Concluding Remarks

Photo.1 Community engagement is a key to climate change mitigation & adaptation (Reference: Gutierrez & Anderson, 2016)

Over the last couple of months, I have discussed on how community contributes to addressing climate change related issues. With a primary focus being placed upon energy, I have found that community involvement / engagement is vital to develop the most appropriate mitigation and adaptation strategies because they are essentially 'the most affected and the greatest contributing actors all together'.

The primary idea first emerged when I wrote my post titled "Conceptualizing Global Climate Change As 'Our Struggle'", yet, I could not give theoretical explanation of the idea because it has recently emerged as social phenomenon. In order to understand these, I made a number of peer reviews on renewable energy development with Germany's Energiewende as a particular example. This is where I encountered contemporary theories that explain the emergence and development of community initiatives.

Among these is institutional arrangements theory that looks into the organizational structure of political economy. As I mentioned in the earlier post, it is a way of describing how politics is structured by non-political traits such as socio-cultural and economic aspects of the community. There are the four types of institutional logics the combination of which comprises the theory; market-oriented system; state-oriented system; community-oriented system; and corporatist association order (Oteman et al, 2014).

At this point, however, I realized that the extent to which community plays a role in developing local initiatives like RE cannot simply be examined through one spectrum like national politics or community capacity. Indeed, what is the best combination of the four logics above to the emergence and development of community initiatives is very different both spatially and temporally. In Germany, for example, the emergence of RE was achieved following nationwide community movement against nuclear power and fossil fuel economy whereas its development has been accelerated by the legal binding force like FITs that the government introduced. Now, the further development of RE in Germany is largely dependent upon how the Big Four compete / cooperate with community power, how they cope with the biophysical constraints in RE production, and the degree of government's intervention. To sum, the degree of community roles in deriving the most appropriate management solution is not constant but changes over time.

Similarily, the incentives for involving community also frequently fluctuate over time (see my previous blog post). Whether their motives are based upon 'sympathy for those who suffer from climate change in developing countries', 'financial incentives to develop RE' or 'grants and prizes for saving energy', their incentive effects often temporal in nature. It is because people do not understand what is really problematic and how it affects their individual life.

Therefore, engaging community in decision-making for climate change mitigation & adaptation (RE development as an example) requires to personalize climate change issues as their own struggle. I discussed how this can be achieved in my previous post as well, with an example of the LCCVP. This is a conceptual framework in which 'local' climate change scenarios are presented with visual aids. This community-based approach helps community members link the global climate change with themselves therefore changes their perspectives. In this way, people start to derive the incentives from their own values to engage in community projects for climate change. The title of my previous blog post 'Think Globally, Act Locally' reflects this idea. Indeed, this transition of individual's perspectives on climate change is a key to sustainable community action to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Photo.2 You cannot dismiss the importance of community in the era of global climate change (Reference: Craig Edmonds, 2016)

To conclude, community engagement in climate change mitigation and adaptation is necessary, yet, its sustainability is achieved only if community members perceive climate change as something affects their individual life. This leads to greater community participation in sustainable way. However, it is also important to note that the degree of the roles community play in developing climate change mitigation like RE development does not remain constant but changes over time. Therefore, we need to pay a great attention to what kinds of structural arrangements of the four institutional logics are required to develop the best possible management solution in climate change policy and projects, at a particular ‘space’ and ‘time’. I hope you enjoyed reading my blog posts over the last few months. Thank you very much for reading my posts and sharing some ideas and questions. It was a really enjoyable journey! Now that I will stop blogging for a while because I will focus on other University work. Hopefully, I will one day come back here and start writing on this topic again! Thanks all! x

'Think globally, Act Locally'

In the last few posts, I wrote some detailed peer reviews on community roles in developing renewable energy. Today, I would like to relate these theories with climate change mitigation and adaptation measures.

In the study undertaken by Sheppard et al (2011), it is argued that most of climate change studies have placed a great emphasis on global and national levels and have ignored community level involvement. It is considered to be a serious problem to be addressed because the majority of the consequence of climate change is primarily felt at local level, such as flooding, drought and freshwater deficit (Riedy et al, 2013) It is applied to the global North-South theory where the South is the most severely affected by climate change than the North. It is due to the lack of knowledge and resources to develop the capacity to adapt. 

At community level, this is more significant because community-level governance is often influenced by the national policy, which does not always consider the heterogeneity of the community characteristics including local economy, cultures, values and ethics (Roncoli et al, 2011). Essentially, good governance considers the local concerns and shared values and integrate them into their local economy. I have briefly discussed the friction between the national and community level governance in my old blog post here. 

