In this last section, we're going to talk about my favorite strategy, which is, make it work, locally. This is about local models, and global solutions. You think about big issues, that you are interested in trying to solve. You may have been protesting about them, or just getting mad in your own house about trying to make a change. There are a lot of ways in which you can do this change locally. It's often tempted to feel you're disempowered and that you can't make a difference. One of the most powerful ways to make a difference, is to look at your local community, and find a way to make a difference there. In our activity for this week, we will be asking you to think about ways that you can do that, and make a change in your own community. In the next segment, Sarah's going to talk about how we think about global issues, and find a way to take our global issue and our global concern, or our broad concern, and take action locally, to push that agenda forward. This segment is going to talk about the offset of that, which is to take a local change, and then try to make that local solution applicable in a broader sense. In this slide you can see that there are four main ways that you can get this done. You can take your local solution, and institutionalize it, such that it becomes long-term viable, even when you are no longer a person pushing forward change. You can take your local change, and set it up so that there are incremental innovations, that help make that change possible, and help encourage change in other places and other times, along the same lines. You can take a local issue that you've been working on for a while, and seize a political opportunity, to make a further change on that issue. Finally, you can do transnational networking, where you network with actors in other communities in different countries, who are facing similar challenges, and help get your local solution, put into place in those other places. I'm going to bring just a few examples, one for each one, as we move forward. The first example that I'd like to talk about, is an organization called Citizens Committee for Green Seoul, and this was formed in 1996. It's part of a participatory government's model, that was put in place, in South Korea. The organization has three elected co-leaders, one is mayor, one from the civil society, one from business, and a 100 standing members who meet regularly to talk about environmental issues in the city. By 1998, just a couple of years after it got started, it had 25 branches in the different districts of the city and each of them were modeled in the same way, where there were a 100 members each, and they came from the government side and civil side in business. In Seoul, the example that you have in front of you, the image, is a restoration project. This was a massive road that ran through the middle of Seoul. When they decided to either to be reconstructed or torn down, they tore it down and uncovered a stream, or a little river, that runs through the middle of the city. Rather than just covering up again, they decided to turn it into a large green space that runs the center of the city. This was such a successful project, that it laid the groundwork for the mayor of Seoul, who was part of the project at the time, to become prime minister. Examples of this greening process in Seoul, have been copied in cities around the world and also elsewhere in South Korea. This is a example where you can scale through the institutionalization, because what started as a little group of people in one city, was able to create a structure such that over time, it's now several decades, these community leaders and the mayor and businesses talk regularly about these issues, in an ongoing way, so that they are able to generate positive outcomes over time. A second case that I'll talk about is how you can scale through incremental innovation. The case that I'll talk about is a Taiwan's Anti-Naphtha Cracker Movement. Naphtha Cracker are big petroleum chemical companies or factories that help create a lot of petroleum products. They can be highly toxic to the environment that they are in, and they are generally located in large industrial plants. In 1987, there was a big move to try to resist a new Naphtha Cracker that was going to be put into Yilan. The citizens mobilized and they pressured the government and pressured the company to cancel the project and they were successful. In 1990, just a couple of years later, the company tried to put in another one a fifth cracker in the country, in Kaohsiung which is a different town. Protesters rallied again but they were not successful. They've made it smaller, they changed the scale a little bit but it was built eventually, then in 1991 another one was built. However, the advocates who were originally around in Yilan worked together with local officials. They worked together especially with academics who held listening sessions, they put together a tour bus that took residents from areas that were going to build new Naphtha Cracker or were opposed Naphtha Crackers were built and brought them to Yilan where then Naphtha Cracker was canceled, which is now a beautiful town that boost a lot of different diverse industries, and then brought them to my Mailiano where the cracker was built. Although it does okay as an industrial town, it looks very different than Yilan, and has a relatively single industry and so it's not as much diverse income streams for the town. Subsequent after the sixth Naphtha Cracker in 1991, advocates have been able to change the advocacy strategies