In the late 2000s Bob started volunteering with a Transition group based on the Gloucestershire town of Newent and since then he has developed various approaches which are focussed on enabling individual environmental action.

The approaches one takes to enabling and encouraging individuals to act on environmental and climate change issues at a personal level is quite different from top down approaches taken with major national programmes. Many professionals fail to understand this and come into local settings with heavily biased project based agendas which do not address the questions individuals have; nor do they take the trouble to listen to what those questions might be. The approaches developed by Bob and others locally sets out ways of both understanding and then enabling personal action.

For most of his career Bob has collaborated with professionals on environmental issues at a national and European scale on a host of policy and management programmes mainly concerned with the water and marine environment. In the late 2000s he started working on local environmental issues with a Transition group based around the Gloucestershire town of Newent close to where he lives. The Transition Movement developed by Rob Hopkins and his colleagues explored a host of ways people could become involved in taking environmental action for themselves. Bob’s involvement with Transition Newent was through organising, planning and facilitating smaller group and some community meetings. This has lead to a number of different approaches.

Personal Action – a clear set of topics

If one takes the trouble to ask people what environmental actions they are taking one finds a rich listing. These actions can be structured to include topics like transport, food, waste, spending, home energy etc. With small group meetings focussing on personal action one can engage all the audience by discussing these topics. This is quite different from discussing community based topics where often, only a limited number people in the audience are engaged in specific topics.

Climate Conversations

Using a set of four questions the residents of Bob’s village were engaged in what we called Climate Conversations. Again by taking the trouble to listen to what a non-environmentalist group of residents were saying it was possible to quickly ascertain that most understood and knew about climate change, they were taking a wide range of action of the sort identified above. Assessing their views on the benefits of acting and what further steps were needed to support their efforts enabled further steps to be taken in the village.

Can Do Cafes

The name of this idea arose from Maggie Bligh in Kempley but it perfectly sums up the ethos of a meeting style to look at individual action. Two meetings have been run using this heading on the subjects of waste and home energy. A mixture of professional and individual inputs was driven by questions raised by the audience rather than being spoken at by ‘experts’.

Virtual meetings

Virtual meetings were used in Covid and a formula for these was driven by compiling an agenda based on questions from the prospective participants. The meeting, often with an expert on hand, went systematically through these agenda topic heads so that feedback notes could be compiled from the meeting.

Mailings of local environmental, climate and sustainability information

Bob emails a small network of 60 contacts with information on national and local interest. If you would like to join this network or want any further information on these subjects please contact Bob at bob@bobearll.co.uk