This project emerges from a 2-year AHRC-funded Early Career Researcher Leadership Fellowship project, 'Imagining Alternatives: Utopia, Community and the Novel, 1880-2015', which investigated how the near future is being imagined and represented. This research explored a tendency in fiction to either consider the individual or the mass global scale, neglecting sites such as community, region and nation where substantial agency might still be located. It also examined the preponderance of dystopian future visions and the corresponding need for optimistic or 'utopian' thinking that can open a sense of possibility for the future, build capacity for change, and counter feelings of pessimism and disempowerment. Through a series of workshops and events, in collaboration with community groups and the renewable energy not-for-profit Regen, the PI developed an engagement model for catalysing local change through the imagination of place-based futures.

Devon Climate Emergency Response Group (DCERG) was established to coordinate a collaborative response to the Devon Climate Emergency, and is made up of senior officers of about 25 organisations including: 11 county councils; emergency services; businesses; and voluntary organisations. As a result of his research the PI was invited to engage with the Net-Zero Task Force, a team drawn from economic, environmental, health and academic organisations and chaired by a leading climate expert, who have been tasked by DCERG with producing an evidence-led Devon Carbon Plan (DCP) for becoming net-zero carbon by 2050. The PI's research led to the creation of a goal and priority action for the plan: to support community groups to develop local net-zero visions, in which they imagine a decarbonised Devon collectively and in detail. The follow-on funding will allow this goal to be actioned and achieved, thereby helping build public support for the legitimacy and feasibility of change to net-zero; helping people to realise that change for the better is possible; and supporting communities in re-imagining themselves in the context of net-zero, so increasing local capacity for transition.

The project team comprises the PI and CI Dr Emma Whittaker, the Creative Industries Research Fellow for the 'Low Carbon Devon' project at the University of Plymouth. They will work with Emily Reed, Project Manager at the project partner DCERG, and members of the Net-Zero Task Force; acclaimed Devon-based Creative Industry professionals, Sue Gent (illustrator), Ashley Potter (animation), Mutant Creative & Mutant Labs (games developers), Kate Crawfurd (mural artist) with Igneous Interactive (Augmented Reality); community groups or coalitions of groups from 7 locations across Devon; a book production team based at the University of Plymouth. The project activities will have several strands:

1. Coproduction of Showcase Net-Zero Visions in 7 different locations, with each Vision linked together on conclusion by the award-winning Devon-based poet Fiona Benson: to help build public awareness of and engagement with the DCP, and to promote a willingness to consider change as possible. To be disseminated via webpages on the DCERG website, launch events, and a book with photos, essay by PI and participant accounts.
2. Solicitation, selection and dissemination of Net-Zero Devon visions from the public, hosted on the webpages, so as to foster detailed engagement in the DCP via the underpinning research ideas.
3. Coproduction of supporting material for interaction with Net-Zero visions, to be hosted on the webpages. A key aim will be to engage with new audiences as identified by partner DCERG and lead community stakeholders.
4. A one-day workshop with project team, partner, and other stakeholders. This will coproduce the dissemination activities and engagement materials, and feed into a model of best practice for using local net-zero visions as a tool for catalysing change with communities.