The impacts of climate change are felt more keenly by women, minorities and people living in poverty. But the majority of climate change research and negotiation is undertaken by men – the voices of those most at risk are the least audible. 

This is mirrored in climate change and eco-dystopian fiction, in which women often suffer the worst effects, but the heroic solution is driven by Western scientists. This narrative is also reinforced by climate change communication, which focuses on the technological and political changes driving the ‘fight’ against climate change. 

Indigenous and Third World actors are often cast as passive victims, or in some cases as the perpetrators of environmental degradation in their own lands.

Under Her Eye

Representing indigenous, non-western or oppressed groups and societies as either passive victims or environmentally naïve perpetrators is damaging and Western-centric.  It ignores the entrenched power structures and socio-political injustices that control human-environment interactions and allows these groups no agency either in their current situation, or in the design of their future under climate change.

Under Her Eye: Women and Climate Change was an international arts-science conference and festival run by Invisible Dust, an organisation that works with artists and scientists to explore different ways of communicating and responding to climate change. 

Under Her Eye was unique in that it featured only women speakers who were working to communicate, research or address climate change. Speakers included Caroline Lucas MP, Co-Leader UK Green Party; Hakima El Haité, Moroccan Minister for the Environment and COP22 Host; Laura Tenebaum, former Senior Science Editor, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab; Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economicsand Renegade Economist; Christina Figueres, former Executive Secretary if the UNFCCC; and Margaret Atwood, author and inspiration for the conference title. 

The aim of Under Her Eye was to give the platform of communicating and discussing climate change to those who are so often underrepresented in these discussions, namely women, activists, artists, and researchers working in the arts and humanities. 

The conference allowed topics such as carbon trading, seas and oceans, and health and wellbeing, to be addressed from drastically different viewpoints even when the topics covered were very similar. This highlighted that diverse people, disciplines and sectors all have important roles to play in the climate change conversation.

Hostile climates

Alongside the Under Her Eye conference, Invisible Dust ran a fellowship for fifteen young female artists, activists and researchers working with issues related to climate change or the environment. 

Theses women received training and the opportunity to be involved in the conference and associated artist workshops. 

Inspired by the passionate and enlightening discussion in the Under Her Eye conference, a few of the fellows decided to organise a second conference focussing on the exploration of marginalised voices and alternative perspectives on climate change in an academic context, focusing on the contributions of postgraduate and early career researchers.

This conference, titled A Hostile Climate? Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change, aims to interrogate and respond to the meaning of ‘hostile climates’ in diverse and receptive ways, hearing from scholars across the humanities, sciences and beyond as they contribute to engaging discussion on the topic. 

Like Under Her Eye, we will explore the many different facets of climate change and related environmental catastrophes through the lens of different academic and artistic disciplines. The floor will be given to PhD students, early-career researchers and artists who are producing new and innovative work on the topic. 

Keynote speakers

We welcome contributions from all genders, and aim to keep the focus on a diversity of backgrounds, ethnicities and disciplines, in order to allow the voices of a range of demographics to be heard more strongly than they currently are in climate change discourse and debate.

The keynote speakers chosen for the conference are Professor Julie Doyle and Dr David Higgins. Professor Julie Doyle is based in the School of Media at the University of Brighton. Her work examines the role of media, communication and culture in shaping understandings of, and responses to, climate change. 

Professor Doyle’s work focuses on visual communications, and examines the limitations and successes of visual communications in helping make climate change a relevant issue and inspiring engaged and effective action. Professor Doyle is the author of the book Mediating Climate Change, and has been a key figure in establishing the genre of environmental communication.

We (the conference organisers) first met Julie Doyle during the Under Her Eye fellowship, when she ran a seminar inspired by her research and recent. This seminar became one of the core inspirations for the organisation of A Hostile Climate, and it is very fitting that Julie Doyle will be one of the keynote speakers. 

Mediating change

Dr David Higgins is an Associate Professor based in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Coming from a background in Romantic literature and ecology, within recent years Dr Higgins’ work has included the book British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene (Palgrave, 2017), which considers the monumental eruption of Mt Tambora in 1815 and the global crisis that followed. 

This book was part of a broader AHRC-funded project, which culminating in the international conference Mediating Climate Change at the University of Leeds, which brought together scholars from across the humanities to discuss the problems of communication, representation and comprehension that we encounter when considering climate change. 

Dr Higgins also currently works on the AHRC-funded project Land Lines: British Nature Writing, alongside colleagues from St Andrews and Sussex University. In 2018 Dr Higgins won the ASLE-UKI/Orkney Science Festival lecture prize for his lecture ‘Frankenstein on a Changing Planet’, which discussed the failure of Victor Frankenstein to take responsibility for his creation in relation to contemporary debates about anthropogenic impact on our planet. 

