BY SUE RIDDLESTON, DIRECTOR AND CO-FOUNDER, BIOREGIONAL DEVELOPMENT GROUP

As a global agreement to tackle climate change is still some way off, the best thing we can all do is work to implement low carbon communities and economies right where we are. This was the sentiment of local government and city leaders as things unravelled at Copenhagen last year.

From our experience we know that if you can show people through real life projects what our sustainable future might look like, suddenly objections melt away and it is possible to achieve radical progress in policy and practice.

We are consuming resources and emitting greenhouse gases faster than the planet can deal with it and seeing the results from climate change to disappearing forests and fisheries. If everyone in the world lived like the average European we would need three planets to support us and yet a citizen of Bangladesh uses the equivalent of a third of a planet. What we all need is “one planet living” where we live within our fair share of the earth’s resources and leave sufficient space for wildlife and wilderness.

It is what everyone at Cancun is working to see happen, but it sounds idealistic and far from our grasp. The immediate reaction if you come from a rich country is “it’s all very well, but I don’t want to cut back on my standard of living or go without”. If you come from a developing country, you would quite rightly think “it’s not my mess, our country needs to grow and I want a European or American standard of living”. Both people might think one planet living is not possible. But what if we can achieve it?

Residents at the BedZED eco-village in London, UK can reduce their consumption based carbon and ecofootprint by half and yet they say they love the sense of community and have a great quality of life (add link). It’s a mainstream project which BioRegional initiated back in 1997 in our local community, we have our offices there and some of us live there too. The approach we took was to make it easy for people to live sustainable lifestyles. Making it easy to do the right thing and difficult to do the wrong thing. So it’s about low energy homes and renewable energy but also about sustainable travel options, reducing the need to travel, swapping and sharing goods with your neighbours and eating seasonal food. To make it easy for subsequent projects we formalised this as a framework of ten one planet living principles, which were endorsed by WWF. You can use these principles and download a tool-kit to create your own one planet plan from our website.

We wanted to show that all around the world and for different industry sectors one planet living is possible and we have been working over the last six years with some fantastic business and local government leaders from London to San Francisco, USA to Guangzhou, China.

As Dr Pachauri said at the Climate change communications forum here on Friday, the world needs more of these success stories. Do you want to show one planet living in your organisation or project? Do you know of existing projects which show one planet living in action? Please send them to us and we will post them on our website This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call +44(0)7949 265442. Visit us at stand 44 during Cancun.

You can look up your country’s average footprint on the Global Footprint Network website: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/2010_NFA_data_tables.pdf and your carbon emissions at the carbon footprint of nations: http://www.carbonfootprintofnations.com/content/global_carbon_footprint/

Download a one planet toolkit at: www.oneplanetvision.net