learned from their past mistakes, learned from their successes and have blocked subsequent cracker. It's been very difficult for new big industrial plants in Taiwan, because they advocates have networked with one another, they bring in celebrities, music stars, they generate protests, academic conferences, and these advocates have been able to work together with one another to innovate in an incremental way which has made them very successful. A third strategy about how you take your local action and scale it, also pulled from East Asia in Beijing. In 2004, there were five very local NGOs in the city of Beijing that wanted to launch a campaign to recommend that people keep their air conditioning at 26 degrees. There's about 85 degrees, so it's hot but it's not so hot. The idea is that rather than taking your air conditioning and making it super cold, which takes a lot of energy. Rather than people coming inside and feeling cool in the summer, they would come in side and field not so hot. It would take the edge off the heat outside, but not over cool at the indoor temperatures, which would lead to enormous monetary savings because of their energy bills and also a big impact in terms of carbon emissions. In 2004, these five local NGOs decided to launch a campaign and volunteer spread out across the city and took the temperature inside public buildings and hotels and malls and these locations. Then they embarked on a media campaign to spread the word that a lot of these places were over cooled, probably everyone watching this video has experienced as sweltering hot day. Then you walk into a hotel or a mall and you had to put a sweater on, even though it's very hot outside, the temperature inside the building is overly cold. These activists publicized this over cooling that was happening throughout the city, and they timed it very well. This was in 2004 and 2005, which is right before the Beijing Olympics, and China was getting ready to highlight the Beijing Olympics as a green Olympics. These hotels had been designated to be hosting international guests during the Olympics, so they were particularly sensitive to media criticism. Also notice that if you keep your air conditioner set a little bit warmer, it saves money for the hotels. This was a win-win for the environmental advocates and for the government officials, and also for the private hotel companies who would gain financially if they could set their air conditioning up a little bit higher. 1995 the 26-degree campaign which had worked really well in Beijing, and was then mandated for all government offices, not just in Beijing, but actually all over China. By 2015, it had become an annual campaign in 30 cities across China. The small number of largely volunteer NGOs in Beijing ended up transforming the policy for government buildings all across China and helped spur civic engagement and campaigning in a number of other cities across China. Indeed, the idea of Cool Biz or cool business style where people are a little bit more relaxed in their clothing over the summer and public and private buildings keep their air conditioning set a little bit warmer. That idea has spread actually not just across China, but also around East Asia and indeed the world. The last example that I'll talk about is from Japan and Indonesia. This is about how you scale a local idea through transnational networking. The picture on the left is just an empty lot that was in Indonesia and in the city of Surabaya, who's of medium-sized city in Indonesia. They had these empty lots where people just dumped their trash. There was an idea, there was a recognition that most of the trash, especially the health-harming trash in Surabaya, was actually food raced from households. They piloted an idea of a household composting project in which a local NGO would distribute compost bins to local households. The households to build compost their food waste at home using a new technology. Then they would bring the composted dirt back to the NGO, which would then buy it from the household and use that dirt to create a public green space. You can see the difference in the various same plot of land in Surabaya turned from this noxious health hazard on the left to a beautiful public green space on the right. This was very successful in the pilot program that was sponsored by IGES, which is Institute for Global Environmental Strategies, which is an environmental NGO based in Tokyo or actually I guess it's based in Japan coming out maybe. It had an office in Kitakyushu. Because Surabaya in Kitakyushu, our sister cities, they work together through the Kitakyushu International Techno-Cooperative Association to try to develop and pilot this idea, and it was successful. After that, they created this composting method and from the composting method, they started a network of different cities all across for Southeast Asia. Then as you can see from the map across the world, where they have the basic composting method and they have a local NGO that they work with that trains households on how to do the composting and then works to collect the compost, pay the household for the compost, and then use the compost in local gardens. In Indonesia, it saved the local government enormous costs in terms of their dump, which had been overrun and was now operating just fine and cleaned up a lot of the green space. Now, this method has been spread all across the world in local communities are improving the health and safety of their community, lowering their carbon footprint, and creating meaningful green space in their spaces.
