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Nathalie Maisonneuve in Gangan, Guinea

“Tourism can quickly become a source of conflict within a community. And there are many more cases demonstrating this than the other way around, unfortunately! It is essential to prepare the population well in advance and to work alongside them to prepare them for the reception of foreign visitors as well as for intercultural exchanges.”

Nathalie Maisonneuve is an expert international consultant in Ecotourism specializing in Natural Resources Management and Sustainable Tourism in Protected Areas. Passionate about nature and adventure from an early age, she embarked on her ecotourism career in 2002 (the International Year of Ecotourism) working for a local NGO in the Peruvian Andes. With studies in Geography, Ecology and Natural Resources Management, she has worked on international (EU, UNDP, GIZ, SPREP, U.S. Forest Service, and others) national and local sustainable tourism projects throughout Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Greenland. A long time Ecoclub.com Professional Member, Ms Maisonneuve passionately believes in ecotourism as a tool for conservation of natural resources and development that benefits local communities. Read on for an insider’s perspective on ecotourism consulting, helpful tips for aspiring professionals, and more!

Antonis Petropoulos - Ecoclub.com: What first attracted you to this career and what keeps you going?

Nathalie Maisonneuve: A taste for travel, adventure, discovery... then, the desire to preserve these beauties, to be able to continue to be amazed and therefore, quite naturally, to contribute to preserving this nature. Ecotourism can be a real tool for conservation and development. There are plenty of examples in the world of smartly run ecotourism programs that work. This is what gives me hope and the desire to persevere. 

Antonis Petropoulos - Ecoclub.com: Of all the projects you have been involved with, which is your favourite and why?

Nathalie Maisonneuve: It's hard to choose! But I will mainly talk about 2 projects: my first one in Peru, in the Andes Mountains, in the Province of Cotahuasi because it was my first job. I had to develop ecotourism, and I had ‘carte blanche’. We would explore the caves and discover relics from the time of the Quechua people; we only moved on foot or on horseback…. I learned everything there. And Guinea, where I discovered a population of chimpanzees and forged very strong links with the communities thanks to the trust I gained from them by working alongside them, by valuing them, by listening to them. 

Local Energy Communities, Emergence, Places, Organizations, Decision Tools
Edited By Gilles Debizet, Marta Pappalardo, Frédéric Wurtz
ISBN 9781032190693 - 376 Pages ,42 B/W Illustrations - Published May 27, 2024 by Routledge

Local Energy Communities (LECs) and Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) are touted, especially in the EU, as vital for a Just Transition. They constitute a visionary and practical approach, combining renewable energy with economic democracy—a win-win. They are increasingly seen as a useful tool for climate justice, for urban regeneration, allowing renewable energy production as close as possible to the place of consumption, reducing energy transmission losses, promoting local acceptance of cleaner, renewable energy, reducing energy poverty, and supporting the local economy and jobs. As decentralised energy systems, they may also prove more resilient against cyberattacks and disruptions from extreme weather events. On the other hand, naysayers fear that they make local grids unstable, that funding and technical expertise are in very short supply, and regulations are a nightmare. 

Energy communities are certainly not a pipe dream: since the early 2010s, the energy community model has become popular, and the European RED II and IEMD directives have defined energy communities and enabled national and local policies. Already there are over 10,000 in the EU involving up to 2 million citizens, EUR 11bn of investment, and 10 gigawatts of installed energy. At the same time, RECs still represent less than 1% of renewable energy production.

The book originated in a 2020 online conference from which editors chose the best presentations, which were then probably reworked/expanded. It covers energy communities in Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, India, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom and focuses on collective self-consumption, citizen cooperatives, and peer-to-peer digital platforms. The authors include academics (urban planners, architects, psychologists, economists, engineers), policy-makers and energy practitioners such as electrical engineers. 

The 14 chapters offer insights beyond individual case studies, encompassing various disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and engineering sciences. The discussion is split into 5 sections, with two to four chapters each. The first section analyzes the motivations behind the establishment of an energy community and their internal dynamics. The second examines regulatory frameworks and their controversies. The third section, clearly the most interesting, focuses on citizen cooperatives, their dilemmas and contradictions, and how they can be scaled up. Section four examines digital services for peer-to-peer communities, while the final section, which is more technical, deals with the design of more complex public private energy communities. Conveniently, each section begins with a summary of the results of the previous one, while nearly all chapters also have a conclusion. Five types of energy communities are addressed: residents' cooperatives sharing production facilities, collective self-consumption operations, citizens' production cooperatives, consumer cooperatives, and digital peer-to-peer services.