Winchester Young People's Climate Assembly

Back in November I spent a Saturday participating in the Winchester District Young People's Climate Assembly, organised by a number of local groups and held in the University of Winchester's Business School. Excitingly, it was the city's first Citizens' Assembly, a group of people brought together to learn about, discuss, and make recommendations on an issue or set of issues. The aim was to explore what young people in the District, aged between 16 and 30, want to see in a zero-carbon future and think should be done to get there faster but fairly. 

Power. Intersectionality. Action. We were charged to remember these three things over the course of the day. That is - that we have power collectively; that climate justice cannot happen without social justice; and that it is vitally important to actually take action.

(If you don't know what intersectionality is, it basically means that various factors such as race, gender, sexuality, age, disability, poverty, etc, overlap. They exist on their own but compound to form unique life experiences and challenges, and determine who has power and privilege in our society and who does not. Anyone wanting to tackle a social justice issue must consider and try to understand the multiple ways in which a person or group may be impacted, and make sure they are included in discussions and listened to. For example, people on low incomes and people of colour are more likely to be exposed to pollution, less able to afford organic and sustainable products, and less likely to be invited to join the conversation (or to have the time, money, or energy to attend) and have their say in creating change. So, climate justice is totally interwoven with social justice, it cannot happen without it.)

After the introductions, the day kicked off with talks by expert speakers on energy, transport, homes, food, and lifestyles. After that, we had about an hour to discuss on our tables what we thought were the main challenges around those topics. After lunch (which was a delicious vegan buffet held in the new sustainable West Downs Centre next door), a local Councillor talked about the roles of Councils and how they can be influenced, and then we each chose one of the five topics to focus on for the afternoon and moved to new tables, where in groups we discussed actions that could be taken to help reach a zero-carbon future faster. The day then rounded up with everyone voting on the suggested actions, and the organisers and guest Councillors giving responses.

I warn you - this is not a concise review of the event, it is long post of my notes taken over the day. Obviously there was a lot of information to take in, all of it fascinating, so I couldn't note down every point. I wish I had a copy of the slides used by the speakers, but that's probably a good thing for this post, as it would be even longer if I had that extra info, haha.

Expert talks

Transport and liveable places (by Sustrans South)

• Older towns and villages that existed before WW2 are/were more livable - they were small, walkable, and all or most amenities residents would need could be found within the centre. That is not the case now, and developers don't often consider this when creating village-sized swathes of new housing. 
• Electric vehicles will still produce around 14 tonnes of CO2 over their lifetime, 10 of which is just to make it. Nor can they be made fast enough to fulfill the demand for new cars by 2030 when the no-new-fossil-fuel-cars law comes into effect. We have to reduce our use of private cars.
• Lots of our infrastructure doesn't work for us.
• Demographics are changing - e.g. young people are driving less and having fewer children - but infrastructure isn't changing to reflect that.
• We need to rethink public spaces. Make places equitable and liveable first. "Healthy Streets". Create neighbourhoods, designed around people not cars. (The speaker said about how she lives on a busy road, an unpleasant and unsafe place to stop and have a chat with neighbours - as a result, they don't know each other, there's no sense of neighbourhood and community and no interest in making the area nicer.)

Sustainable homes / Building design (by Guy Derwent Architects)

• We need intelligent design with passive sustainability. This takes into account the effect of natural resources like sunlight, wind, and vegetation on the site when designing the building's lighting, heating, and ventilation systems etc, and takes advantage of them. E.g. face the main living area south to get the most light, even if that means the houses on a street aren't in a straight line, and place a sun shade over windows at an angle that will shade the interior during summer and let light in during winter. Or orient houses so that gardens get the most light, better for growing food. Again, designing places for people first rather than what is going to be most profitable.
• The average lifespan of a building in England is just 50 years.

Food (by Winchester Food Partnership)

• Eat less but better meat - locally reared, grass fed, high welfare, etc.
• We need less protein than we think - the average woman needs 50g a day.
• Plant-based diets are not necessarily more sustainable or environmentally-friendly. As with everything, it depends where and how a product was made, what resources were needed, how the farmland was created and is used, how the people working there are treated and paid, the supply chain, how much the product is processed, how and how far it is transported to the consumer, etc.
• We need more community composting.
• Do we focus on encouraging dietary changes or reducing food waste?

Lifestyle changes (by the founder of Earthian Zero-Waste Shop)

• Plastic can only be recycled 2-3 times.
• Less than 9% of plastic ever produced has been recycled.
• We need closed-loop supply chains, for example where suppliers take back empty containers and refill them. (Circular economy.)
• There is only 1 landfill site left in Hampshire (at the moment), a lot of waste goes to energy recovery plants (waste is burnt to produce electricity).
• Best to worst: Refuse (say no), Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Rot (bin).
• Maybe start by making one change per month to make it more manageable.

