Tag Archives: Circular economy

10/03/2023
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Climate change, Local body politics, Social ecology

Building a resilient future

Sometimes people don’t need more facts. What they need is a plan.

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to realise that we face multiple challenges in the world today – environmental, economic, political and social. Climate change is far from the only problem, but it is probably the most significant, because it makes everything else much worse. Many of us have been talking about this for decades, and slowly gaining traction, but it wasn’t another rigorous, scientifically conservative, well referenced report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that seems to have tipped the balance. It has taken a cyclone of unprecedented scale to bring home the real cost of our, and the world’s, inaction.

The science tells us that we still have a brief window to stop runaway climate change. That means we can still prevent the sort of feedback loops that would probably bring an end to homo sapiens 10,000 year experiment with civilisation. If they kick in, we just won’t have the abundance of resources, including the food surplus, to make cities work.

So it give me great comfort to know that the window still exists. That’s a helpful fact. Now what we need is a plan.

That has been my main focus since first being elected to Whakatāne District Council in 2016. In that first term the council agreed a set of principles to govern how we respond to climate change. We asked the people of Whakatāne for feedbaack, and we got strong support. In my second term on council we agreed a set of strategies, targets and action plans. Again these got strong support. The result has been both reduced council carbon emissions and substantial work on adapting to climate change. Last year we agreed on a reset of those strategies – a shifting of gears. You can expect to have your say as part of that work.

I need to add here that I didn’t do that work by myself. The success of the programe is really down to the highly talented staff that work and have worked at WDC. What I provided was the political leadership that allowed staff to do their jobs well.

The next phase of the climate change work needs to engage our communities better. If we have learned anything from the array of disasters that Whakatāne District and other areas have experienced, it’s the need for resilience in the face of an uncertain future. At the heart of resilience is community.

National and regional agencies, and the council, are important in terms of emergency response and long term recovery, but it is our willingness to look after each other that is the most critical. It is when we check on the neighbours because we know they may need a little help, or get stuck in where we see the need, that we see the best of us. Great examples are the Community Emergency Response Teams in action, or springing up, in places like Edgecumbe, Matatā, Waiohau, Thornton, Galatea / Murupara, Awatapu and Manawahe. Marae, who fling open their doors to become critical parts of the emergency response infrastructure, are another. It is a reminder of how blessed we are in the Eastern Bay to live in communities where people look out for each other.

Adapting to climate change isn’t just about disaster response. Council’s job is to make sure our infrastructure is both robust (strong) and resilient (able to spring back when parts of the system fail), but that’s just one part of the story. Given the impacts that Cyclone Gabrielle is already having on things like food supplies, how do we build a more resilient economy in the Eastern Bay? It’s not just about food sovereignty – we need to build strong local economies, that cycle resources (including money) around and around the community as many times as possible so as to extract maximum value.

WDC Council members were privileged recently to hear from Jacob Kajavala of Industrial Symbiosis Kawerau about the work to build synergies across businesses in Kawerau (and increasingly beyond). They work with workforce development training, recruitment and employment, and growing industry and opportunity. These kinds of collaborations across local businesses have great potential to build a vibrant local business ecosystem which provides some buffer from international economic shocks because they are grounded in strong and enduring relationships.This could be a building block towards a true circular economy, where upcycling applies to resource flows (eg the waste from one enterprise becomes the feedstock for another) people flows and financial flows.

It’s just one example of how the Eastern Bay of Plenty has the ingredients we need to build a strong, resilient, interconnected, prosperous and ecologically grounded sub-region. We just need a positive vision and leadership.

First published in the WhakatāneBeacon 8/3/23

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30/12/2020
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Economics, Local body politics, permaculture, Social ecology

A Circular Economy for a Better Future

What kind of economy do we want? The words that spring to my mind are things like – abundant, prosperous, inclusive, fair, and sustainable. An economy which is healthy, which all of the people in our district benefit from and which is viable in the long term.

For those things to be true, our economy needs to be circular. A circular economy is about the prosperity of our district now and in the future. It means cycling resources, of all kinds, through as many hands as possible. In this way, we are able to generate the maximum value from them. This builds local wealth, local resilience, and local connection.

In a circular economy, materials such as glass, metals, plastics, textiles etc would get reused, up-cycled, and re-cycled indefinitely. The aim is for production where, as in nature, no ‘waste’ exists because every waste product from one business becomes a feed-stock to another. This goes beyond recycling, to redesigning material flows through the economy.

Money flows should also be circular. This keeps and generates wealth within our own communities by circulating around as many people as possible. Small towns especially suffer from linear financial flows – money comes in on payday and then leaves as everyone heads out of town to do the shopping. Instead of draining money from our communities we need to look at how we can slow the flow, create eddies and dams to capture more value within our communities.

Even when we buy in local shops, the products are often not locally produced, and so the local benefits are limited. It is very likely that as fossil fuel use reduces, from global action on climate change and also declining global oil production, we will have to produce more stuff locally. Supporting local production builds resilience into our local economy.

Circularity applies to people as well. COVID has highlighted NZ’s vulnerability when it comes to overseas workers. The Eastern Bay has, I think, done well in terms of building long term relationships with communities in Vanuatu to support the kiwi fruit industry. This allows skills development and other kinds of exchanges to occur and is not based on the same kind of exploitation we see in some other places. But it also raises the question of how we build more circularity in terms of local people.

The marine school, to be sited at the new boat harbour, is a good example. We have some of the best aluminium boat builders in the world in the Whakatāne district. They have had to bring in skilled workers from overseas because of the lack of locals able to do the job. The new marine school will not only train local people for welding, but for all aspects of boat building and boat maintenance, from design to fit out. The boat harbour itself, coupled with highly skilled local people, will both draw and retain work in this local economy.

Whakatāne Boat Harbour - Artist's impression

As the work around the marine school and boat harbour shows, circularity in our local economy relies on long-term relationships between businesses, and between businesses and institutions. It is impossible to build a business ecosystem without some long-term commitment to shared goals of building collective local prosperity. I believe that most business owners in our sub-region do share that goal, but we lack the mechanisms to easily give effect to them.

This is why institutional commitments to a circular economy are important. During the COVID lockdown and recovery, and also with the Provincial Growth Fund, the Whakatāne District Council was able to attract far more Government money into this area than most councils of our size. Because this put a real strain on local contractors, the council worked with them and with other institutions to schedule work flows to keep them manageable, rather than swinging back and force like a pendulum. Contractors willingly took on temporary staff from other businesses facing a downturn, to help make sure local workers stayed employed. WDC was able to access Kia Kaha funding to keep work flowing, and its commitment to local employment saw 175 unemployed or redeployed people find work. 50 of those are now permanent jobs.

There are many elements of our local economy that are already circular, or at least moving towards it. The contribution of Māori world views, and Māori business, based on values such as whakapapa, kaitiakitanga, mana motuhake and intergenerational thinking will, I think, help move us even faster in that direction. I believe that it is where our community wants, and needs, to go to build a prosperous future where all people enjoy the benefits. Of course this is not something we can do alone. We need to build momentum in our individual businesses, in our business networks and in our local economy as a whole, as well as across the region, our nation, and the planet. When I look around at what is happening globally, I know we are not alone.

Published in the Whakatāne Beacon 30/12/20

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