WHAT IS A ENERGY DESCENT ACTION PLAN?

An Energy Descent Action Plan:
Is a guide to reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and reducing our carbon footprint over the next 20 years.
While at the same time building our communities resilience to global economic, energy, food supply crashes.
In the coming years we expect many changes associated with declining oil supplies and some of the impacts of climate change to become more apparent.
An EDAP builds a picture of this future scenario based on visions of a better future.
An Energy Decent Action Plan (E.D.A.P) plan is different from the many Community and County Development Plans that appear regularly in our lives. It is based on a set of different, and we feel more realistic, assumptions. It assumes that we have reached a pivotal and historic moment in history, a time when we can afford to think big and to think beyond what one might call ‘business as usual’.

The economy of Kerry and Ireland is starting to feel the impacts of the global downturn, and the record oil prices. What if those two trends turn out to be a permanent and growing feature of our everyday lives?

What will it look like if Kerry takes proactive steps to live within its carbon balance and playing its part in avoiding runaway climate change?

Who is it being written for?
This EDAP is written for the community. It is for people from all walks of life, all sectors; individuals, families, organisations, policy makers, service providers and service users; people who want to become part of the solution to some of the biggest challenges civilisation has ever faced.

An EDAP provides a guide to our common future.
With information about the challenges we face.
Ideas about how the future may look as we face these challenges.
any small and large actions that can contribute towards this vital process.

WHERE DOES ONE GET THIS KIND OF INFORMATION FROM?

The material in the EDAP has been drawn from a wide range of sources. The creative visioning, assumptions and many suggestions for actions will be drawn from members of local society in Tralee and Co Kerry ; at public workshops, at Transition Town Tralee meetings and events and from individuals who have shared their ideas. Other key information is drawn from the local development plans. (Town, County , National) In asking who is going to do all this, we now pass this question back to you as a request to engage in this EDAP, to pick it up and to make it happen.

We say this with a sense of urgency, but also as an invitation to participate in one of the greatest possible initiatives open to us. If we wait for the Government to do this, it will be too late. If we try and do it all on our own, it will be too little. But by organising with friends, neighbours and our community, it may just be enough, and it may just be in time.

AN ENERGY DESCENT ACTION PLAN IS:

  • A visioning and policy planning tool
  • A plan for the lead up to, during and after energy descent
  • A re-localisation of our society – the reversal of globalisation
  • A way to identify areas of society that will be affected by energy descent
  • A way to identify and timeline the construction of post-carbon infrastructure before the crisis hits
  • A way to identify regional vulnerabilities and opportunities
  • A tool to change society’s attitudes and behaviours
  • It is a method for establishing diversification strategies to ensure Tralee and our communities survival