave off some really unfortunate consequences. Our leaders are simply not taking this seriously enough and they are undoubtedly influenced by industrial lobbyists. Too little is happening and it would seem that we need to try a different tack, we cannot rely on nor wait for governments to act, we have to get on and do it ourselves.

Any major project becomes easier when it is split up into easily achievable bits, with the ‘bits’ being organised in such a way as to coherently lead to the ultimate goal. This would seem to be the approach best adapted to dealing with carbon emissions and most of the other problems with which we are confronted today. Ideally measures taken to reduce emissions will also address problems such as poor housing, inequity, poverty, social injustice, employement, food production and all the rest.

We have been indoctrinated in such a way that the ‘political compass’ in our heads tends to always point towards the central government. A problem arises and our compass immediately points ‘government’ and we all hope that the elected leaders will get on and do something about it. This despite the fact that in most cases government action is delayed, inadapted, slow and inefficient. This is subsequently noticed but our compass continues to point ‘government’ and so we wait for the next elections to try another set of elected leaders and so on and so forth.

It is time to readjust our political compasses so they point ‘my community’ instead. It is here that we can act and act now, we can elaborate coherent strategies to ensure that our communities rapidly become carbon negative, equitable, just, with good food, good housing and meaningful jobs in the local circular economy.

Take the example of village X, the inhabitants started working with the local farmers to encourage them to redirect a part of their production directly to the village. The farmers were also given help to transform their open fields into organic agroforestry systems. Hedges were replanted as well as areas of woodland. Within the village itself developed community orchard gardens were created and more space given over to vegetable garden areas.

With the help of the local authority the inhabitants undertook a housing quality assessement which revealed that many dwellings were leaking too much heat and a small percentage of houses were unfit for living. Working together the locals set about re-insulating the buildings and also rehabilitating the unfit houses to be adapted to purpose.

After these phases the villagers started to work out how they could produce the electricity and gas that they needed. Locally owned windturbines and a biogas plant linked to a combined heat and power system were installed.

Decisions were and are collectively taken using Pol.is, the local mayor and the local authority were linked into this system and enacted the decisions agreed on by the inhabitants. Some of the decisions taken were about how to avoid the inevitable gentrification that happens when people improve their communities, whether a village or a city neighbourhood. A charter was drawn up and signed by all the inhabitants which specified such things as : local people have priority when houses are for sale. Secondary homes have much higher local taxes levied on them. Incoming people must agree to the charter and to being active in helping the ecological restructuring of the village.

The villagers also set up some teams of experienced people who invited the inhabitants of neighbouring villages to come and visit. Over a meal they dicussed how the other villages could do similar things and they organised festive working parties to get things moving. They also started to develop a bioregional group of all the local villages in order to make decisions about how to regenerate the bioregion and how to manage it all more effectively. One of the first things this group decided was which areas could become nature reserves to help preserve and increase biodiversity.

Some of the inhabitants had family who lived in the local city and, just as with the neighbouring villages they sent teams to help set up urban based groups who would work to regenerate the city neighbourhoods.

The speed at which things were set up in the first village was an inspiration to others. To quote Julie the new mayor “we got sick and fed up of continually reading bad news about the state of the planet, we were upset by the stress our children were feeling, we got increasingly frustrated with the lack of any coherent response from the government. One day we just said to ourselves sod it! Let’s DIY it! And we did!”

Rapid, strategic, coherent action is better than morbid stressful inaction. It’s about time that we all ‘DIY it’.