Emergence in the Gigatonne Challenge

Even without being a professional in climate and sustainability, you can learn where critical decisions are being made in your organization or community or industry and aid those who are pushing for real change. Alex Steffen, When **it Gets Real.

I don’t want to hold on to the old way of doing things, but the new way is still being pieced together. So working out what are the right-for-now steps to keep moving forward while we evolve. Lucy White, CU.

Last October I embarked on an addictive, frustrating, hope filled, fun filled journey - the newly launched Gigatonne Challenge, a Complexity University (CU) initiative which aims to equip thousands of teams around the world to reduce a Gigatonne (1 billion tonnes) a year of greenhouse gas emissions - the reduction we need if we are to stay within the carbon budget.

The children’s story

I started by coaching a Mexico City team and then decided to recruit a team from among the climate activist networks I am a part of in Gran Canaria. A team of eight fantastic women came together and developed a school composting prototype with a class of 20 children in Arucas in the north of the island.

Over the past seven months our team has grown to include 30 people from diverse sectors of society, we have developed a kit for school composting in collaboration with SuperFoxy (visit my resources page for free downloads) and are now working in four ‘pioneer’ schools. Next week we are talking to the service providers for a local government school composting initiative that is due to start in 50 schools in January 2022.

Meanwhile our pioneer class invited their local environment councillor to the school to hear about the Challenge and to ask questions about the environmental issues that the Canary Islands faces. As a result the entire school was invited to participate in a municipal community composting pilot, along with two other schools.

So small is beautiful?

The way our ‘children’s story’ has emerged certainly shows the power of a bottom up approach, of the leadership that exists when people are no longer victims of circumstances but participate in creating new circumstances.

However, when we started to look at progressing from level 2 (10 tonne target) to level 3 (10 tonnes a month) we realised that our work with schools was a longer term game and that we needed to look at other prototypes, ones that would inform large scale, at pace solutions for the management of organic waste on the islands.

So began a process of dialogue with stakeholders - ranging from the head of environment for the island government, to a composting consultant who has been advocating for 20 years for organic waste to be returned to our degraded soils. We discovered a complex reality, with competing interests and legal blockages on the one hand, and excellent examples of good practice on the other.

Canarias Siempreviva

As we journeyed we asked ourselves how we, as a citizen’s platform, could position ourselves to demonstrate the economic, social and environmental benefits of composting.

Answers to this question are emerging. At times this process more slowly than we would like. Sometimes it feels like we see a way forward, only for it to be clouded over by what feel like intractable bureaucratic issues. And sometimes we have a conversation where, after an hour of exploring angles that seem to lead nowhere, a route to explore suddenly comes into focus.

A week ago we had such a conversation with one of our team members - a woman who has spent 20 years building up an ecological farmer’s cooperative with farmers from all over the island in Telde, one of the biggest towns in Gran Canaria. Out of that conversation emerged an idea for a farmer managed community compost, with the support of young people they work with, in collaboration with the local town council and local schools.

If the prototype works Telde would be a pioneer, re-channelling money that would be used for the transport and management of organic waste into the creation of local green jobs whilst creating quality compost that ecological farmers are happy to use to enrich their soils.

As such it would also provide an example of how, if we respond to the challenges we face in creative ways that foster interactions among diverse people, we also contribute to the emergence of a vibrant, inclusive society. One that is ‘siempre viva.’