The talk on energy was given by a rep from Wessex Green Hub, but I didn't take any notes on that for some reason. She mentioned Doughnut Economics, though, which is a cool framework for sustainable development. And the idea of local energy production, such as lots of miniature power plants each generating and providing energy to a street or two or three.

Challenges

Sustainable and affordable housing

• Acquiring long-term thinking and strategies instead of focusing on short-term profit
• Evaluating current building use more
• Making sustainable development more economically viable for developers
• Getting developers to engage with and consider the needs and wants of the public (e.g. what amenities would be useful in a new development, gardens/allotments on the roofs of blocks of flats or offices, communal spaces to foster community, etc.)
• Getting the government to address things from the top down, e.g. put into law building regulations such as double insulation, triple glazing, solar panels, heat recovery, rainwater harvesting, green roofs etc for every new building
• Developers are set in their ways. Target councils, housing associations, local organisations to make decisions, change their policies and standards for what developments they approve, put pressure on from the grassroots level.

Food

 - How to support those on lower incomes to buy better

 - How to eradicate the discourse that continues consumption (not just food)

 - How to make people more open to diet change

Lifestyle changes

 - How to scale up sustainable products to supermarkets

 - How to support employers and local businesses to be sustainable and support sustainable working

 - How to celebrate small changes rather than dismiss as "not good enough"

Energy

 - How to reduce energy consumption

 - How to decentralise energy production and make it more local and zero-carbon

 - How to better share energy use

Transport

 - How to improve public transport - cost, reach, accessibility - cheap and fast

 - How to incentivise main demographic users of private cars to use public/clean transport

Council duties, responsibilities, and how to influence them

District/borough councils (in this case Winchester City Council) are responsible for council housing, planning for businesses and homes (use of land/buildings, appearance, landscaping, environmental impact, etc.), the Local Plan, housing benefit, housing the homeless, household waste collection, car parks, leisure spaces like parks, and air quality. County Councils are responsible for roads, highways, and pavements, cycleways, waste disposal, planning for minerals and waste, flooding, and buses.

Regarding energy, Councils can do what they like on their own land - so for example there is a lot of potential for County Councils to generate energy on the roofs of schools and care homes. With transport, councils can have policies but no decision-making powers because most public transport is now privately-owned. With buildings, again councils have their own buildings, and can set standards for the design and construction of buildings to ensure health and safety. With food, WCC has the Environmental Health Department which monitor restaurants, noise, air quality, etc, and HCC buy food for schools and has some farms.

So how to influence the councils?

• Official ways - Write to councillors. Attend Full Council meetings, and make a deputation (10 minute talk) on any topic to the County Council, or ask a question to the District Council (however you must be registered to vote in that area). Attend a Committee meeting and make a deputation on an agenda item. Petitions. Run for election.
• Unofficial ways - Campaigning (best as a team - recruit, build case including surveys). Get lots of people to write to councillors. Write to papers. Media/social media.

Proposed actions

Transport / liveable places: Ban cars in the city centre, but maintain a single bus lane and access for hired mobility scooters and timed deliveries. Subsidise buses for everyone (including free bus travel for under-16s and Universal Credit recipients), paid for by increasing residents' parking permits and workplace parking levies based on vehicle emissions. Improved and continuous street lighting for safety, solar-powered and with motion-sensors. Increase extent of bus routes outside of city centre, especially out to rural communities. Cycle highways linked to network of cycle lanes.

Energy: Infrastructure upgrades for social housing that includes district heating, electricity for charging EVs, internet - cheaper if done all in one go. Open up roofs of public buildings for community renewable energy projects. Change Planning to ease installation of renewables. All council parking to include wide availability of EV charging. Visible and celebrated generation of renewable energy and supporting information at all schools and hospitals.

Housing: Student housing needs to be warm, dry, and affordable - create tenant unions, regulate landlords, have rent caps. [Frankly that should apply to all housing not just student.] National regulation on new builds to create sustainable homes - Councils need to lobby central government. Affordable retrofitting with well-administered grants and accessible financing. Increase council housing stock and make them pleasant homes. Counter NIMBYism - more brownfield site development, avoid wealth-influenced decisions.

Food: Community campaign to educate and change behaviours on food waste. Household food waste collections by Council (e.g. Eastleigh Borough Council do this). Council incentives to encourage more sustainable food businesses with more accessible opening hours. Local organisations and councils to encourage more sustainable diets by offering sustainable choices and education (e.g. by serving those foods). Council to develop a Local Plan for local food (e.g. including more community gardens/allotments and spaces for growing food).

