Livewell Clusters Carbon Reduction and Wellbeing Enhancement Project

Livewell Clusters Carbon Reduction and Wellbeing Enhancement Project
The Livewell Clusters project will develop and test a mainstream community engagement model designed to expand the number of Australians significantly reducing carbon. It will trial at least three local clusters, each consisting of groups and activities started and operated by cluster participants, supported by the local council, and assisted by a secretariat providing all clusters with information, advice, training, materials and suggested structures for groups and activities. The project will examine whether mainstream engagement can be increased by focusing on wellbeing benefits from lower carbon living, and by engaging people through participants’ existing and new social networks. The clusters will be designed to be highly replicable, with the aid of the secretariat and distinctive branding. The project will develop local expertise, share ideas among clusters, and draw on existing online informational material and the outputs of other projects.

We need to encourage many more Australians to be active in reducing carbon emissions – in their homes, transport, workplaces and communities. The Livewell Clusters project will tackle this challenge, by testing a model of community participation that highlights the wellbeing gains from lower carbon living, utilises and builds on people’s social networks, works with local organisations, and facilitates a new, highly replicable, decentralised, self-help approach to low-carbon community development. The model will draw on existing resources from inside and outside trial localities, be supported by local councils and a national secretariat
In meeting the challenge of substantially reducing Australia’s carbon emissions, the role of the general population is critically important. While there are key roles for governments, industry, researchers, non-government organisations and others, their efforts are only effective if they are supported and acted upon by the public – as consumers, householders, travellers, voters, organisation members, and employees or small business people.
There are a range of existing organisations, programs and facilities intended to engage the public in reducing their own emissions and those of the broader society, and these fall into three main categories: behaviour change programs, climate action groups, and information sources (mainly online). It is likely that most or all of these achieve some results, but a challenge for this program is to research how public engagement in action to reduce carbon can occur most effectively. This involves researching questions in three areas as follows:
1. How can the program become known to, and attract the engagement of, as many people as possible?
2. Once participants are engaged, how can the program encourage and enable them to reduce their emissions as much as possible?
3. How can costs – particularly public costs – involved in running the program be kept to a minimum, so that it is financially feasible, in the current Australian fiscal climate, for as many people as possible to participate in the program.
Limitations of existing approaches include the following:
1. Behaviour change programs are expensive, and therefore governments have only delivered them in certain localities or for certain groups, leaving the great majority of the population without access to them. For example, Energymark, notwithstanding its excellent results, has been described by its own creators as too expensive to be delivered to ‘the mass public at national scale’. Such programs are also not ongoing for participants.
2. Climate action groups (and related groups like Transition Towns) tend to only attract the already converted, and their total membership is only a minute fraction of the Australian population.
3. Online information is cheap to deliver, but information provision alone is generally seen as insufficient to induce change in hard-to-change aspects of life, as there is no social support, little attention to specific circumstances, and no facility for two-way communication. Moreover, people first have to be motivated to seek out such information. (See next section.)
Substantial research indicates that a range of conditions need to be satisfied if an intervention is going to induce people to lower their carbon emissions significantly:
1. The focus must be on changing people’s actions, not just their beliefs, cause there is a weak or non-existent correlation between believing we should reduce carbon and actually doing so. Changes in actions may even precede changes in belief. Thus an effective program needs to be built around taking action, not just providing information.
When it comes to their actions, people are very strongly influenced by norms, that is, by what those around them – and particularly those close to them and those they respect – are doing. Thus, interventions should occur in a social context in which new norms can emerge and people can support and ‘prod’ one another into action. Moreover, the program should focus on examples of a desired change already happening in society, because this shows that it is both feasible and normal, or at least on the way to normality. This in turn contributes to a sense of hope and the efficacy, which is critical.

2. Changes must be feasible in the context of a person’s specific life circumstances, and they are best demonstrated and broken down into do-able steps. Thus, an intervention needs to include local contact down to neighbourhood and household levels, in order to allow for the fine-grained variations there, to understand why people do things as they do,2 to demonstrate solutions in specific contexts, to have two-way communication about how to implement measures and to create an environment in which people are encouraged or even expected to make changes. This attention to local variations also helps address differences in values and worldviews.
3. People need sufficient incentives to change,and intrinsic incentives to reduce carbon are often weak – with a high level of uncertainty about anthropogenic climate change, with the consequences (if believed) being seen as ‘in the future’, and with no individual climate benefits flowing from individual carbon reductions. So it’s critical to make the issue personally relevant to people6 and to provide incentives. These can include the (evidence-based) promise of enhanced health, wellbeing and productivity and reduced costs from low carbon living (though cost as an incentive can be overrated). These benefits are best expressed in narrative form rather than simply as data. Satisfying activities and social contexts within which carbon-reducing actions are undertaken provide yet other incentives.
4. The ways in which people come together and communicate are changing, with traditional forms of social engagement declining and new ones, such as social media, emerging. Despite the changes, it remains true that people are more likely to be drawn into engagement by those they know. Interventions, therefore, need to devise how people can – in socially acceptable ways – engage others from their social networks in Livewell Clusters or in reducing carbon, as well as assisting people to develop new networks through which to engage people. Building ‘bridging social capital’ between dissimilar individuals or groups is particularly important to reach different sectors of society and to develop useful skills and contacts. Social media and other forms of modern communication have important roles to play given the fragmentation of traditional channels of communication.
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