Sustainable Communities

A sustainable community is defined as having a flourishing local economy, engagement and participation by locals and safe and health local environment with designed spaces. It should have a good public transport service and good quality local public services.
My super output area is Reigate and Banstead 009D:

As for being a sustainable community health is a key issue in trying to achieve this. Looking at the statistics of the general good health of Reigate and Banstead, 80.84% of the people have good health, this is very good if you compare this to England's average which is 68.76%. 89.66% of people live near Establishments for the long term illness and medical care, when compared to the south of England's figure it beets it by .3% and trails Englands figure of 91.02% of people.

Reigate and Banstead's housing is generally in good condition, with Reigate becoming an attractive destination for buyers due to its good location near London and green surroundings. New housing is on the rise as property developers are increasing the town. This shows in the figure of poor housing condition in Reigate and Banstead which is 0.23%, only 0.23% of housing in Reigate and Banstead is of poor quality and condition.

The employment rate in Reigate and Banstead is quite good with there being 43.08% of people in full time employment, while 7.76% are in part time employment. England's average full time employed figure is 40.81% while the part time figure being 11.81%. So their are more people employed full time in Reigate and Banstead than in England. But the figure for par time employment is much lower.

So to what extent do i believe that Reigate and Banstead 009d is a sustainable community. It provides a good local historic town centre, with castle remains and classic main high street. A french market every month and numerous clubs for the community. The housing quality is great, along with the general health of the population being good. There is also a good number of employment. I wouldn't call it a complete sustainable community at all, but i would ask the question whether one does exist.

Education for sustainable Development

Sustainable development  can be defined as meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. I think that the main and vital way of us becoming sustainable is education which is invaluable. Without education people wont know about global warming, the shortage of oil or the impact on the environment. Education is key in the worlds future of sustainable development. 

There are good examples of successful sustainable development such as recycling, special bins for separate rubbish even know this is minute education wise it is vital in securing a sustainable future. Another small way of education is the adverts on tv telling us to turn of lights and become more sustainable.

'We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science' (lovelock, 2006)

This quote from James Lovelock in his book, basically is putting the point across that people don't care about facts and figures, most people are not concerned one bit about being sustainable. Even though there are huge problems like global warming and oil demands, which are affecting us now and will drastically affect us in the forcible future. He is saying that education of sustainable development depends on peoples attitudes towards being sustainable, not the science.

If there is one subject to promote sustainable development it is Geography. This is the one subject where sustainable development just about applies to every part of it.  therefore it is this part of education where it is invaluable to teach and educate people on sustainable development. I am currently doing a module on Learning for Sustainable development, which was and still is very interesting to find out ways of becoming sustainable, where countries are at with sustainable development and to do our own research and investigations into a green travel plan.

I think that without education people wont know about the problems occurring around us, but without the right feeling towards a subject things wont improve much. So the education of sustainable development is vital to create a more sustainable future which future generations can fulfill their needs.

References:

Lovelock,J. (2006) The revenge of Gain. Allen lane

Recession = sustainable development Boom?

Due to the current economic recession, thousands have lost there jobs and many businesses have gone bust. Therefore people spend less, travel less, consume less and the production of goods has decreased with factory's closing etc. This blog is asking the question whether the global recession could have an positive impact on sustainable development.

People are spending less money, people cannot afford to buy unnecessary goods or waste 5p on a plastic carrier bag. This is a good example of how it will help people become more sustainable, its 5p per plastic bag so most people will therefore save their bags and reuse them, recycling the bags. The fact that the world is spending less on goods means that the production of many goods has fallen, and the prices are dropping to get them of the shelves. Some company's fore example Honda have closed some factory's because they are losing money on producing cars when they cant sell them. This could be a great time to redesign these factory's making them more energy efficient and increase the amount of waste that is recycled. This would in the long run be very beneficial to company's, using Honda as an example. They would save money and become more sustainable.

During this global recession people are expected to travel less as it is quite expensive. This in the short term would be beneficial due to the amount of fuel planes and cars use, and how it is an limited resource. Making it more sustainable, but this will last for the recession but when the recession is over there might be a massive increase in the amount of traveling people make, or at least it will just return to normal. There is also the question that because of the recession airlines have to decrease there prices, so there might not be so much of a difference to the amount of people traveling. Car wise the recession might have a positive impact in the fact that it could encourage people to use public transport to work or around. Petrol is already an expensive resource and this is just another way of how people could save money.

I believe that a recession does have a positive impact on sustainable development, but it still requires people to make the effort to recycle and become more energy efficient. The recession is a good way of making people realise that being sustainable can save you allot of money. The only question i ask is that in this recession can people and businesses afford to spend money on insulation, solar panels etc. To become sustainable in big impact ways its expensive, which in a recession i think is the last thing on peoples minds.

Green Travel Exercise

I think that the way in which we have collected our information with time we had available was very beneficial. Doing an hour each from 8am till 4:30pm on a weekday meant that we could get a good overview of how busy the traffic in the car park on park campus. All the groups managed to split up, so that some went of and collected data on questionnaires. This managed us to get the work done twice as quick during that hour.
The data we managed to collect was what I really expected to be honest, that the peak times would be from 8-9. Also the fact that car sharing was a very rare quality to find, and how people didn't really care about their environmental impact. The findings of this investigation didn't really surprise me, it just proved my view and the general view of drivers parking at park campus. The obvious reason that the busiest time of the car park was between 8 and 9 is due to early lectures and students arriving early to get a parking space. The answer for the fact that car sharing was very rare would be down to the fact that its very hard to organise unless you have same time lectures as your friends, its very hard to organise car sharing with an unknown.

