Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Bill

The importance of microgeneration and a community approach

The Community Renewables Initiative helps make the issue of climate change real rather than abstract to people. The government partners backing the initiative are addressing its future through 2005/06, to secure its wider adoption across England.

 

Modest government funds could enable this approach to ‘low-carbon challenge for communities’ to be adopted on a widespread basis.

 

As well as bringing direct benefits across communities, this approach could help people and organisations become actively aware of the need to adopt more low carbon activities.

 

The Countryside Agency and DTI funded Community Renewables Initiative (CRI) helps local people and organisations devise and implement renewable energy developments which:

 

• are environmentally sensitive
• have the support of all stakeholders
• are appropriate to the circumstances of the locality
• link to other diversification and regeneration schemes.

 Using 10 Local Support Teams, the CRI gives ongoing guidance to communities, through all the steps associated with installing renewable energy, such as feasibility studies, funding, technology issues, planning, environmental assessment, and public participation.

 

Across England the Community Renewables Initiative has helped deliver 89 renewable energy developments and advance a further 260.

 

The projects include schools, farms, housing associations, visitor centres and community shops.

 

All of them are genuine community ventures. The benefits include local income, skills, livelihoods, and people realising what renewable energy is about, how it works and what it achieves. 

 

The developments include wind turbines, hydropower, photovoltaic solar panels, solar hot water, heat pumps, biogas, and wood heat.

 

Our experience through the Community Renewables Initiative shows that communities can be guided to support low-carbon activities, and can innovate according to their own skills and situation.

 

An example is the community process in Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire, summarised below.

 

Bishop’s Castle Community Project

Local people in Bishop’s Castle spent 6 months in 2004 surveying the population, discovering our carbon footprint, and writing a strategy for tackling it.

 

The result is that Bishop’s Castle is the first community in the UK to have a bottom up climate change strategy.

 

The result will be that the community in Bishop’s Castle will demonstrate the ability and the mechanisms to reduced carbon by 4% pa (against the national target of 1.9% pa) and do it in a way that provides local employment, gives local energy security and can act as a template for other communities.

 

The Community Renewables Initiative will continue to assist this community process and help secure funds to implement it.

 

This approach both challenges and supports communities to adopt low carbon activities, which they are motivated to achieve through gaining new skills and new income.

 

Climate change proofing

The Countryside Agency participates on the Defra Rural Climate Change Panel. The panel has suggested that climate change proofing be introduced.

 

This would help ensure that climate change mitigation and adaptation measures were built into all relevant government policies and actions.

 

The proofing process should ensure that 'climate change resilience is built into policy making at all levels (and not as an alternative to climate change avoidance measures such as fuel switching and transport reform). This should be a routine procedure for all policy making.

 

All new policies, plans and programmes should incorporate proposals for climate change robustness, as integral points, not as add-ons.

 

Climate change proofing could reinforce this and gauge the adequacy of such proposed measures, and point to good practice on climate change robustness.

 

Climate change may have significant negative impacts upon landscape character, either directly or indirectly, however, we believe measures to address and mitigate climate change can, and should, be designed to enhance landscape character.

 

To return to the briefings menu please click here