Addressing environmental impacts

Human wellbeing also depends on a healthy environment. Community currencies play an important role in efforts to better value the planet’s finite resources, move away from the doctrine of endless economic growth and incentivise more sustainable behaviour. There are a number of ways in which they can influence this area, such as rewarding carbon reduction by citizens and businesses or creating better accounting systems for the valuation of natural resources.

Value natural resources: linking money and nature At global level, many argue for a stable unit of account that reflects the planet’s natural capacities. Such a currency would not solely facilitate trade and pay taxes, as mainstream money does today, but also account for the finite natural resources that a monetised economy is based on.

Rather than being excluded from economic decisions, as they often are today, environmental considerations could be ‘priced into markets’ through, for example, accounting for the renewable energy used to produce kilowatt-hours of electricity. This is an ambitious aim that would require top-down economic and monetary reforms.

This chapter has provided an overview of the most common aims of community currency projects. Turning now to the question of ‘Who’, in the following chapter we consider the roles of partners, backers and users – the motor of these people-powered money systems.

Community currencies play an important role in efforts to better value the planet’s finite resources and incentivise more sustainable behaviour. Often working towards the high level objective of moving away from a money system that relies on endless economic growth, there are a number of ways in which currencies can influence this area.

This symbol denotes the projects seeking to address a number of environmental concerns via a range of methods such as rewarding waste reduction, mobilising investment for renewable energy or building public support for local supply chains.