On 2nd December two members of BBT went to Basauri where the local ecologist group Sagarrak had invited two members of Ecologistas en Acción de Córdoba to talk about the initiative, Barrios por el clima (Communities for the climate). Córdoba is a city in the south of Spain which is already very hot and with the changes in the climate it is destined to be even hotter. Therefore, shaded areas will be even more important so the priority for the neighbours was to show that there was a distinct lack of trees while the ones that were there were not looked after properly by the municipal authorities. So the first actions of the neighbours was to show up the lack of trees by making some “trees” out of pieces of cardboard and other material. After having to form chains to water the few trees that the city-hall put, they have now succeeded in getting the city-hall to wake up to the necessities of the neighbours` efforts to mitigate the worst effects of climate change and now they even pay someone to coordinate their efforts.
At the heart of this project is the participation of associations of neighbours, feminists, ecologists.etc. The methodology is to carry out a diagnosis of the district, what they call a “mapeo”, with various groups going round the area looking at the problems there are. Different groups look at the area from different perspectives before getting together and deciding what needs to be done. In this phase it is decided what the city-hall needs to do and what can be done by the neighbours themselves. Without going round the streets of Basauri the people who attended the meeting gave examples of what needed to be done to improve aspects of the town and together we offered various proposals as to what could be done to solve some of these problems.
It was very clear that such an initiative which has local people participating in the problems of their part of town could be very usual in solving some of these problems and at the same time making them more aware of the difficulties that climate change is going to bring. Sagarrak has offered to do another meeting in the new year on the lines of this one and we in BBT will be looking at how we can apply the methodology to the transition process in our own area.