The needs for developing community oriented capacity have long been discussed by many researchers. Grimm et al (2008) highlight the fact that more than 75% of the global CO2 emissions are from cities and urban areas. This means that a sum of local emissions is the largest contributor to climate change. Others insist that 'community level is the scale that matters most to decision makers and the community', and that 'the local community is where "the rubber meets the road" in implementing GHG emission reductions or adaptation measures through policies and projects' (Moser and Dilling, 2007). Indeed, they are those who both contribute to and are affected by the effects of climate change. 

The implication of the above is that climate change mitigation & adaptation strategy should be developed and practiced at local level so that individual stakeholders change their attitude. Examples of community action include energy saving, community 3R programme, community power development, or community movement against certain industries such as deforestation for land, fossil fuel and mining activity. However, their attitude is not simply changed by 'paper' or 'news', about the recent IPCC report, for instance. It is often the case that people tend to lose interest in climate change after showing an immediate response to a particular event (AccuWeather, 2014). 

Interestingly, one study suggests that neither negative nor positive media reports on climate change have only a short-term effect on public opinion (Anderegg et al, 2014). They measured the frequency of people scouring the internet for climate change related information. The graph below shows the transition of the public interest, with a blue line representing global warming and a red one climate change. 

Figure.1 shows a time-scale change in relative interest in climate change issues based upon the statistical data. Red represents global warming and blue climate change (Reference: Anderegg et al (2014))

Obviously, the data above is only based upon the statistical data of internet search, yet, it highly suggests that people are inclined to constantly gain and lose interest in climate change. This can be a serious constraint when it comes to developing community-based adaptive measure. This reflects the finding I have discussed in the earlier post that the community engagement is primarily 'voluntary' and therefore can easily deteriorate after a certain length of time unless their motivation is maintained. 

Furthermore, the study conducted by Leviston et al (2011) reveal the fact that a large proportion of the community in Australia does not even believe in climate change, which prevents them from making efforts to agree with climate change adaptation. Others may believe that climate change is happening but does not fully accept the need to respond urgently (Riedy et al, 2013). 

Based upon the argument above, what I think is required to engage community is essentially to change their perspectives because that is how community engagement can become 'sustainable'. In the study by Sheppard et al (2011), they suggest a series of requirements to improve 'a process for building both awareness and capacity for developing climate change solutions at the community level'. Here, we have a set of general criteria that has been distilled from seminal literature review on this topic (Moser and Dilling, 2007), as follows:

• an engaging, accessible process;
• understandable information;
• salient information for local stakeholders and decision-makers (i.e. linked to things that people can identify with and which they care about);
• appropriate affective responses that are personally relevant and motivating;
• salient information for local public and decision-makers (i.e. linked to things that people can identify with and which they care about) (Sheppard et al, 2011)

Essentially, the above criteria emphasizes the importance of providing sufficient & accessible knowledge and resources and appropriate communication. These are then integrated into the following three requirements:

1. Bring the climate change information down to the local level and engage local stakeholders in the process
2. Use holistic scenarios which combine multiple aspects of climate change, for instance: a broad range of scenario drivers; impacts and responses; and both adaptation and mitigation strategies
3. Use visual tools to maximize interest and engagement, achieve rapid learning, and foster public interaction with the emerging action plans and solutions (Sheppard et al, 2011)

As you can see, these are all theoretical explanations about how community develops the capacity. To give a more insight into the theory, I would now like to introduce 'the Local Climate Change Visioning Project (LCCVP)', which was conducted in British Columbia. The project has two primary objectives. The first goal is to develop 'a coherent framework and prototype process to localize, spatialize, and visualize climate change effects and policy responses at a neighbourhood or community level, i.e. in the community’s ‘backyards’, looking out as far as 2100 (Sheppard et al, 2011). The second is to examine how this framework can be utilized to develop 'a holistic and plausible set of alternative futures, in order to build awareness and capacity within the community by making explicit links between local action and global change' (Sheppard et al, 2011).

There are two components of the framework, namely, a scenario ‘‘cube’’ (Figure.2) and a new type of "participatory visioning process" which integrates 2-4D visualisation tools (Figure.3-5) to represent the scenarios to the local community (Shaw et al, 2009; Sheppard et al, 2011). The scenario cube is basically a 3D cube that integrates a spectrum of four distinct emission, impacts, response scenarios or tiers, over a range of three distinct time periods, across a spectrum of distinct landscape types or case study communities (Sheppard et al, 2011). This helps understand the effects of climate change in different spectrum, and clarify what combination of mitigation and adaptation measure is the most appropriate for what purposes. This is particularly useful for local community decision-makers in developing their policies. 

