Most people already know about the problem of climate change, but the second issue, 'peak oil', is less widely understood. Oil production has already peaked in 64 of the World's 98 oil producing countries, and there is general consensus among oil experts that global production could peak in less than 10 years, and may already be happening. New oil field discoveries are now rare and supplies are increasingly expensive to extract due to their location (eg deep ocean, coal tar sands) and this, together with World population growth and rocketing demand from developing countries, means there will start to be a growing gap in supplying the ever-increasing demand; and this means an imminent end to the era of cheap oil. 

The process

The aim of a Transition Initiative is to pull a community together to explore practical ways of cutting carbon emissions and rebuilding resilience - the capacity to live with less (or no) oil and its numerous by-products.  While each community will do this in it's own way, there is already evidence from the many established Transition groups of what is working well, and this process is, broadly, as described below:

1  Initially the project's steering group work to increase awareness of the key issues through local film shows, talks, discussions and events. Alongside this it is crucial to build links with local groups, local government and other organisations.

2  At a stage when wider community interest is seen to be taking off, the project is 'unleashed' into the community with an official launch event. At this point the project will go where the community wants it to go, there is no right or wrong way!

3  At this stage there is the opportunity for many more people to get actively involved in groups to look at specific aspects of community life, e.g. energy, food production, transport, the local economy and so on. Of course, these groups may already have started to form during earlier stages of the project.

4  Over a period of a year or so, these new groups will research the current local situation for their topic area, develop a vision of how a more resilient  - 20 year distant - future will look and then describe steps and activities that need to happen in order to arrive at that future situation.

5 Representatives from the new groups replace the original steering group, to form a new steering group for the whole project.

6  The work of these groups is then pulled together into an Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP), a 'blueprint'  to reduce a community's carbon footprint while increasing local resilience over a period or 20 years or so. The plan will describe activities against a timescale and how these will be delivered.