Modeling a Citizen’s Environmental Network

Authors :

Denis Bellamy, PROFESSOR EMERITUS ZOOLOGY

1 Climate Change

Climate change is rising up the public political agenda. UK public attitudes polling in August 2021 found it was the second biggest issue of concern, second only to the covid pandemic. In this connection, climate change is expressed as the culmination of many local issues that can be tackled from the ground up led by communities galvanising action on a local level. Progress can be made by conceiving of the challenge not as a single big one, but the culmination of lots of smaller local issues. This demands that local governance operates in new ways beyond traditional service delivery roles. It must work with people transitioning to a zero waste economy.

2 Education

The model, named SmartpurSCAN is being promoted in The Green Forum to give UK schools and their communities the opportunity to link across national boundaries to co-design an internationally acceptable syllabus of radical hope. Local government will need to mobilise community action with schools, where there is none, facilitate communities where they are already coming together to have greater impact, and convene powerful networks of local stakeholders and institutions. Above all, new ideas are required to get people involved in education for conservation.

SmartpurSCAN is a model for a school /community,/ local governmen/t network to spread ideas and achievements for improving neighborhoods. It is a synthesis of two successful educational IT initiatives, namely, Smartpur (India) and SCAN (UK).

Smartpur is a concept designed for a 'Sampoorna Gaon' (holistic village) or a digitally integrated ecosystem where people leverage digital tools to bring efficiency in daily lives, transparency in governance, economic prosperity for households, social cohesiveness and ease of access to various kinds of services and information. Communications between communities are organised on a hub-with-spokes model.

SCAN was the outcome of ‘Rescue Mission; Planet Earth’ funded by the UN after the 1992 Global Environment Summit. The aim was to promote a global democracy of young people based in schools and the communities they serve to make local action plans for sustainable development. Rescue Mission, branded in Wales as ‘Baywatch’, was a community education project (2000-2015) based in Cardiff’s secondary schools and their primary feeders. It was sponsored by the Cardiff Bay Development Corporation to encourage schools to help the communities they served to plan for sustainable development, SCAN is now managed and promoted by ICOL (community action plans) and the National Museum of Wales ( citizen science of climate change).

SmartpurSCAN is an example of a citizen’s environmental network that combines Smartpure with SCAN. As a flexible system it is being presented by The Green Forum as a design concept that shows how people can be connected across the globe, making action plans to adopt local waste-free economies. The Forum is a global community of professionals with a particular interest in working towards the sustainable economic transformation of Small Island Developing States (SIDS). It is managed by the Green Growth Knowledge Partnership (GGKP). The GGKP is a global community of organisations and experts committed to collaboratively generating, managing and sharing green growth knowledge and data to mobilise a sustainable future.

Basically, SmartpurSCAN is a scaled down version of the U.K Conservation Management System (CMS) . It is a simple arrangement of local environmental appraisals carried out by communities where young people highlight what they like or don't like about where they live. Participants celebrate ‘the good things’ and say what should be done about the ‘bad things’. The ‘bad things’ are monitored to check that improvements are made. As a management system SmartpurSCAN is based on the LEAP for Wales logic for making community action plans to change things for the better. The system uses the Google free suite of digital tools for presenting and reporting progress within communities and between countries.