Lifestyles: Free access to green spaces by public transport during school holidays. Audit empty spaces in towns to give room for sustainable businesses and homes. Councillors actively engaging with young people more. Funding youth climate activities and pathways into environmental jobs. Smarter planning to allow people to live their lives locally. Divest pension funds from fossil fuels.

After the participants voted on the actions - we were given 10 sticky dots to place on our favourites - the organisers and guest Councillors reviewed them and made a response. It was mostly very positive and encouraging, but a local Councillor also gave reasons why some of the actions would be really difficult to do - which was good and useful, and largely appreciated, he didn't do it in a dismissive way.

...

Obviously, there will be reasons why all of those proposed actions would be difficult or have a negative impact on a group of people. But they're a starting point for discussion, compromise, and taking action. Whether or not recommendations made by Citizens' Assemblies are followed is up to politicians, but CAs are increasingly being used and listened to. We in the UK are technically a 'democratic' country - and we do indeed have freedoms and rights that many countries across the world do not - but in reality there is hardly any public participation in the way our country is run, we have very little say and almost no way to hold the people in power to account. Citizens' Assemblies are an important part of a more democratic future. Along with more action.

If you've read this far, thank you! I know it's a long post. I really enjoyed this event, and I hope they organise future ones, and bigger ones with more than 25 participants and voices from a range of backgrounds. The organisers will be presenting the list of actions to both local councils soon, and letting us know their response. It was so energising to be around like-minded people who really care about these issues too. Especially people younger than me, many still teenagers, passionate and no-nonsense - the sort of people who, when somebody says "Well, no it's not fair but that's just the way it is" respond with "So make it fair!". When the local Councillor made his response at the end, two girls on one of the tables spoke up and said that actions like the ones proposed need to be taken, no ifs, no buts. They need to happen; adults - councils, businesses, governments, normal people - need to start making them happen, standing up to powerful individuals and corporations. There have been four decades and more to take the actions needed and it hasn't been done, and now we are the ones being left to clear up the accumulated mess. We're simply telling you what needs to be in place for us to start doing that. We've had enough of the myth of unlimited growth, and profit over people and planet, and exploitation, and rampant consumerism and short-term thinking and ecological destruction and all of it. We want a better world. 

There is widespread apathy, and a big reason for that is simply the scale of the problem. It is enormous, too big for most of us to see as we go about our daily lives with the more immediate stressors that occupy our thoughts. It is enormously complex, like a vast web, and solutions to one issue will create conflict elsewhere. It's terrifying, and our minds shut the issues out so we don't get overwhelmed by them. Western society wants to be able to tackle climate change while still retaining the lifestyles and level of comfort that we have, but that's just not possible. We have to change, dramatically. The society and systems humanity have created are mind-blowingly complex. But that doesn't mean they can't be changed. We have to band together, step up, and find a way forward.

Thanks for reading!

New year, same me

Ah, New Year.

I've spent the last week stewing over writing something about resolutions, reflecting, and intentions (during breaks from stewing over college assignments...). I've never been one for New Year's Resolutions, but do quite like the gentler concepts of reflecting on the past year and what you've learned, and having general intentions for the year ahead, a list of things you'd like to do, or maybe a word or theme for the year. But, I'm not really any good at those things, either. Three years ago I wrote a blog post of intentions for 2019 but then proceeded to not do much about them. I chose the same 'word for the year' two years running because I didn't actually make any conscious effort to build it into my life. And I'm not the sort of person who can easily realise, remember, and articulate how I've grown in a certain area of life over a period of time.

I did start writing a list of things I would like to do this year, but at the third item it just began to feel like pressure. More about what I feel I should do rather than what brings me joy. They are things I would like to do, but I realised I don't have the headspace right now to spend time thinking about it, figuring out how to break them into actionable steps that don't put my brain into fear mode. Because that's the thing about 'resolutions' - our brains are literally not designed to keep them.

I love neuro-psychology (if that's the correct term - the relationships between our brain mechanisms and emotions and behaviour and evolution, etc, why we respond to things the way we do, maybe it's behavioural psychology, anyway!), so here's a fun and fascinating fact. Our brains are literally not designed to keep large, vague goals like New Year's Resolutions. Resolutions are usually quite big compared to what we do in our daily lives, so our brains are suddenly faced with the prospect of, say, going to the gym every day when you usually only go a few times a month. If we make goals that are too different from our current habits, too unfamiliar, our hunter-gatherer brain feels like it's in danger - and we flee, or freeze, or fight. So we need to break them down and start small, really small, with promises we know we can keep, and anchor them to the habits we already have in place.