Dr Higgins’ work is increasingly focused on engaging wider audiences with environmental issues, and he is currently developing new public collaborations around culture and climate. 

Conference themes

The themes covered in A Hostile Climate include (but are not limited to):

•           The risks of climate change for those living on the margins of society, and how these may be apprehended or mitigated
•           How communities across the globe experience climate change, in a radically different way to those on mainland Europe and the US
•           How technology, entrepreneurship and science could provide benefits for humanity in a climate-changed world OR the possible negative ramifications of reliance on technology in attempting to solve these issues 
•           Non-Western, Indigenous and grassroots approaches to (and understandings of) climate change and related environmental issues
•           Understanding and responding to climate-changed environments through music, art and performance  
•           Climate change and migration: the risks and realities of hostility towards migrants in a climate-changing world, or alternative responses to possible climate change-induced migration

In addition to the conference presentations, we will be holding a small art exhibition instead of the more common academic poster exhibition. This exhibition will display works by young artists relating to climate change, environmental issues, and the inequities and inequalities that cause and arise from such issues. 

Embracing connections 

By including both artists and researchers in the sciences and humanities, we are encouraging attendees to view their research from a perspective beyond their normal purview, and to examine the social and scientific connections between their work and the work of others. 

As Under Her Eye fellow and conference organiser Claire Cooper stated: “One of the greatest difficulties that climate researchers often face is how troublesome it is to disentangle the science from the social impacts. 

“Perhaps the solution is not to further the separation between a work of research and its consequences, but to embrace the connections between the theoretical, the empirical, and the artistic exploration of the questions we ask”.

These Authors

Isabel Cook, Lucy Rowland, Rosamund Portus and Claire Cooper are doctoral researchers exploring climate change and environmental catastrophes from varying perspectives such as archaeology, environmental humanities, and geology. They are Under Her Eye fellows and the organisers of A Hostile Climate conference. More information on the conference can be found on the conference website.

The First Minister’s recent statement to the Scottish Parliament announcing her Programme for Government 2018–19 featured a number of high-level commitments relating to the environment. 

Nicola Sturgeon’s statement emphasised the Scottish Government’s commitment to “move to a low-carbon society”, and the importance of ensuring that economic growth is “environmentally sustainable”.

The Programme for Government statement outlined details of some of the policies and legislation which will play key roles in achieving the Scottish Government’s ambitions concerning the environment. 

Building momentum 

These policies included, for example, the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Bill, and its 2050 targets which the First Minister described as being “the most ambitious anywhere in the world that is based solely on domestic actions”.

Sturgeon also highlighted the Scottish Government’s commitments to introduce a national deep sea marine reserve, and to continue investing in projects such as the “the central Scotland green network, and the water environment fund”.

Building on the momentum from the Blue Planet TV series, the Scottish Government also announced its intention to introduce a deposit return scheme for drinks containers, and to take action to reduce plastic pollution. 

It remains to be seen what policy and legislative changes in Scotland relating to the environment will be driven by Brexit. Environmental campaigners will want to engage with the Scottish Government, and with politicians of all parties, to influence those changes.

Significantly, the SNP government has no majority in the Scottish Parliament, or in any of its committees including the environment, climate change and land reform committee, which is the lead committee for the new climate change legislation. The Scottish Parliament also has a well founded reputation for openness and transparency. Against this background, the current parliamentary session potentially offers environmental campaigners major opportunities to help shape and influence policy development and legislation relating to the environment in the Scottish Parliament, and at Scottish Government level. 

Top tips

I have jointly written a book and trained people in third sector organisations in how to make the most of opportunities to influence policy and legislation in the Scottish Parliament, and at Scottish Government level. The Scottish Parliament should be accessible to everyone in Scotland.

Below are outlined seven top tips to help environmental campaigners to make the most of these opportunities to influence environmental policy and legislation over this parliamentary session.

