Sustainable Thornbury was launched in 2006 by some visionary residents who wanted to prepare Thornbury for a world in which fossil fuels would become rarer. They also recognised that reducing our reliance on fossil fuels would lead to a pleasanter and healthier environment and way of life. Sustainable Thornbury is part of the Transition Network initiative.

Sustainable Thornbury has developed good working relationships with parish and town councils as well as South Gloucestershire Council.

Sustainable Thornbury consists of various groups. Some of these run existing community facilities such as the community orchard and wildflower meadow. Some run regular meetings where members support each other in, for example, growing their own food.

In 2019 a new group has been formed under the umbrella of Sustainable Thornbury with the uncompromising objective of achieving a Carbon Neutral Thornbury in the next 10 years. This group is now called Climate Action Thornbury and Surroundings.

We want to help make our community ready for the changes we expect in the future. We expect oil to become scarce and expensive. Transport relies on oil, so bringing goods from a long way away will cause problems and be expensive. For essentials like food, it makes sense to produce them locally.

We want to be more energy efficient, and generate more of our energy locally. We want to grow more food locally and to eat more local food. We want to waste less and use more locally produced goods. We want a strong community that feels able to do things for itself. We are not expecting to make Thornbury totally self-sufficient, but we would like to be less dependent on the global economy for our basic needs. We want to keep the good bits of technology but throw away the wasteful bits, the noise, the pollution, the traffic and the stress.

We are interested in lots of topics including:-

energy (saving and generating it); food (growing, buying and preserving it); waste (reducing, reusing and recycling); skills; the local economy (jobs, production and trading)  and transport.