The Arctic railway would have opened up the Arctic trade routes and allowed Finland to have a direct connection to central Europe for transport of raw materials. However, a recent report has brought the project’s commercial and ethical viability into question.  

The report concluded that: “A railway project this size is so complex and involves so many stakeholders and factors that in the time and resources given it has not been possible to properly assess all of the issues regarding the Arctic railway project.”

The report argues that more planning is needed regarding funding and respecting the rights of the Indigenous people (the Sami) whose land the railway would have to traverse across.

Environmental impact 

The projected railway was planned to cross from Rovaniemi, Finland to Kirkenes Norway. This railway would open up the Arctic circle to Europe and secure a more direct trade route for Baltic Nations, Russia, Japan and China to transport raw materials to Central Europe.

The project was initially announced in October 2015 by former Prime Minister of Finland Paavo Lipponen, in a memorandum to Former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. 

This project has since been met with vehement criticism from the Sami People, environmental activists and artists supporting the Sami people and ordinary Finnish citizens.

Johanna Kronqvist, a student at Abo Akademy in Finland, said: “At first, I thought [the railway project] sounded quite exciting, but as soon as I realised the effects on the Sami people, the reindeer husbandry and the environment in general, I got upset”. 

Indeed, though the Norwegian and Finish governments explored five different route options, all would have had to cross Sami Lapland, and thus cause damage to the habitat of the reindeer and the fishing traditions of the Sami people.

Final frontier

The construction of the line was projected by Minister Anna Berner to cost €2.9 billion, with Norway paying €0.9 and Finland paying the rest. Te Rovaniemi-Kirkenes line would cut through lake Inari and a large portion of forest and herding territories.

Dr Humrich from the University of Groningen describes the Arctic as “the final frontier”. The Arctic region is a goldmine for those seeking to exploit its natural resources, with its untapped liquid oil and gas reserves, and the Arctic ocean serving as an expedient sea route that helps transport raw goods.

Dr Humrich said: “Concerning the transport of raw materials, the railway would be transferring copper, iron ore, phosphate or raw wood. They are not transportable by plane. The goods are currently being transported by boat but that is a very slow process.

“Finally, the goods could be transferred by street but they have less capacity than trains, who are in the eyes of the Finnish government, the most economically feasible option.”

As it stands, goods from Russia enter the northernmost part of Norway and still have to be transferred to other modes of transportations. The Rovaniemi-Kirkenes line would have effectively cut out the middle man and set up a direct line connecting Europe to the Arctic sea and create new transport hubs and ports. 

In Dr Humrich’s opinion, despite looking at all five proposal routes for this line, there was no way for construction to avoid Sami Lapland. However, he did agree that the Rovaniemi-Kirkenes was the option, though most direct, that would cause the greatest amount of damage to the Lapland flora and fauna.

Indigenous livelihoods

The Sami people are the only Indigenous peoples living within the European Union. They are present in Norway, Sweden, Russia and Finland.

Part of their heritage is Reindeer Husbandry and Fishing.  The projected railway line would cut through one third of Lapland forest region and would cause significant damage to an already fragile Arctic Environment.

As Dr. Cepinskyte of the Finnish Intstitute of International Affairs, specialist on the protection of national minorities and indigenous peoples and Arctic Security explained: “The Sami people fear the railway would disrupt reindeer pastures and migration patterns, while trains could also kill a lot of reindeers.

“In addition, the railway would likely attract large scale industrial activities, such as mining, which would pose a threat to the environment and nature.

“Reindeer herding and the traditional use of lands is fundamental for the survival of the Sami culture and languages, thus any harm to the environment and nature would put the preservation of the Sami identity at risk.”

Activist interventions

This view is further supported by Former head of YLE Sami-language news, Pirita Näkkäläjärvi, who wrote an article citing that the projected line would plough through Sami remains, thus disrespecting culturally significant traditions and bring about significant damage to Sami culture.

