Pioneers with unpopular ideas always struggle at the outset. In April 2008, James Hansen, head of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, said that contrary to previous estimates and international targets, the world would change drastically unless over the next few - not 50 - years, we get carbon dioxide parts per million down to 350. The European Union target - which is regarded as stringent - is only 550 ppm.

In Mui Wo, on Lantau, a British teacher is concerned for the future of his two young daughters in an uncertain world. Donald Latter would like to see the 3,000-strong community become a 'transition town'. It would be one where the population reduces its carbon emissions, produces its food locally and even creates its own currency. It would have the skills to withstand an energy shortage, which he believes could come in the next few years as a result of both global warming and 'peak oil'.

His idea is at the conception stage, with about 15 to 20 supporters on Lantau and around Hong Kong.

'It's important to keep ourselves educated about peak oil and global warming, so I've held a couple of evenings showing DVDs about those two issues,' says Mr Latter, who has lived in Hong Kong for the past six years and teaches at St Clare's Girls' School.

He is also organising workshops on a variety of environmental issues, and is setting up a small-scale initiative where people borrow books from one another, rather than buying them.

Oil production has already peaked, says Mr Latter and the human race is facing the next stage - in which there is still an oil supply, but it costs a fortune to drill.

'We've really got to reduce our reliance on oil. When people talk about oil, they think about transport. But oil is used for everything - plastics, pesticides, everything. Every day, virtually everything you use, oil will play a role. I really don't think that most people get how their lives will have to change for a life without oil.'

Mr Latter's transition town concept goes back to Briton Rob Hopkins, an academic, who with students at a further-education college in Kinsale, Ireland, put together an 'energy descent' action plan. It was adopted by the town and is now popular elsewhere. Mr Hopkins says that an oil shortage need not be a disaster for people, but we do need to adapt.

'One important thing is, as much as possible, to grow your food locally.

'In Mui Wo, there used to be farming communities before we imported our fruit and vegetables from across the border and all around the world. We need to interview the older residents and find out how they grew things. Another reason why Mui Wo would make a possible transition town is that hundreds of people already use bicycles as their means of transport every day.'

Mr Hopkins and co-founder Ben Brangwyn have now adopted some of the concepts of Kinsale and taken them a step further in Mr Hopkins' hometown of Totnes in Devon, which in 2005 became the world's first transition town. There are now 50 officially recognised such towns and villages in Britain, with others sprouting in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.

'We were recently asked if the transition town material on the web could be translated into Italian,' says Mr Brangwyn.

In the village of Martin, in Hampshire, England, there is no supermarket. Instead, the villagers have chickens and market gardens and each Saturday sell their produce.

A transition town works towards energy independence, through community gardens, business waste exchange - which seeks to match the waste of one industry with another industry that uses this waste - and even simply repairing old items rather than throwing them away.

'There was a time when in Saudi Arabia, you could stick a straw in the ground and it would gush oil,' says Mr Brangwyn. 'Now in Alberta, it requires natural gas to heat the rock and huge amounts of water just to get the oil out. The cheap and abundant energy is drying up.'

Mr Latter cites Cuba as an example of what happens to a country that suddenly had to cope without oil.

'When the Soviet Union stopped supplying Cuba with its oil in the early 1990s, it could no longer do industrial agriculture. It really changed society' as many more people returned to the fields.

One of the problems at a national level, says Mr Brangwyn, is that many policies required to get countries down to 350 ppm are currently unpopular. 'We need tradeable energy quotas in the UK. Energy rationing is a crucial national priority.'

Economically, countries would have to get accustomed to 5 per cent negative growth, says Mr Brangwyn. All three men say the world is at a stage where people will have to learn they can no longer be consumers in the same way as before. But that doesn't have to be a negative thing.

Both Mr Hopkins and Mr Brangwyn argue that in a so-called globalised world, many people are not leading satisfying lives. They say fulfilment would come from an active lifestyle where people grow their own food and go back to basics in an active, vibrant community.

Recently, with the heavy rains on Lantau, the allotments where Mr Latter and friends, neighbours and students have been growing fruit and vegetables have become a quagmire.

'It's very much at the early stages, but what we would like to do is get it to the point where it's sustainable and we can sell what we don't need ourselves,' he said.

The allotment, with its organic produce, is a pilot project. 'There are methods where on your roof or on your balcony you could be growing 10 different types of vegetables by dividing the areas into squares,' he says. 'I'm planning to bring my students over. Even in the classroom, they are amazed watching a plant grow from seed. What we need to do is relearn some of the skills that people had when there was less reliance on energy,' Mr Latter says. 'We need to talk to the older people in villages, some of whom do still farm, but the majority don't. We need to learn how they did grow things.'

Having completed a master's degree in environmental science, Mr Latter lived in Australia with his Australian wife, hoping to work in the environmental field. 'Oh, there's plenty of work,' he says. 'As long as you're happy to work for no money and be a volunteer.'

'I'm 50,' says Mr Brangwyn. 'The life expectancy of men in Afghanistan is 47. I come from the most useless generation that has walked this planet. I can do programmes on a computer and work out pixels, but what we need to do is actively engage the universities for the 'great reskilling', having syllabuses that equip people with those skills.'

Mr Brangwyn is a local-currency team member in transition town Totnes. The former accountant works full-time for the project. Totnes, with the go-ahead of the Financial Services Authority, has created its own currency for Totnes - supporting local business and ensuring that money stays local. 'I'm not sure that the Chinese restaurant is doing it yet,' Mr Brangwyn says. 'I'll go and talk to them.'

Two weeks ago, Mr Latter organised a workshop with a compost expert. Among his supporters are a Chinese neighbour who helps him grow the vegetables and a woman who runs an organic clothing business. 'One thing I need to do is get more local Chinese residents involved.'

Mr Latter has his detractors. 'It's unbelievable. At a stage where you have all this scientific evidence, I'm still arguing with people on e-mail who question whether global warming is even happening,' he says.

Some salient advice from Mr Brangwyn is to leave what he calls the 'laggards'. 'You can split people up into three categories. The laggards, the middle group of fence-sitters and what I call the early adopters who constitute 5 per cent.'

Mr Latter says he needs to build a group of early adopters who all think similarly.

'And there are so many areas to work in,' he says. 'We need to form groups.'

The recent summit of the Group of Eight nations resulted in watered-down initiatives to reduce emissions by 2050, which Greenpeace classed as 'just flower words', the conservation group WWF called pathetic, and Oxfam International said would endanger the world's poor.

'Most people are in denial,' says Mr Brangwyn, a co-founder of the Transition Network. 'But I take comfort from an old fella I met. He said in 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, most people in Britain went to the beach and didn't pay any attention.

'There were only 5 per cent of people who looked the problem squarely in the eye. And we have that 5 per cent of early adopters.'