1. Develop public affairs strategies which understand politics and politicians. This includes adopting a cross-party approach, and engaging with politicians of all parties (even if you did not vote for them!). Adopting such an approach will increase your chances of influencing policy development and legislation, given the Scottish Government lacks a majority in the Scottish Parliament, and in its committees.
2. Define what you want to achieve, and ensure you can communicate what you want to do, and why, to Scottish Government Ministers, and to MSPs, in a clear and concise fashion. A good exercise is to try and summarise what you want to do in 55 words. If you cannot manage this, because what you want to do is too complex or too vague, then you probably need to rethink your activity!
3. Adopt clear ‘policy asks’ that you want the policy makers to accept and to act upon. Basing your ‘policy asks’ on robust evidence and proven best practice will help to maximise support for your ‘policy asks’ from MSPs and at Scottish Government level. 
4. Don’t expect politicians to have all the answers. You know best about the issues which matter most to you. Be proactive – tell Scottish Government Ministers and MSPs what you want them to do. Invite them to meet you to find out why these issues are important. Don’t just wait, and hope they show an interest.
5. Keep track of what’s going on. Most of the media will tell you about what’s going on in the Scottish Parliament after it has happened. If you want to change what’s going to happen, monitor the Business Bulletin (the timetable of what’s coming up) on the Scottish Parliament’s website. This will provide you with details of forthcoming debates, committee inquiries, parliamentary questions and other relevant business relating to the environment. Ask your local MSPs if they are going to be speaking in, for example, a particular debate relating to the environment, and tell them what you would like them to say. 
6. Don’t be scared of legislation! With the current political balance in the Scottish Parliament there are major opportunities for environmental campaigners to secure significant changes to the law relating to the environment. Tell the politicians about why particular provisions in the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Bill need to change.Work with the Government and/or with the opposition parties to draft amendments for Stage 2 and, if necessary, Stage 3 of the Bill, and work with members of the committee to secure their support for the amendments to secure these changes.
7. Careful thought should be given to ways in which your organisation can work in partnership to deliver key parts of its wider public affairs strategy, including its response to key legislation such as the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Bill. Partnership working to progress specific amendments to this legislation will demonstrate to the committee members considering the Bill, and to the Scottish Government, that your organisation has wider support for the issues it is raising. This will, in certain circumstances, make them more likely to support your amendments to the legislation.

By following these tips you will improve your chances of shaping and improving policy development and legislation relating to the environment, and of ensuring that the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government take effective action to safeguard the long term future of the environment.

This Author 

Robert McGeachy is an award winning public affairs professional, and the joint author of The Public Affairs Guide to Scotland: Influencing Policy and Legislation published by the Welsh Academic Press.

The DEFRA Consultation that preceded the publication of the Agriculture Bill was called ‘Health and Harmony’, yet there was no reference to the protection of public health. I detailed the glaring omission of anything human health related shortly after the Agriculture Bill had made its first appearance before Parliament. 

Neither the Agriculture Bill nor Michael Gove’s accompanying statements recognised the health risks and related acute and chronic adverse health impacts for rural residents and communities from the continued use of pesticides and other agro-chemicals on crop fields across the UK.

This was staggering – albeit unsurprising given the Government’s inaction on pesticides – considering that these highly toxic agrochemicals remain the biggest contributor of damage, pollution, and contamination of the air, soil, water and overall environment in agricultural areas, as well as damaging to human health. 

Vital amendment

There is now some renewed hope on the horizon. A specific amendment to the Agriculture Bill for the protection for rural communities has recently been tabled by the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas – amendment New Clause 10 (NC10) entitled “Application of pesticides: limitation on use to protect human health.” 

This vital amendment prohibits the application of any pesticide for the purpose of agriculture near (a) any building used for habitation, (b) any building or open space used for work or recreation, or (c) any public or private building where members of the public may be present including, but not limited to, schools, nurseries, and hospitals.

This is the most important health protection measure that the campaign I run, the UK Pesticides Campaign, has been calling for since the outset in 2001. 

The ongoing campaign petition – which calls on the Prime Minister Theresa May and DEFRA Secretary Michael Gove, to urgently secure the protection of rural residents and communities by banning all crop spraying and use of any pesticides near residents’ homes, schools, and children’s playgrounds – has been signed by nearly 6000 people, the majority of which are affected UK residents.

The petition has also been signed by a number of prominent figures including Hillsborough QC Michael Mansfield, Stanley Johnson, Jonathon Porritt, Gordon Roddick, Ben Goldsmith, and Caroline Lucas herself, among others.

Health scandal 

The prohibition of pesticide use in the locality of the areas listed in the NC10 amendment must cover substantial distances, as small buffer zones won’t provide adequate protection. Scientific studies (such as Lee et al 2002) have found pesticides miles away from where they were originally applied and calculated health risks for rural residents and communities living within those distances.

The existing evidence is unarguable regarding the damage agricultural pesticides are causing to both people and planet. Yet still no action has been taken by successive governments on this. This is without a doubt one of the biggest public health scandals of any time.