Näkkäläjärvi wrote: “The grazing lands for the reindeer have already been cut by competing land use such as logging, roads and construction. Building a railway through the reindeer herding cooperatives would further fragment, narrow and decrease the land needed by the reindeer.”

Activist groups such as Suohpanterror and Greenpeace joined the Sami people in September 2018 as the Sami formed a ‘red line’ along the projected railway route to protest the construction that was planned without the ‘Free, Prior, Informed Consent’ right given to the Indigenous people to protect their rights.

Furthermore, Sami Parliament have issued a statement claiming that the Sami were not consulted adequately by Norwegian and Finnish governments to discuss the implications this project would have for the Sami.

This is not the first time Nordic governments have ignored indigenous people’s rights, but the cancellation of the project is a step closer to protecting the environment and indigenous rights.

Viable solutions

The Sami and the environment can breathe a little easier as the controversy seems to be settled peacefully, unlike those affected by the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States.

The future of this project remains unclear. What is clear however, is that if Norwegian and Finnish authorities wish to continue with this railway, they must include the Indigenous peoples on their territories in all stages of planning and discussion, in order to come up with a viable solution for all parties.

This Author 

Clemence Waller is a journalism Masters student at the University of Groningen. Growing up in the Middle East, she has always been interested in international reporting and politics. She is currently a freelance journalist.

Famed for its remarkable archaeological treasures from the ancient past, today Orkney is forging a low-carbon future for itself.

The archipelago can point to a string of landmark achievements in developing low-carbon technology, and hasn’t been a net importer of electricity since April 2015.

Yet, this quiet renewables revolution in the far north of Scotland is under threat.

Historic shift

The UK’s carbon and nuclear-oriented energy regime continues to punish Orkney for its clean energy bounty: community-owned wind turbines often sit idle due to a lack of grid infrastructure, the islands have the highest fuel poverty rate in the UK, and a regressive charging regime sees producers pay a premium to send their electricity south.

Set in the north-west corner of the Orkney archipelago, the island of Westray (population: 600) was an early-starter in making a bid for a sustainable future based on the fierce elements that have shaped ways of life in this part of the word for millennia.

This historic shift began in 1998 when, with the traditional whitefish industry in crisis, the islanders on Westray held a conference to determine what might be done to mitigate outward migration from the island in the wake of job losses.

The result was the foundation of the Westray Development Trust, formed with the goal of making the island entirely powered by renewable energy. In 2005, they took the audacious step of purchasing an electric vehicle for community use, well before manufacturers were offering off-the-shelf models.

Clare Lucas, who works at Westray Development Trust, said: “The community recognised early on that something needed to be done if a healthy, thriving population was going to remain on the island. There needed to be a way to bring sustainable jobs and infrastructure to the island to reverse this downward trend.”

The island’s 900 kilowatt wind turbine generates around half a million pounds of revenue each year for community projects. Throughout Orkney, other communities have gone on to develop their own turbine-powered trusts based on this model.

Renewables revolution

The story of Westray Development Trust is just one strand in a rich tapestry of stories about Orkney’s remarkable renewables revolution by ethnographer, poet and writer Laura Watts. 

Energy at the End of the World is the result of a ten year study, and offers an original perspective on how Orkney has changed in that crucial decade.

In this account, these “Energy Islands” are a place where renewable power, a constant presence amongst the gale force winds and raging seas that incessantly batter the coastline, is viewed less as a commodity and more like a fundamental part of day-to-day life.

Watts notes: “A low-carbon renewable energy future, which is much talked about elsewhere, is coming early to Orkney.” 

But in addition to being a study of the economic and scientific processes involved in making this new future, her work is also deeply rooted in the islands’ past, woven, like the old Norse sagas, from fragments of culture, fable, myth.

Knowledge base

There is an inherently heroic quality to the story of a rural, plucky, self-reliant place trying to make a distinctive mark, despite frequent intransigence on the part of a UK economy and government still hooked on fossil-fuels. But Orkney has long since surpassed the limitations of what fierce independent localism can achieve.

