Media Statement

Paul Bruce is a Greater Wellington Regional Councillor. He also works half time as a Meteorologist and is one of the Met Service’s lead forecasters. He has lived in Brooklyn for the last 28 years and you might see him commuting round town on his bike but also sometimes on his carbon neutral electric scooter.

According to Paul, Wellington is a great place to be, and we do a lot right. But he argues we can do better. He argues we are unprepared for many changes that will happen in the coming decades. Our local economy is dependent on limited fossil fuels and there is not enough attention paid to long term sustainability. This is why he wants people to attend a "Pathways to Resilient Communities" event at Te Papa on Saturday March 7th to assess greater Wellington’s state of preparedness and develop ideas to improve our position.

PATHWAYS TO RESILIENT COMMUNITIES by Paul Bruce

Wellington city hums with a vibrancy you get from a denser inner core surrounded by a Green belt with pleasant walking and cycling routes combined with easy rail and bus access to outer suburbs. A cafe and art culture, together with up to 800 cultural and science based talks and events a year, fosters an intellectual buzz. The young flock to town, some just for entertainment but others contribute actively to community groups concerned with heritage and the environment. Living Streets and Frocks on Bikes are two such groups showing the will for social engagement. Both participated in the recent Cuba Street Carnival which attracted 150,000 people.

The greater Wellington region also swings, with its temperate climate, fertile soils and mostly plentiful water supplies. Wairarapa has the dry and warm conditions ideal for other fruits, forestry and animal husbandry. It is justifiably famous for its wine festivals and food markets. The Hutt provides another industrial base and like the Kapiti Coast, has a great climate for market gardens. Surrounded by waterways and native forest Porirua City has a vibrant Pasifika community and the popular annual Festival of the Elements.

The balance of urban and rural environments connected by a rail and road network in the Wellington region provides the foundation of a resilient region. However, though well-endowed, the region faces threats to its environment and well being through its inter-dependence on global trade and financial markets.

We are also vulnerable to earthquakes, Tsunami, and climate change impacts, such as more intense downpours, floods and droughts. After the catastrophic combination of heat wave and firestorms across the ditch in Australia over the recent month, nobody could remain unaware of the reality of global warming. Melting of the northern ice cap 40 years ahead of the most pessimistic predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change, and signs of a West Antarctic ice-sheet collapse, heighten worry over a catastrophic sea level rise this century.

The speed of technological advance over recent decades, on the back of cheap oil made real the dream of instant communication and overnight travel. Hip replacements and heart surgery became routine. Computers common place and cell phones and satellite television reached even village level in Africa. Yet this massive advance in science and technology did not translate into food on plates or clean water to drink for much of the world, nor in the decarbonisation of our economic systems in order to avoid dangerous climate change.

Cheap oil was squandered, and there are sweatshops, child slavery, toxic garbage heaps, dead rivers and seas, exhausted aquifers, disappearing forests, lopped-off mountain tops, acid seas, melting glaciers, cancer, obesity and a atmosphere heating up like a flambé. A few got very rich, so much so, that in the US, equity fund managers earned some 19,000 times as much as the average worker.

Then, in the space of a year, high oil prices and peaking production turned a US sub-prime market problem into a global economic crash.... and zero growth. The collapse of prices has also meant that many new oil field projects have been cancelled, ensuring even lower oil production levels during the upcoming decade.

The bailouts, regulations, and government spending sprees that we have seen during recent months, all share one tragic flaw: They still assume no physical or biological limits to human growth, and it is that paradigm shift that needs to be explored.

We need to recognise that it was not so much the sheer greed of investors and bankers which caused today's collapse, as much as the inevitable rocketing price of oil when supply was no longer able to meet demand, and which took commodity prices beyond what households could withstand.

Yet today, in spite of the collapse in consumption and the world economic downturn, concentrations of greenhouse gases are still hitting new highs. Leading scientists such as Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, say that they are basically looking at a future climate that's beyond anything they had considered seriously in climate model simulations. And according to Lord Nicholas Stern, if we don't deal with climate change decisively, "what we're talking about then is extended world war."

