Sustainable Dunedin City Inc changed its name to Resilient Dunedin Inc to better reflect our needs in the current transitional climate.

Ōtepoti Compost Collective formed under the Resilient Dunedin Inc umbrella on 22 March 2021 to enable large scale composting for Dunedin City.

Recently, Sustainable Dunedin City changed its name to Resilient Dunedin. The reason behind the move should give all Dunedinites food for thought.

The regime we all ran, for a short period on this planet, was to extract stuff, consume it and eject it. We did this at increasing rates, until the planet was no longer able to supply our demands at a maintainable rate. Just like someone tapping into their bank account because they were living beyond their weekly income, we have tapped into the resource and energy stocks of the planet faster than their daily-replenishment rates. We’ve also ejected wastes faster than the planet can absorb them, and we’ve increased the rate at which all this is happening.

That process, like Dunedin City in its present form, was unsustainable. Logic tells us that if something is unsustainable, it will cease. Logic also tells us that as time goes on, that cessation-point must be coming nearer. The window for making Dunedin sustainable – long-term-maintainable, in other words – is closing, and we have done too little, too late, for that to be a realistic goal.

Thus, while ‘sustainable’ is still the only description of what would be ideal, the future is increasingly looking like a mix of mitigation, adaption and triage. Resilience is essentially the ability to withstand; and build your capacity to cope beyond surviving. The Sustainable Dunedin committee agreed that this future is beginning to impact us now, and that a change of focus was therefore appropriate.

One of the first projects Resilient Dunedin Inc is undertaking is to facilitate the advocacy group the Ōtepoti Compost Collective to scale up commercial composting, and work on education and creating decentralised community hubs for Dunedin City. Pooling the knowledge to create shared resources and community infrastructure. This group was formalised on 22 March 2021 and is now applying for funding to scope and pay for the required resource consents from the DCC and ORC. We are also looking for suitable and available land sites to scale up commercial composting, so if you know of anywhere appropriate and want to share it with the community, please do get in touch.

Composting is an integral part of building Dunedin’s resilience, the ability to create soil, regenerate whenua and grow kai for our Dunedin communities.

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