Orkney boasts a string of notable firsts — the first smart grid, the first grid battery, the first community owned wind turbine, in addition to the highest number of electric vehicles per head of population in Scotland.

There is also an impressive energy knowledge base on the islands, embodied in the Orkney Renewable Energy Forum, which meets every month.

But this string of achievements pales in comparison with future potential. The unique geographical position of Orkney at the meeting point of the North Atlantic and the North Sea means that there is an estimated marine energy capacity amounting to several gigawatts: if fully exploited, energy generated from around the islands’ coastline would be on a par with one of the UK’s large nuclear reactors.

Despite the burgeoning sector creating hundreds of local jobs and delivering millions in revenues and investment, the islands continue to be viewed as a peripheral anomaly in the current UK energy system: a system that makes Orkney pay for its excess of renewable energy.

Additional capacity

The islands currently generate around 120 percent of their electricity needs. But rather than being rewarded for this energy surplus, the current set-up sees the islands penalised for creating too much clean power.

At the root of the problem is the sub-sea cable built to link Orkney to a highly centralised, carbon and nuclear-oriented national grid, which simply isn’t up to the job.

There have been a plethora of calls for additional capacity, with OFGEM and Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks (SSEN) currently negotiating terms for a £260 million, 220 megawatt, high-voltage link to be completed by 2023.

As Watt’s notes in her study, the “exchange-rate” for energy prices is “inverted.” At present the constantly shifting rate can see generators on Orkney charged as much as £40 or £100 per kilowatt hour.

Added to this, community owned wind turbines have to be turned off or “curtailed” when the grid reaches capacity, directly depriving some of the most isolated areas of potentially transformative funds.

Pace of change

Many islanders are incensed at the slow pace of change, when contrasted to the rapid innovation taking place daily around their coastline.

Based in an old high-school, the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) is the preeminent global testbed for marine renewables, drawing the interest of an array of global investors — including Silicon Valley giants like Microsoft.

However, despite its success (since 2003, 31 devices from 11 different countries have undergone testing at the site) the inadequate grid infrastructure poses a potential threat to the viability of EMEC.

Neil Kermode, Managing Director of EMEC, said: “It’s definitely holding us back”.

“At the moment, we’re the only place doing this anywhere in the world. But there are other places lining up to do this … the industry that we have got here and we’ve built up here is absolutely at risk and will go overseas if they get better from somewhere else.”

Energy inequality

The lack of strategic vision required to fix Orkney’s energy infrastructure is an issue of social justice, too. Despite an abundance of energy production and a willingness by the islanders to push innovation to its limits, the islands have the highest fuel poverty rate in the UK.

The factors behind this, common throughout rural Scotland but especially acute in Orkney, range from a lack of gas infrastructure for heating, to high fuel costs, to the nature of the housing stock itself — which in places like Westray consists mainly of old stone built dwellings that are often uninsulated.

The still smaller island of Rousay (population: 216) is trying to tackle the twin issue of community turbine curtailment and fuel poverty with a Smart Heat Project, using a variant of “Total Heat Total Control” already deployed by providers to manage demand during peak times.

The aim is simple and compelling: “instead of turning the turbine off, we want to divert that lost power and use it locally,” says the island development trust.

Energy inequality within the islands is a potent issue, too.

Rich and poor

Robert Leslie, Energy Officer at Orkney Housing Association, describes the gap between ‘energy rich’ Orcadians — those with the means to invest their own capital in personally owned assets (such as a small turbine, solar panel, or electric vehicle) and the majority of ‘energy poor’ islanders. The latter pay exorbitant prices for electric heating and at the petrol pump.

Of the housing association’s 772 tenants, 66 percent are in fuel poverty, with 22 percent in “extreme fuel poverty” where more than 20 percent of their income is spent on fuel costs.