While operators generally have protection when using agricultural pesticides – such as use of personal protective equipment, respirators, and filtered cabs – rural residents and communities have had absolutely no protection at all for over seven decades. 

There are many thousands of known cases of adverse health impacts reported by rural residents across the UK, but which the government has continued to blatantly ignore. With millions of rural residents exposed in crop sprayed areas there will undoubtedly be many more unreported cases.

Rallying support

The NC10 amendment tabled by Caroline Lucas is crucially important. It provides an opportunity to get parliamentary support for the protection of rural residents and communities, especially the most vulnerable groups such as babies, children, pregnant women, the elderly and those already ill and/or disabled – none of whom should ever have been exposed to cocktails of these poisons in the first place.

A tweet I sent out last week regarding the NC10 amendment has received considerable support and has had many shares so far on social media including from groups such as the Sustainable Food Trust and the Soil Association, as well as prominent figures in the food and farming sector such as Peter Kindersley, Craig Sams, Joanna Blythman, Jonathan Porritt, and others such as the BBC Environment correspondent Roger Harrabin, Livia Firth, Glynis Barber.

The Director of the CLA Christopher Price actually ‘liked’ an earlier tweet that also contained the information about the NC10 amendment – rather surprisingly considering the CLA’s often pro-pesticides stance

If parts of the ‘industry’ even support this measure then here’s hoping that other MPs – especially those in rural constituencies – will also sign up to and support this crucial NC10 amendment for public health protection.

Take action

Now is the time for rural residents and communities to speak out as loudly as we can, contact our MPs and ask them to support the New Clause 10 (NC10) amendment entitled “Application of pesticides: limitation on use to protect human health.”

The post-Brexit UK agricultural bill and policy provides a real opportunity for the UK to clean up agriculture once and for all, and adopt a non-chemical farming policy.

Removing toxic chemicals from food production would then protect not only the health of rural residents and communities, as well as other members of the public, but also the environment, wildlife, pollinators, and other species that are being wiped out from the continued use of such toxic chemicals.

This Author

Georgina Downs is a journalist and campaigner. She runs the UK Pesticides Campaign, which specifically represents rural residents affected by pesticides sprayed in the locality of residents’ homes, as well as schools, playgrounds, among other areas.

Environmental campaign groups and the waste industry have largely welcomed an overhaul of England’s waste and recycling system announced by the government yesterday, but warned that it would need significant funding.

The waste and resources strategy – England’s first in a decade – proposes a raft of measures to tackle the country’s throw-away culture and boost the recyclability of products. Producers will be mandated to pay the full costs of disposal or recycling of packaging they place on the market, instead of the 10% they pay for currently.

The government also wants to see consistency in which materials can be collected for recycling, and consistent labelling on packaging. Consumers will receive financial incentives to return bottles and cans for recycling; while food waste collections will be weekly, and rolled out across the country.

Expensive plastic

Manufacturers will be encouraged to design products that last longer by mandatory guarantees and extended warranties; while food businesses will have to report food surplus and waste annually, the government has suggested.

It also wants to clamp down on waste crime by introducing compulsory electronic tracking of waste, and tougher penalties for waste operators breaking the law if they mislabel their waste to dodge tax.

Campaign groups including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) and the Aldersgate Group largely welcomed the proposals but wanted more detail on implementation and funding. Full details on how the new policies will be implemented is subject to consultation.

Extra funding

Louise Edge, senior oceans campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said that plans to ensure that companies who create and sell plastic packaging will pay for dealing with the consequences were “really encouraging”.

“This should be a big help in getting difficult to recycle and expensive plastic packaging off our supermarket shelves, driving better product design and much needed investment in refillable and reusable packaging,” she said.

However, she criticised the fact that the proposals would only enter law in 2023, a concern echoed by the Marine Conservation Society and the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

Libby Peake, policy adviser at think-tank the Green Alliance, wrote in a blog that the strategy showed “real ambition”, but success would depend on significant extra funding for enforcement at the Environment Agency and local authorities.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

The dialogue of the COP24 climate talks often seem to consist of little but collections of acronyms and buzz phrases.

We need “enhanced ambition” for the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that are written into the Paris Rulebook, with provision for “loss and damage”.

Well of course. But I’m about to make myself potentially unpopular by suggesting that we add another to the list: BAU, meaning Business As Usual. And its reverse, N(ot)BAU.

IPCC warning 

Sessions at COP should come tagged with which category they come in – and the only ones that will be worth going to will be the NBAUs, unless your aim is to challenge the BAU narrative.