Figure.2 shows a conceptual framework of the cube scenario (Reference: Sheppard et al, (2011)). 

By contrast, participatory visioning process is a system which helps integrate 'existing local climate change studies and engages climate scientists, local experts, and community stakeholders in a local working group; their role is to help fill key data gaps, develop final scenarios, and advise on visualisation preparation' (Sheppard et al, (2011) Figure.3 below is a flow chart that shows how the system is processed. Basically, the system produces a visual representation of the consequence of climate change. The 3D and 4D examples are shown in Figure.4 and 5 below. 

It conveys a strong message to individual viewers, and I think it helps them not only understand the consequence of scenarios described in the cube model but also conceptualize climate change as something that matters their personal life. This is an essential element of both attracting and sustaining community engagement in climate change mitigation & adaptation because their incentives are fundamentally coming from their own. This relates to my earlier blog post titled 'Conceptualizing Global Climate Change As 'Our Struggle' here. 

Figure.3 is a flow chart that explains the process of participatory visioning process (Reference: Sheppard et al, 2011)

Figure.4 shows a three dimensional visualization of statistically downscaled data for snow pack in Greater Vancouver’s Northshore mountains, showing April 1st median snowline in

2000 (current conditions on right) and 2100 (Reference: David Flanders (CALP) and Environment Canada in Sheppard et al, (2011)

Figure. 5 shows a four dimensional visualisations of Scenarios 1–4 in South Delta, BC (from top left to right, to bottom left to right). (a) Scenario 1 illustrates more frequent flooding and abandonment of houses in 2100; (b) Scenario 2 shows a berm as an adaptation strategy in 2100; (c) Scenario 3 includes incremental retrofits of raised housing and solar panels in 2100; (d) Scenario 4 depicts more rapid retrofitting and low-carbon redevelopment with energy- and food-producing clusters, resilient to projected impacts, in 2050. (Reference: David Flanders, CALP/DCS/UBC in Sheppard et al, (2011)

Some critics argue that uncertainty is often involved in running scenarios because the regional climate and consequences does not always result from their own action but are also largely influenced by the global scenarios. Thus, it is difficult for community to assess the choices in responding to climate change (Sheppard et al, 2011). Nonetheless, uncertainty is something that always exists in science, like shown in various climate change scenarios stated by IPCC (2015). This implies that the accuracy of scenario should not deter all the possible choices community is given. Instead, Gardner et al (2009) insist that community should be honest with uncertainty but try to simply it by indicating 'what is common to the different scenarios and projections, and by drawing comparisons to uncertainties in other areas'. They argue that it can be useful to present action in response to climate change as a risk management issue, rather than implying that climate change is “proven” (Gardener et al, 2009). In this way, the scenarios described above can be an useful tool for building awareness and capacity for behaviour change from their own, policy development, and decision-making in the community. 

To conclude, community engagement is essential in climate change mitigation and adaption because they are the most affected as well as the contributing actors. However, simply raising awareness is not enough to sustain their engagement. It is concluded that more community-based approach with a conceptual framework exemplified in the LCCVP is needed. Although uncertainty in climate change scenarios makes it impossible to draw a full picture of local scenarios, it still helps develop and maintain community engagement by communicating the knowledge and limitation effectively. The important thing is to foster the individual sense of concerns over climate change so that the incentives to act against the issue are derived from their own. This concept is also discussed in the case of renewable energy development I blogged about earlier. Yes, 'think globally, act locally' is what we all need in addressing the global climate change. I hope you now see the evolution of my blog in discussing the roles of community over time. Any comment or questions are welcome as always! 

Theoretical Understanding of Energy Transition in Germany Part 4 (Final) - Critical Reviews on Germany's Energiewende

Over the last couple of months, this blog has placed a primary focus on what roles community plays in renewable energy development, taking Germany as an example. As discussed earlier, community power is highly associated with the emergence of RE projects whereas its development is considered to be accelerated through the state's involvement. This is attributed to the fact that a small-scale business cannot compete with big utility companies which both benefit from economies of scale and the possession of key infrastructure such as grid systems. What I have realized through examining their development is that there are two distinct meanings of community power. First is 'multiple individuals pooling resources (such as space, money, and skills) in order to mutually benefit from a shared renewable energy project', which is generally accepted as a definition of community power (Sustainable Enterprises Media, 2016). Whether the power produced by renewables is sent to the grid in long distance or used on site to offset electricity usage, community power generation is locally owned and collectively operated. The second is more of political power which can influence the energy policy of the entire nation. In this post, I would like to share my reviews on this topic with the findings above.

Photo.1 (Reference: Friends of the Earth Europe, 2013).