For Leslie, this problem is captured in a single anecdote: “A couple of years ago, I heard the story of a farmer who noticed that gaps were opening in the wood panelling in his hallway due to the fact he was heating it to such a degree, unable to put the electricity generated by his wind turbine into the grid.”

“At the same time, a mile from that farmer’s house on the edge of Kirkwall, I could visit a tenant who worried how many hot meals she could serve her children during the week as she watched the money count down on her prepayment electricity meter.”

“The gap between Orkney’s energy rich and energy poor might be small in distance, but it is huge in resource,” he explains.

Scottish nationalism 

Orcadians might not be taking to the streets, as the Gilet Jaunes did, to protest at the iniquities present in the shift to low-carbon energy. But the question of who will be carried along and who will be left behind on the Energy Islands cannot be answered in isolation.

Orkney Islands Council, with the smallest population of any local authority in Scotland, lacks the scale and, particularly in a time of austerity, the risk-bearing capacity, to take decisive interventionist steps to fix the situation.

At a Scottish level the changing picture is not encouraging.

Our Power, a Scottish government supported not-for-profit retail energy supplier, folded in January 2019. After only a few years in business, its attempt to reduce fuel poverty by brokering lower prices for social tenants, including many in Orkney, was stymied by a retail energy market that props up the big six and has seen numerous start-ups go to the wall.

The current Scottish National Party (SNP) administration at Holyrood is committed to delivering a Scottish National Energy Company (SNEC) during the current term of the Scottish Parliament, but the nature of this new public entity is already a matter of fierce debate.

Scottish nationalism has often mobilised around the issue of injustice of fuel poverty in an energy rich nation.

Energy injustice

Riding the wave of a previous energy revolution, the SNP’s iconic “Scotland’s Oil” campaign, which led to the party’s first electoral breakthroughs in 1974, featured text below the image of a Scottish pensioner asking, “why are so many Scots old folk cold and undernourished? Why do 5,000 die of hypothermia every year?”

With Age Scotland reporting that 60 percent of single-pensioner households in Scotland struggle with energy bills, the issue remains a national controversy.

The nature of how the SNEC is constituted will be crucial. A recently published report by left-leaning thinktank Common Weal called on the Scottish Government to embrace a model that moves beyond the retail market and includes ownership of generation assets, too.

For the report’s lead author, Dr Keith Baker of Glasgow Caledonian University, this will be the essential determinant of whether an SNEC can tackle energy injustice in Scotland:

“At the end of the day Our Power was still a retail energy company. Therefore they were always going to be susceptible to the kinds of things that tend to bring retail energy companies down … that’s one of the reasons that we pushed so hard for the National Energy Company to own generation assets.”

Systematic failure

Slamming a lack of strategic thinking on the part of the Scottish Government, Baker contends that an SNEC would be uniquely well placed to front the kind of investment in infrastructure required in Orkney:

“The real value here is in generation assets and in supply assets and in doing the sorts of projects that are not going to have very high returns but are going to benefit a lot of people in a lot more ways — the co-benefits of tackling fuel poverty and job creation, and sustainable fuel supply chains — they need to be thinking at that level. Which again is why we need a strategic approach.”

Orkney’s electricity export log-jam is a by-product of this lack of long-term thinking on the part of regulators and policymakers. This is why OFGEM and SSEN continue to debate the immediate return required to justify the additional connection, despite Orkney’s marine energy capacity equating to around 10 percent of the UK’s current electricity demand.

Neil Kermode of EMEC points out that this debate has been going on for twenty years. It is a symptom, he believes, of a systemic failure:

“Frankly it’s a function of the privatised element of the process, which requires people to have a business case for doing things, as opposed to there being an element of vision.”

Island resourcefulness

In response to such frustrations, and a system that seems intent on keeping Orkney on the margins, island resourcefulness attempts to fill the gap.

The profusion of electric vehicles offers a DIY method of offloading additional grid capacity, acting as multiple mobile grid batteries. There’s also a plan, with a pilot already underway, to re-fit Orkney Island Council’s ferry fleet to be powered by locally produced hydrogen — another notable first.

