WHY IS THE LOCAL ECONOMY A TRANSITION ISSUE?
If our community is to withstand the vagaries of climate change and ever changing commodity prices, then we need a strong local economy. This is because the more we can produce locally, for ourselves, the less we are affected by outside events beyond our control. Producing locally also has a huge effect on the carbon footprint of a product – we’ve all heard of ‘food miles’, but that concept applies to everything that we import from elsewhere.
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
As individuals, we can all think about what we buy, whom we buy it from and where it came from. Money spent locally gets re-circulated, as the person you give it to also spends some of it locally, hopefully with someone else who will spend it locally and so on, all of which supports the local economy. Economists call this the ‘multiplier effect’. As a community we can do far more, which is why Transition Buxton:
- organised The Alternative Economics Seminar in November 2013,
- produced a major report, the Buxton Economic Resilience Study, launched in January 2015,
- contributes to the work of Kickstart Buxton, initiated by Buxton Rotary, to support a fair and sustainable economic recovery from the Covid 19 pandemic.
We have also worked with other organisations in the town to support independent local businesses and individuals.