To make this investigation more accurate I would change the fact that we didn’t survey the times at the end of the day for example from 5-6 which I would expect to be quite busy due to lectures finishing and it being the end of the day. Also the fact that we only did this survey on one day of the week, it would be interesting to see the variation in findings over a week. Finding out the busiest and least busy day. Also you could do it in the summer, where you might compare and find that more people walk or ride a bike into university.

We got the POWER

There are many environmental issues that have come about due to the realisation of the concept of global warming, for example recycling, using low emission cars and using sustainable methods of transport. So how can individuals make a difference and if they can to what extent is it.

Obviously it would depend on the subject that the individual is trying to make a difference in, but in this case its sustainable development. I don't think that individuals have the power to make a direct difference, but they do make a indirect one. The fact that they can influence people around them would make an indirect difference. For example when this university didn't have separate coloured bins for different kind of rubbish. When you had to go to the bottle bank the individual that would go wouldn't make a difference on a worldwide scale but could influence people to do the same. It was these individuals that properly helped towards us getting the coloured recycling bins. so i would say its a indirect difference at the time.

Numbers count for example the other day when 49 protesters trespassed the 3rd biggest airport in England Stanstead and held it to a standstill and lead to more than 50 cancellations. They were protesting against the use of planes, and how bad they are to the environment. Say if 1 person tried to storm the airport they would have got arrested almost straight away, when there were 49 they made a difference. The individual does not have the power to make a direct difference unless they are in a situation of power. For example the sustainability officer at Northampton Uni decisions make a difference towards sustainability development. So overall i belive that if you want to make a difference you need to have a big group with a good plan to make a difference.

Feedback on Exercise

When we first got assigned China as our country i thought we had a good chance to do well, the fact that the largest construction boom in world history is ongoing in China, they are a major consumer of resources and energy and their environmental record is one of the worst in the world.

Whilst researching for the exercise we did find it quite hard to find China's sustainable development strategies. I was surprised at the fact that china is the only country in the world where its rainforest's are increasing in size. I was also surprised that one of there main environmental problems is desertification. After thinking about it i then realised that China is still a developing country and a poor country, so their are not to focused on sustainable development at the moment, hence why they don't have to join the Kyoto yet.

Our presentation didn't really go to plan, the main reason was time. We ran out of time before we could even begin to finish our presentation. I didn't realise how quickly the time would go. Otherwise i thought i did OK, but i was rather scared and do not like doing presentations. I thought Cat did really well especially with the tough questions at the end. I would also say that we were not really prepared for the questions either which kind of took us by surprise.

I thought our handout was good, it had a wide range of sustainable development strategy's and important relevant facts about China. If we did this exercise again i would definitely limit the information as much as i could to fit it in the time constraint. I would not read out from my handout with my head down as easy as it is to do. I would have post it notes to spark my memories about topics and i would talk about them and engage more with the audience.

I'm going to be honest i dreaded this task from when it was set, i really don't like doing presentations and i am really bad at them, but the only way to improve is to do them so this did benefit me. I also did learn allot about China's sustainable development strategy's and other countries. I definitely learned allot about giving presentations and how to improve and research for presentations.

Recycling in Northamptonshire

Northamptonshire introduced a Joint municipal waste management strategy to increase recycling and reduce waste. In 2001/2 the % of household waste that was recycled was 18%, since the new strategy has gone in place it has increased to 28% in 2004/5 and is predicted to reach 39.2% in 2007/8. The government has set targets of 50% by 2020, at the rate Northamptonshire recycling is increasing they are well on there way.

The reason why recycling has become such a big issue is because getting rid of waste is expensive, its becoming more expensive to use landfill sites its predicted £48 tax per tonne by 2010. There are many other obvious reasons such as its better for the environment reusing what we have instead of making more. Many of the resources we use are slowly running out or cannot be replaced quickly enough. We save allot of energy by recycling for example making new aluminium cans out of recycled cans uses 20% less energy than normal. If we recycle green waste this will save valuable space in landfill sites, and will get a product out of it.

The new strategy has made recycling easier by having new waste services on a regular basis. Also having colour coded bins, bags which makes recycling allot easier. They collect paper, bottles cans and organic waste up to every 2 weeks. Also bottle banks and paper recycling places around town are more common.

Recycling means people have to make effort with their waste and this is the problem. Many people are too lazy to organise their waste, so how could we make recycling easier to improve recycling rates. One way to provide people with an incentive to recycle would be to charge a little bit extra for bottled drinks, cans etc and when you take them back to the store empty they give you the money you paid back. They do this in Germany, they charge 10 cent extra and it does work. If taking you bottles to be recycled means you will get money back more people would do it. Businesses could label their products whether they are recyclable or not and use less packaging to reduce waste.

Northamptonshire currently has a total household waste of 345,329 tonnes and 135,329 of this is being recycled. in Northampton 450kg of waste is produced per person, the strategy aims to reduce this to 225kg by 2020. Recycling is definatly on the increase and the new strategy seems to be working.