As I have already discussed in earlier posts, community renewable energy initiatives began to emerge in many parts of Germany when anti-nuclear movements become dominant in 70s - 80s (National Geographic, 2015). One of the most famous examples is the abandonment of the construction of a nuclear power plant in Wyhl near Freiberg (Details described in my old post here). Their collective value against nuclear power turned the locals to become publicly active enough to keep demonstrating against the plan (National Geographic, 2015). The movement spread across nationwide, which gradually formed a political party, known as 'Green Party' in 80s. This certainly reflects the second definition of community power I have mentioned at the beginning. Essentially, Germany's long history of green politics including relatively earlier FIT introduction and extensive financial support for RE is consolidated by the power of community.

Todays, their political power is strong enough to further accelerate the country's green movement, including the recent decision to phase out nuclear power plants following the Fukushima disaster despite the ruling parties were primarily pro-nuclear (Major Economies and Climate Change, 2014). With the climate change negotiation going for a couple of decades, there is also a huge pressure to decarbonize the nation by diverting the investment on conventional energy system such as domestic lignite and other imported fossil fuels, which are dominantly managed by big utility comapnies. This has come with the further growth of community RE since 2000 when Renewable Act, which is known as a new FIT system, was implemented. For instance, half of wind energy is produced by individuals / communities or wind cooperation.

Nevertheless, large utility companies would not just let community energy initiatives keep going. For example, Vattenfall, is the Swedish state-owned company that recently started investing on a large-scale offshore wind projects (Vattenfall, 2015). They used to be a primary exploiter of lignite (and still are), yet, the public interest in clean energy has encouraged them to embark on the completely new strategy, the energy mix (National Geographic, 2015). In April 2015, 80 offshore wind turbines in the North Sea were inaugmented, called 'Dantysk Project (Dantysk Offshore Wind, 2015). It is expected to produce enough renewable electricity that supports the households, subway and tram lines in Munich by 2025 (National Geographic, 2015). Similarly, E.ON, the other utility company now divide their business area into the one devoted to contemporary energy such as coal, gas and nuclear and the other to renewables (Reuters, 2014). Despite half of the current wind energy is owned by individual households or community cooperation, it is expected that the share of these large companies will rise in the future (Oteman et al, 2014).

Photo.2 Offshore wind turbines in Germany's North Sea (Reference: NHST Media Group, 2015).

This seems, at least to me, a positive outlook to Germany's RE development because large companies have greater funds to develop RE more quickly than community power. However, some critics argue that it could price out community energy companies of the market. Considering the temporality of FIT systems, the future climate seems rather dim to small-scale projects because they do not have economies of scale like big companies. The consequence is either relinquishing of business or mergence with the Big Four. I suppose the former is less likely because energy is a type of staple product that needs to be constantly produced and distributed to consumers. By contrast, the latter case is more viable and acceptable if the quality of services and the electricity prices remain at reasonable levels. This raises a question that whether community 'ownership' is a prerequisite for community energy project management.

As I insisted in the earlier post, I believe that community ownership is essential at the beginning of community initiatives, yet, this may not be the case in the long term. It reflects the argument made by Harvey and Reed (2007) that the participation of community in the development of local initiatives is necessary but the community management is not. In other words, community should have the right to decide how projects will be managed even including the decision to let non-community-owned companies to operate the facility (Newton, 2013). I assume that It is because ownership is rather symbolic than something functional. This means that the difference between community-owned and non-community-owned projects is a stronger psychological effect of the project on the locals to become proud of themselves achieving their own initiative. The only reason why I insist that ownership is essential at the onset of project is that Germany has a strong sense of community and the grassroots movement is very typical (National Geographic, 2015), therefore, the incentives for energy projects need to be derived from their own. This bottom-up view is presented in the interview to some German that 'there's a certain rebelliousness that's a result of the Second World War' that 'you don't blindly accept authority' (National Geographic, 2015). This is not to say that government is not trustworthy or reliable but that people are inherently skeptical of and challenge the government. As I said earlier, this is reflected in the politics of community power.

To conclude, community's involvement is a key aspect of Germany's energiewende and so will be in the future. With large utility companies entering the RE market, it is likely that community-level RE cooperation/company is gradually taken over by the former. However, whether the ownership remains in the community or is handed over to outside company is not something we must worry about. Rather, community participation to discuss the future management of their RE facility is more important, so that they feel being continuously engaged. Also, community's political power is inevitable in developing Germany's energiewende over the course of transition in the way that shapes the energy politics of the entire nation. Although it is anticipated that the growth of community RE will slow down for the above reason, their political influence on Germany's energy sector will not be dismissed. If you have any thoughts please don't hesitate to share them with me here!