Kermode, originally from Bournemouth, sees a unique factor in Orkney that underpins this willingness to innovate:

“There’s something really powerful about an island: you know who’s there. You can pretty quickly get around and go ‘right, we’re thinking of doing this, has anyone got a problem with this? If you have, then just say so’,” he explains. 

“In a landscape like Orkney … it’s really hard to keep a secret. So you don’t bother. So you tend to be honest and open about stuff … it’s quite a contributive culture … That sort of culture pervades what goes on in Orkney and has done for generations.”

Island independence

In one of the last poems published before his death, Orkney’s greatest bard, George Mackay Brown, wrote to an imaginary Orcadian poet in 2093. In verse rich with the references to the different cultures that have inhabited Orkney, he explored the commonalities across time, including the role of the sea:

“We wear the sea like a coat/We have salt for marrow.”

Explaining the significance of marine energy to UK policy makers, unfamiliar with the far-flung islands, is bound to be challenging. But perhaps Orkney’s insistence on occupying the leading edge of energy innovation, rather than settling for a peripheral role, points to a whole new paradigm for a post-carbon economy. 

Carbon-based capitalism concentrated itself in large cities where cheap workforces were easier to come by and economies of scale, fed by centralised distribution networks, kept costs down. Perhaps its successor is already taking root in places not hemmed-in by the assumptions of what has gone before.

Writing against the bleak backdrop of the late 1930s, another Orkney bard, the novelist Eric Linklater, observed: “Have I said we are an independent people? It is one of the blessings of a small land. For freedom of opinion, even of action, is still permissible in small places.”

By shaping an energy revolution on its own terms, Orkney has shown that it doesn’t require permission to forge a new future. It simply needs the rest of the UK, with its ageing 20th century energy system, to stop living in the past.

This Article

Chris Silver is a writer currently looking at #JustTransition in Scotland and beyond. He tweets @SilverScotland. This article first appeared on Desmog.uk.

I loved the school students’ climate strikes last month. The energy, the jokes on the placards, the smiles, the hopeful faces. The students in Brighton marching by the railway station, chanting ‘F*** Theresa May’. I had all those kindly, patronizing, adulty feelings. But something deeper too. 

I have been a climate activist since 2004: endless protests and phone calls and emails and meetings in small rooms, week after week, year after year, all the time trying to give other people hope. When I spoke at meetings people would ask – But how can we do it? How can we force the powerful the act? In every country, on every continent, someone always asks that question. Because everyone wants to know the answer.

I would try to invent an answer, and then lie alone in the dark in the middle of the night and wrestle with despair. But now I have seen a power that can change the world. 

First steps

If young people all over the world come out of school and stay out of school, the cities will stop. The workplaces will stop, because so many people need to go look after their children.

The young people would have immense moral force. They can occupy the parliaments. The police will not and cannot beat and gas and kill all the children. Nor will the soldiers. Nor would we let them. And if it is all over the world, it will be a power such as Earth has never seen.

The kids could make the rest of us brave and decent, and we could follow them out of work into the squares and the halls of power until we win.

We are not anywhere near that now. These are one-day strikes. Who knows how long the strikes will last? How far they will spread? What exactly do they want? 

I fantasize we will go all the way this time. I know we won’t. Great historical movements do not work like that. But the process has begun. 

International movement 

What I can now imagine, many can now imagine. It will be possible for millions to begin working out how to use their power, with apocalypse in their future and a lifetime of making history ahead of them.

I have seen another thing. For forever I have had to listen to experts telling me we would never be able to convince people by scaring them shitless about climate change. They told me, and you, how people were too short sighted and greedy and stupid and unwashed to grasp what the enlightened understood.

Now I know that we climate activists have persuaded hundreds of millions. The first part of our work is done. The real work commences.

Another thing is so big people hardly comment on it. The internationalism. The strikes started with one young woman in Stockholm, spread to Australia, back to Belgium, on across parts of Europe, even came to Britain, are going to be global this Friday, and will not stop there.

