CAIRNGORMS CLIMATE CONFERENCE – NET ZERO WITH NATURE

Dave Windle

On Monday 9^th March, I attended this conference organised by the Park Authority in Aviemore. The irony of getting a lot of people to travel to talk about climate change was not lost and strenuous efforts were made to encourage car sharing and using the train. Refreshingly, there were no conference papers and no freebies.

The event was well organised, consisting of presentations in the morning followed by workshops in the afternoon. In a neat touch, the first presentation was by two students, from within the Park – it’s the young who are going to be affected. Roseanna Cunningham then gave a political speech with lots of references to legislation. Chris Stork, CEO of the UK Climate Change Committee, presented an interesting set of slides showing what Scotland has done so far and the scale of the remaining challenge. Mike Rivington and Alison Hester of the James Hutton Institute added some scientific perspective. Pete Mayhew, from the CNPA, then talked about what was already going on.

More details of these presentations are available on-line. The output from the afternoon workshops will take time to collate and should be available in due course. It will be fed into the update of the Park Partnership Plan due at the end of the year. So, what are my "take-aways"?

• Peatland restoration is rising up both the political and scientific agenda very quickly.
• The next steps in decarbonising our lifestyle are going to involve us changing our behaviour, e.g. eating less meat and dairy produce, using more public transport. They are not going to be easy and how the Park plays a role in the national context needs to be thought through carefully. It will require a lot of consultation — hence the need for the conference.

The acid test, of course, will be seen, not in the updated Partnership Plan, but in how well the actions are actually carried out.

Please let the webmaster know if there are problems with viewing these pages or with the links they contain.