Report

It’s not every day that you meet the Minister, if you don’t live in the capital yourself, and even if you do, the Minister himself doesn’t spend every day in the capital. He often travels around the country, sometimes even abroad. Around midday he was expected at a lunch with the businesspeople of the Portuguese and Foreign Chambers of Industry …

Everything began in 2011 with a guerrilla gardening campaign, Luís Bello Moraes (41), founder of Portalegre in Transition, told ECO123 on the patio of the FICAR cultural centre. They sowed thousands of sunflower seeds in all of the public gardens and parks of the city. And just as soon as they began to get growing, the mentors behind the initiatives …

Annelieke van der Swijs (48), Sara Carvalho (40) and Sandra Rocha (26) work alongside over 30 other members of the Coimbra Transition group. They deal both with social needs and the ecological and economic problems existing in this city of 145,000 inhabitants and temporary home to over 30,000 students. Everything started in 2009 with the organic garden in the Coimbra …

Fishing from the land. Six o’clock in the morning. We parked at the isolated spot where the team were starting to arrive, in the area of Meia-Praia in Lagos. We crossed the railway line and the dunes, heading resolutely towards the boat – known locally as a ‘calão’ – whose location we could guess, but which we couldn’t see. Once …

Solar Impulse, the solar-powered round-the-world flight. Flying was always one of humankind’s dreams, in order to be able to observe the world where we live like a bird. But the beginnings were difficult, when the Wright brothers took to the air in their first gliders and later motor-powered aeroplanes at the start of the 20th century. Building on that, in …

… but all over the world, more and more people are asking themselves how humans could live their lives more sustainably. Ana Nunes and Carlos Abafa from Monchique are two of them. “Economy and ecology follow separate paths – it cannot continue like that in the future,” they say. Their question is based on a critique of the concept of …

The group ‘Braga in Transition’ first appeared in 2011, drawing on the artistic movement known by the name of ‘Projéctil’. According to Hélder Faria, one of its members, this occurred naturally because “it is always in an artistic context that awareness is raised.” “Our day-to-day work is a process of gradual change, we change habits slowly. We don’t detach ourselves …

“This all began with a party”, recall Gonçalo Pais (38) and Fernando de Oliveira (45). Both live in the Lisbon dormitory town of Linda-A-Velha that packs almost 20,000 inhabitants into 2.32 km2. In the morning, the majority of adults head off to work, dropping their children off at schools along the way. And at night, they return to their respective …

For a long time, people have been warning about the exhaustion of large-scale industrial production – threatened by factors of a natural, social and environmental nature. The worst-case scenarios will force the vast majority of people to radically alter their lifestyles. Oil-based products, and their highly polluting derivatives, are to be found everywhere in the daily lives of people in …

It is nine years since the university lecturer Rob Hopkins(1) started a movement of change, in the small Irish town of Kinsale. The movement has been expanding ever since and today it is established or being established in several hundred cities. Monchique was the first place in the Algarve to join and create a small group to spearhead the project …