One of the things I've wanted to do (well, honestly, felt I should do) for years is start journaling, because I know it's a good way to process feelings, increase self-understanding, and track progress, growth, and learning. But I am an overthinker and perfectionist who knows I would find it hard to just write, and I don't want to feel like I have nothing to write most days, or to look back and cringe at what I've written. But at Christmas my friend gave me a 2022 diary/planner, so I've decided to take that opportunity and use it as a journal. Instead of saying "I'm going to journal every day", I've broken it down a little and plan to write something about my day each night before switching the lamp off for sleep - and to put something like 'I don't feel I have anything to write about today' if that's the case. I've kept it up so far, but it feels quite strange, just writing about my day, it's not something I'll want to read back so part of me wonders what the point is in mentioning mundane things. But it's somewhere I can write about special days or moments, like the big family meet-up at the coast on New Year's Day, instead of just relying on photos for memories. And I'm hoping it will prove to be useful when I need to process emotions or something, as long as I do just write and don't overthink it. And it's somewhere I can write about interesting things I've read or learned.

We live in a culture that constantly tells us we should be doing more, moving faster, working harder. Improving. We internalise that message and feel bad about ourselves when we don't or can't do those things. I love Queer Eye but on one episode Bobby said "Your 20s are for working your ass off". Maybe. I sure don't, though. I don't know how. And I've been hard on myself about that. But writing this I've realised that actually maybe I do work my ass off, but it's just not at the level or speed I've been told I should be doing. And that certainly means it'll take me "longer" to "get" somewhere (compared to who, though? everyone's different), but I'm okay with that. I don't like hustle culture, so I'm not going to take any notice if it criticises me.

Personal growth is important and we sometimes do need to push ourselves. There is a place for uncomfortable truths and doing work to help us be better people in our interactions and relationships with others. There are things I would like to do, skills I would like to develop, and frustrating habits I would like to break. But thinking about it this week, I've stopped being so hard on myself about various things, including about struggling to reflect, make intentions, and take action. My brain isn't naturally geared to do such things and I haven't been taught to do them. Maybe journaling will help with processing and reflecting - heck, writing this post has helped with it, I've come to a few realisations - and they're things that I'll gradually find easier. Or not, and that's okay. I've decided to not pressure myself next New Year too, to reflect and make intentions, even to stay up till midnight if I'm at home. In a world that loves to ask young people where they see themselves in 5 or 10 years time, it's okay that I don't know what my life plans are and tend to figure it out on the way. The 'new beginning' energy of New Year makes it a nice time for starting something new or addressing something you'd like to change, sure, but it's not necessarily better than any other time of year. If you want to, great, go for it, but don't be hard on yourself, and break it down into small manageable steps. It doesn't have to be on the first of January, or of any month, or a new moon, or a solstice or equinox, or a Monday, or a date with a nice round number. It can be a random Thursday in July. Any day of the year. Whenever the inspiration strikes from something personal, whenever you want or need to. For now, I have enough to keep me occupied and to look forward to for a while yet.

Some good things from 2021: The gift of friendship and the joy of feeling accepted and that people want to spend time with you. A couple of great weekends away with friends. Creating a regular yoga practice. Passing the first year of my college course - and not only passing, but getting a Distinction. Doing well in driving lessons. Learning new things that help me understand and accept myself more and have a better idea of what I do and don't want.

Some things I'd like to do in 2022: Do more of what I enjoy. Don't be so hard on myself. Keep a journal. Eat more veggies. Grow some more veggies and herbs and flowers. Go for a walk more often, in daily life. Dance more often. Continue going on trips, solo and with others, and exploring the country. Learn to use the DSLR camera I was given in summer 2020. Make some photo albums. Continue remembering that done is better than perfect.

Word for the year: For the last two years I've chosen "Connection", but that's super vague so of course I haven't made any conscious effort, taken any thought-out action, to connect more in my life, be it to my family or friends or myself or the natural world. Which is why I've chosen it two years in a row. But, it's kind of happened anyway, I have connected more, happily. I've decided to make "Connection" my word, my focus, generally. It's always been something that I've wanted to feel more of in my life and still is, and will be for many years.

Take a few minutes to read through this lovely list of 100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying. 

Finally, I love what Fearne Cotton wrote on Instagram (although I know what she says is easier said than done!):

"New year, same old me.

I do not need to improve myself. You do not need to improve yourself.

I just need to love myself a little more. You just need to love yourself a little more.

When you love yourself you...

 - know when to rest

 - know when to push yourself creatively

 - stop hanging out with people that make you feel like sh*t

 - do more of what you actually love

 - don't beat yourself up so much when you make mistakes

 - and subsequently don't mind so much when others make mistakes

 - look after yourself

 - make sleeping and eating well a priority

 - let go of the past with ease

 - look to the future more positively

 - are up for trying new things.

It's definitely worth a go."

Thanks for reading! :)