Keynote speech to inspire thoughts and actions

“Within this I think some of the key lessons learned revolve around engaging the community; having the appropriate mix of people to take the project forward and maintain it; obtaining sufficient external support both to provide the initial momentum and to resource key activities; and engaging the interest of the media (which is helpful in getting others on board and maintaining interest).  Some of these items can be easily scaled-up whereas others would take a little more thought.  In terms of challenges, maintaining the momentum, degree of engagement and level of activity are critical but moving the project forward is equally important.  By this I mean building upon our initial emphasis on household-level actions and behavioural changes focussed around energy saving to examine broader lifestyle issues and community-level actions. In the latter case we are looking at community renewable energy generation and waste processing.”