Mike Bell's Leadership Wisdom

Reducing CO2 – the ‘Social Change’ solution

Household CO2 emissions offer the greatest opportunity to make significant reductions in community CO2 emissions now. The biggest challenge is moving beyond awareness and education to empowering a significant percentage of households to make major changes in their behaviour.

If “change” is the mantra of our moment in history, Social Change is our greatest challenge and opportunity.

David Gershon—described by the United Nations as a “graceful revolutionary”— is leading a one day workshop in the UK on his recent climate change work helping citizens, cities, and entire states measurably reduce their carbon footprint using his book Low Carbon Diet. His goal: empower change agents to tackle pressing social problems or unmet social needs by providing them strategies and tools to effect transformative change at any level of scale.

See www.thewisdommeme.com/LCD  for more information.

In his new book, Social Change 2.0, introducing his internationally acclaimed “Empowerment Model for Social Change,” Gershon illustrates each of his five core principles with poignant vignettes from his personal journey as one of today’s most accomplished change agents. He offers an original and comprehensive roadmap to bring about fundamental change in our world. More about this later.

Households achieve 22% reduction in CO2 footprint

Latest data from the US shows that households using the 'Low Carbon Diet' have reduced their carbon emissions by an average of 22%.¹

These results come from the Empowerment Institute where David Gershon, founder and president, and author of the best selling book Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds, has successfully implemented and continuously refined this behavioural change strategy through action research over the past 30 years with 20,000 people in the United States. This approach has been described by one academic research study as: "unsurpassed in changing behaviour."

Currently the state of Massachusetts is adopting the 'CoolMass' programme led by David, and attracting communities to participate. Judith Van Damm, Director, Sustainable South Shore, Massachusetts says:

"We are one of 11 cities in Massachusetts creating a Cool Community campaign because it boldly sets the high bar needed to shake people and institutions from business as usual. While the minimum goal of 25 percent of households participating in three years is ambitious, it is at the scale that stabilizing climate requires. If we are successful, the culture of our communities will be transformed. Beyond our town, it shows the world that the American people are willing to provide positive leadership in reversing past trends of our unsustainable resource use."

David will be leading a workshop in the UK in May 2009, "Empowering Communities to Reduce their CO" Footprint" - more details at www.thewisdommeme.com/LCD

1. Low Carbon Diet Case Study, Portland, Oregon.