Shared Insights by Alison Stuart, CEO NESCAN Hub at Climate Action Summit 2024
As someone who set up Aberdeen Climate Action, Climate Week North East, organised some big net zero conferences and then set up NESCAN Hub three years ago, I know something of how to mobilise and get things done—and done in partnership! And that is what we need to do—we need to mobilise, and we need to all work together, from the grassroots to those in power.
Climate Change: The Ultimate Emergency
I came from human rights because I understood that climate change was THE critical emergency and without action to stop further climate change, we would not have a liveable world. The right to life, after all, is the ultimate right and not just for humans. What I have found, though, is that climate change is not treated like an emergency, like we have a ticking clock on a doomsday countdown. It is treated as an inconvenience, as something that should kowtow to our status quo and business/profit needs.
This is more than disappointing—we need true leadership, we need bravery, and, to some extent, we need a willingness to sacrifice from those currently having power. To courageously take steps that might not be initially popular but are necessary for us to have a liveable world for our children and all that we love.
Positive Change Through Collaboration/Action?
Dealing with climate change does require change, but it can be positive change. Some steps might be painful, but the outcome is worth it. If we want to take everyone on this journey with us—and we need to—then we need to enable people to get behind a vision.
We need to inspire.
We need to empower.
We need to embrace people power.
That means that we need to view our journey to net zero as a journey to a better place, and we need to sell our ultimate destination. But not just sell it—co-create it. In NESCAN Hub we go out and help communities vision what they want their community to look like in the future and then create a plan of how to make it a reality. This process creates connections and community and engenders real hope and energy.
We can do this type of visioning and planning as a nation, as regions, and locally. We are doing that to some extent at present, but not in a unified, coherent manner. The Scottish Government has set some ambitious targets and is putting in place some great policies, but we need action to meet them. This will only work, though, if we have the enablers in place to fulfil our vision. At present we have policies without an overarching vision of where we want to get to; we have policies but insufficient action.
The Need for Leadership in a Just Transition
That is where those in positions of power come in—our UK & Scottish governments, our local authorities, and our businesses. We need leadership on a Just Transition to Net Zero. We need a national plan on how we are holistically going to meet our net zero targets, and an integrated systems approach. We need a national land-use plan now—one that determines where we do, what and justifies why—one driven by the best place for, in relation to, dealing with climate change, biodiversity, human needs—not by greatest profit—nation-led rather than individual want-led. Real planning for our future.
We need to prioritise getting to Net Zero in all policy, regulations, legislation and delivery—not just play lip service to it. We need the infrastructure in place to enable change in all our behaviour. When I do climate literacy training, people say to me:
- “I want to cycle to work but it isn’t safe; there are no segregated bike paths”.
- “I want to use the bus, but it’s not reliable, it’s expensive, and it doesn’t go where I need it to”.
- “I want to use trains rather than planes, but trains take so long from Aberdeen, and they are very expensive”.
- “I want to eat locally grown and made food, but I cannot get it easily and conveniently”.
Enabling Change and Supporting Communities
If we want people to change behaviour, we need to enable and support that change. If we want to reduce car travel and increase active travel and the use of public transport, we need to put our money where our mouth is and follow the transport hierarchy when it comes to financing new infrastructure. No roads built without a separate cycle lane. Installation of green byways. Public transport being public and not profit driven—clean, reliable, cheap, frequent.
In rural areas, prioritise the charging infrastructure—communities tell us that they cannot yet buy electric vans in Aberdeenshire for furniture services, bike maintenance etc., because the charging infrastructure is not sufficient, and what is there is often out of service.
People want and need warm, healthy, cheap-to-run homes—we need to drive down energy use—retrofit is the answer, but it is not suitably financed or resourced at the moment. We need huge investment and skills development in this area. We do not have enough retrofit coordinators or tradespeople in the North East or within Scotland as a whole.
It is a great growth area for jobs and could absorb a lot of our offshore workers if and when we transition away from fossil fuels. We cannot dodge the fact that it is fossil fuels creating climate change—fossil fuels are not part of the future, if we want a future. It is that simple.
Transitioning from Fossil Fuels
At the moment, we do not have a transition, as we do not have an accepted energy transition pathway and a set of oil & gas production reduction targets that are needed for certainty in planning for disinvestment and investment in renewables, and for workers in the industry to think of an exit strategy, retraining, and redeployment. At present, we are placing all our energy into thinking about energy production, which definitely needs to be thought about, but we need to give equal thought and finance to energy use reduction. Alleviating fuel poverty will win hearts and minds – dealing with basic needs usually does!
Empowering Communities and Supporting Local Action — Climate Action Hubs
It is a privilege to be one of the two original pathfinder regional community climate action hubs and see the hub system grow to cover the whole of Scotland. We are now 1 of 22 hubs and welcome the opportunity to work together. We can see the desire in people to make their communities more sustainable, healthier, happier. We see people becoming empowered by deliberative democratic processes and the creation of their own community vision and plans. We help communities create projects that make a real difference on the ground.
But to really create change they need to be enabled to do so. We want a mechanism to feed community visions and plans into regional and national plans. We want to see red tape reduced and barriers dismantled so that communities can own their own property, have community energy schemes, do community-led retrofit schemes, create local food supply chains to market, and much more. There is so much ingenuity.
Co-Creation and Capacity Building and Act Now!
We want communities to be able to community wealth build. To do that, though, they need more capacity, resources, and support. The regional hub system can, with specialised technical help from other charities/support services/businesses, support them in their journey. We want to – it is our role. The Scottish Government has put in place a fantastic enabler for grassroots action and local, regional and national connection. We are creating the networks and partnerships for concerted, systematic action, but we need financial stability and continued support to do so.
We also need the enablers—some of which I have highlighted—for impactful community-led projects to become a reality and able to be replicated throughout Scotland. We need to work together; we each have pieces of the puzzle to add in, to create the community, nation, and world that we want… once we have that vision, of course!
Co-creation is key—bring in people from every aspect of society to create a visual of the Scotland they want—have community representatives in the new Onshore Wind Taskforce to ensure community thoughts are understood and taken account of. It could dramatically reduce the planning time for such schemes. Bring those running community energy projects, Community Energy Scotland, and the hubs into the discussion now on the remit of GB Energy, and let’s see how we can facilitate a community energy scheme in every settlement—why not think big and think distributive?
We need to act—and act now—to prioritise a liveable planet over shareholder profit. We know what we need to do, we have the technology and resources to do it. We just need the will. We just need to do it.
