Existing Reap Users

History & Concept 

Why collective action?

Collaborative action is crucial to stimulate a critical mass of people to change their behaviour with the environment in mind. The arguments for encouraging collective action are twofold: firstly, people are more willing to act on behalf of the environment if they see others taking action around them; secondly, people learn together through social experiences and this strengthens their motivation to make changes on an indivitual and collective level that benefit the environment. 

How is community defined?

A community can be geographically bound, covering all the people who live on a certain street or within a particular neighbourhood. A community can also be defined as the members of a local group or the families whose children attend the local school. Alternatively, a community could be defined as the members of a UK wide club or even contributers to an internet forum who are dispersed throughout the UK. REAP petite can be used with all of these groups but some footprint reducing actions such as communal gardens or car sharing clubs work best when a community can physically interact with one another. 

Why footprint a community?

A community footprint tool is a potentially useful tool for communities:

• Firstly, it provides a way of measuring the effect of an individual or community's activities on the environment. Footprints measure the impact from consumption activities covering heating and powering your home, personal travel, food and the impacts from our shopping.
  
• Secondly, the process of collecting information to calculate the footprint can be a collective one that contributes to community development and civic action.
• Thirdly, the results can be broken down by activity and compared with those of other groups. Ways of reducing the footprint can be discussed within the context of local issues. 

Introducing REAP petite

REAP petite started life in 2007 as an Excel spreadsheet, produced for Aberdeenshire Council who wanted to footprint the results of a questionnaire they were running with two local schools. Aberdeenshire wanted to find out if the communities they were working with had a different footprint to the district council as a whole and needed a tool that could calculate a 'community averages' which would then be fed into the main tool REAP.

REAP petite has now developed into a stand alone tool which calculates ecological and carbon footprints and direct water use of each individual in the community as well as determining the community average. The tool displays results in an easy to interpret format and shows the community how their footprint could be reduced through a number of actions.