Most worrying is an analysis that showed that countries that make up two thirds of the world's agricultural output are experiencing drought conditions. Whether you watch a video of the drought in China, Australia, Africa, South America, or the USA, the scene is the same -- misery, ruined crops and dying cattle, and this has lead to a prediction of catastrophic falls in 2009/10 global food production.

Human enterprise has now reached the scale of our planet - and we must now account for ourselves in nature's balance sheets. We face a credit-fuelled financial crisis, accelerating climate change and decline of resource availability. It is increasingly clear that these three overlapping events threaten to develop into a perfect storm with potential devastating consequences.

This is the doom and gloom message but there are other options. We can look honestly at the present, imagine the sort of future we want and identify what we can do to get there.

A new movement called Transition Towns, has sprung out of concern at these global vulnerabilities. The Transition concept emerged from work permaculture designer Rob Hopkins had done with the students of Kinsale College in Ireland. Together they looked at across-the-board creative adaptations in the areas of energy production, health, education, economy and agriculture as a "road map" to a sustainable future for the town. One of the students, Louise Rooney, presented the Transition Town concept to Kinsale Town Council resulting in the historic decision by Councillors to adopt the plan and work towards energy independence and creating the kind of community that we would all want to be part of.

In the Wellington region, 13 separate transition town groups are now networking with their local community and submitting plans to local government on a coordinated range of projects designed to transition from high energy to low energy lifestyles in a positive and creative manner.

A group of committed people, including members of transition towns groups, regional Councils, business leaders and other groups with an interest in supporting the development of sustainability over the broader region, have put together a "Pathways to Resilient Communities" event for March 7th at Te Papa, which aims to assess greater Wellington’s state of preparedness and develop ideas to improve our position.

The plan is to explore different scenarios for the next 10 years with possible responses, giving participants an opportunity to actively engage and identify the community’s most important vulnerabilities and at the same time consider carefully what we treasure and love about our communities.

Wellington region, like the rest of the world, is at risk from increasingly likely external shocks. If actions are explored and put into effect now with the knowledge we have, we can significantly reduce the chance of problematic situations.

This event will create a space for open dialogue and the formulation of collective ideas for forward direction. It will address the issues that link transition groups to the work undertaken by local government in climate mitigation, adaptation, and emergency and disaster management. These groups have similar aims and there will be many mutual benefits co-ordinating our efforts to create a sustainable and resilient Greater Wellington.

As Richard Heinberg, author of Peak Everything said "A new economic world requires new institutions and new thinking. These will take a while to emerge. We can lay the conceptual groundwork now (as the ecological economists and localists have been doing for some time), but implementation will require cool heads and collective effort..."

The "Pathways to Resilient Communities" event for March 7th at Te Papa, is open to anyone who wants to help prepare for the future. To focus discussion, different scenarios adapted from four potential visions of the future investigated by Sustainable Futures (http://sustainablefuture.info) will be presented by Simon Tegg, Ralph Chapman, Wendy McGuiness and Alex Macmillan. Nelson Mayor, Kerry Marshall will open the day, and Fran Wilde, Greater Wellington chair will provide the wrap up.

The event will celebrate those who rediscover the joys of cycling and walking to their workplaces with flow on benefits to their health, the environment and the economy. It has been estimated in the United States that substituting driving with an hour a day of walking and cycling would reduce national oil consumption by up to 38% and would burn 12-25kg of fat per person per year, sharply reducing the proportion of the population that is overweight and obese.

It will explore everyday ways in which ordinary people can make a difference. And we may seek to follow some of President Obama's aspirations and "...restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology's wonders to raise healthcare's quality and lower its cost. ... harness the sun and the winds ... And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age."

Demand reduction, zero waste and moving to renewable energy forms, will free up dollars currently used to purchase oil, for green-collar jobs. The outcome - sustainability, as only sustainable systems can survive.

For more details and to register, visit the Pathways to Resilient Communities Event website: http://www.resilientpathways.org.nz

ENDS

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