Unfortunately in Katowice this month, there were few sessions in the NBAU category. Typical of the BAU was a fashion industry session in which cuts in energy use and increased efficiency were on the agenda; making fewer clothes was not.

While this COP made significant strides in important areas, particularly in acceptance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warning that the world must stay below 1.5 degrees of warming, the proposed actions being presented in side events by researchers and companies, even often by charities and non-governmental campaigners, almost invariably fall short of to the IPCC’s challenge.

That’s without even considering all of the other ways beyond climate change by which we are stretching this planet beyond its limits: the turning of the oceans into a plastic soup, the collapse of biodiversity and bioabundance, as is all too evident with insect numbers, the contamination of waters and soils with pesticides and artificial fertilisers.

What we’re doing now isn’t anything like enough on climate change, and possibly even worse on other issues. What we have to do as a human species is tread far, far more lightly on this planet, take less so we can survive and thrive. We’ll live better while not collapsing the natural ecosystems on which our lives, and economies, depend.

Meaningful change

Yet the models and plans for travel and transport, for feeding and clothing the world, for providing humans with energy for their every desire, on offer at COP suggest that we continue just as we are, indeed that the rest of the world rushes up to the levels now in the Global North, to the three-planet living of the UK – but more efficiently, with new and better technology.

Some of these habits are ones we fell into millennia-ago and have never questioned. But now we need to.

In a session on peatlands, one academic observed that our crops are all dryland species because agricultural models mostly developed in the dry Middle East millennia ago. Growing a variety of crops in rewetted organic soils is clearly essential, yet only just coming on the scientiists’ radar.

I challenged the academics and researchers on a panel that focused on both the desperate urgency of keeping the level of warming below 1.5, and transport, electricity and heating. They were simply assuming more of the same, more efficiently.

Real change was difficult to model, was one of their responses, and I agree that’s true. But we have to imagine it, plan for it and implement it, because there clearly is no alternative. BAU is not an option.

Regenerating consumption 

One of the few sessions in which I heard an exploration of what I’ve called NBAU was in the German pavilion. It was titled “Degrowth”, but that’s a term that often suggests decline and loss, which is not helpful when planning for a future world, and not accurate when we’re talking about transformation to a better life. One of the speakers came up with an alternative, I think better, title: “regeneration”.

That means thinking about societies that work for people, communities that deliver social goods, a natural world allowed again to flourish.

It means banning nearly all single-use plastic, and other single-use containers as well. Transport in bulk, buy into your own containers, and have that cup of tea sitting down in a café, maybe even having a chat (in this loneliness-plagued world). That would end the degradation of plastic-strewn beaches and microplastics-choked oceans.

It means slashing the consumption of animal protein, ending factory farming and the feeding of perfectly good plant food to animals to produce a tiny amount of meat – again, regeneration rather than degradation.

It means not “climate-smart agriculture” – doing what we do now to trash our soils and wildlife slightly less badly – but working with nature with agroecology, enriching soils, varying our diets, using knowledge as the high level input rather than chemicals.

Natural alternatives

When it comes to clothing – which we saw featured here at COP for the first time – it means making garments in quality materials (probably not synthetics, which are just more plastic) to last for the long haul, not “fast fashion” but great clothes.

Also in the German pavilion, I heard a young entrepreneur from the chemical industry talking about his scheme to chemically process complex plastic films containing layers of different materials in Africa. “We need to bring them back to reality,” he said.

It was one of the cases of being more accurate than perhaps he knew. “Reality” surely means that rather than producing complex materials that are extraordinarily challenging to recycle, for products that are generally bad for human health, we should find ways to produce, transport and sell food without the packaging.

Rather than sweet flavoured milk – a corporately sponsored plague now sweeping Vietnam – how about a local fruit, complete with all its natural goodness?

Ah but that’s not what consumers want, you’ll here the proponents of the current system say. Well no, that’s not what’s advertised to them, or, often, offered.

The long haul

There were boxes of free-to-take local Polish apples in boxes at COP. I never managed to snare one. They were always gone before I got to them, but I overheard one American delegate commenting with astonishment: “The taste, it is just amazing! I’ve never had anything like it.”

Nature, left to flourish, can do an amazing job of creating tasty, nutritious, varied foods, quality materials for clothing, manufacture and building, meeting our needs and those of the other species with which we share this planet.

That’s if we let it, and value what it produces enough to keep and maintain it for the long haul.

That’s not business as usual, but business as life – and it has to be if we’re to provide a decent life for everyone within the physical limits of this one fragile planet. Not so much regenerating the world as allowing it to regenerate itself.

This Author 

Natalie Bennett is a member of Sheffield Green Party and former Green Party leader.