Empowering
Communities to Reduce their CO2 Footprint
Household by Household, Neighbourhood
by Neighbourhood
A One Day
Workshop with David Gershon
It is estimated
that half of the UK’s carbon footprint comes from the residential
sector and up to 90% of a communities. If a local authority is to achieve
the annual 2% to 4% carbon reduction goal required of it by the National
Performance Framework Indicators it must develop an effective strategy
for reducing household carbon emissions. If 20% of the households in
a community reduce their emissions by 20% then the authority could
save 4% of its annual residential emissions.
New technologies
and renewal energy will not be available in the short run to help achieve
this, so the one practical carbon reduction strategy available to local
authorities is conservation. This is the low
hanging fruit in a community (and the country) for carbon reduction.
How to get at it this is the major question. Traditional approaches
at conservation of awareness and information campaigns have not been
effective in promoting behavioural change.
This situation
has so discouraged policy-makers in the past that this approach was
given its own dismal label by social scientists: “minimal effects.” What
is needed is a tool that can measurably and substantively change household
behaviour and be brought to scale community-wide.
The Empowerment Institute has successfully implemented and continuously refined such a behavioural change strategy through action research over the past 30 years with 20,000 people in the United States. This approach has been described by one academic research study as: "unsurpassed in changing behaviour."
Empowerment Institute has applied this research to the area of climate change and participants, using its programme, are reducing their carbon footprint by an average of 24%.
David
Gershon, founder and president of Empowerment Institute, and author
of the best selling book Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose
5,000 Pounds is leading a one day workshop in the UK to educate
local authorities about this carbon reduction strategy.
At this workshop you will learn:
Ø
4
barriers to people changing behaviour and how they can be overcome.
Ø
5
design principles of the Social Change 2.0 model for large scale transformational
change.
Ø
The
principles of behaviour change and community empowerment.
Ø
How
to use the diffusion of innovation model to create a tipping point in
social behaviour.
Ø
How
the Low Carbon Diet programme is achieving
an average household CO2 reduction of 24%.
Ø
How
communities in the United States are taking this program to scale through
a 3-year “Cool Community” campaign targeting a minimum 20%
C02 reduction of between 25% and 85% percent of the residents
of the community.
Ø
The
basic community engagement tools and organizing strategy for developing
a Cool Community campaign in your local authority.