As I watched the strike reports, Nancy Lindisfarne and I were finishing a book on class and male violence. The last chapters – a joy to write – were about the exploding resistance to rape and sexual harassment.

Tracing the history of the last few years, the same thing jumped out at us – internationalism. The movement leaps, from the riot against rape at India Gate in Delhi in 2012, to Rhodes University in South Africa, to Buenos Aries and across Latin America, to the women’s marches against Trump, to the MeToo movement in the US, to the Chinese MeToo and the Indian MeToo, to Stormy Daniels and Blasey Ford, just two women, to hundreds of thousands protesting for legal abortion in Argentina, to the conviction of Cardinal Pell in Australia, to three million women in Kerala joining hands to defend the dignity of their menstrual blood, to demonstrations of millions around the world on International Women’s Day last week.

Increasing visibility 

These movements are only the beginning, and the earthquakes will threaten all established power.

You can see that same internationalism – the leapfrogging power of example and shared messages – moving as quickly in the climate strikes. It’s partly social media, and partly that our experience is growing more alike across the world. It’s partly migration and Skype.

There is one imbalance. Everyone sees what happens in the US, but people in the US have trouble seeing anything in the rest of the world. That sucks. Let’s change it.

The movement and the internationalism are a property of our age. It is the same this week in the great crowds and strikes against the tyrants in Sudan, Morocco and Algeria. That is how it was in the Arab Spring eight years ago too, which spread throughout the Arab world and south to the rest of Africa, to Greece and Spain and to Occupy in the US. That Spring, like MeToo, like the climate strikes, was a movement of the young.

The young are changing, which means the world will change.

Against the walls

Internationalism matters right now. The solution to climate change must be global, because the atmosphere we breathe is global.

Our movement has tried for global agreement at the top, between the existing governments, tried long and hard, and failed utterly. That’s why we know that we need mass movements from the grassroots, pushing upwards. But those movements have to spread from country to country, each encouraging the others, because in the end we have to win this globally. 

Internationalism matters too, because this is the age of The Walls. Trump’s wall, Netanyahu’s wall, the migrant-hating spreading across Europe, the drowning pool of the Med, the xenophobia in South Africa, hating Muslims in India, hating Roma in Hungary, and Brexit.

Internationalism matters in Britain this week because the politicians are leading us into a racist Brexit. Many on the left are tailgating the racist right. They say it would be wrong to have another referendum, because the majority would vote to remain. They say we have to leave because we can only change the world by ourselves, on our own, in our little island. That is a mistake about how we can change the world. 

Internationalism matters now because in the lifetime of the today’s climate strikers, heat and its consequences will drive hundreds of millions from their homes. One solution will be the Walls around the World.

Changing the world

We will be climbing these walls, clambering out of the sea, our children in our arms, begging the men and women with the guns to let us through. Or we will be the ones standing on the Wall, gassing the refugees, shooting them, shoving them back into the sea or the desert or the barbed wire.

But the children of Earth are showing us another way. Internationalism makes it possible to learn to welcome the needy because they are our brothers and sisters, and because we can only change the world together.

This Author 

Jonathan Neale is a writer and was secretary of the Campaign Against Climate Change for several years. He is the editor of One Million Climate Jobs, and blogs with Nancy Lindisfarne at Anne Bonny Pirate.

Image: School climate strike in Berlin. 350.org, Flickr. 

Crowdfunding and peer to peer lending grew out of the banking crisis of 2008. According to the European Central Bank, the availability of bank loans to SMEs declined 23 percent immediately following the crash, causing a devastating impact on the economy.

The crowdfunding revolution that sprung up as a result of this credit crunch (along side the rise of the internet) may not have completely filled this funding gap, but has led to what some call the democratisation of capital, allowing people to invest with greater ease directly into projects of their choice. What’s more some you can invest as little as £5 in some of the projects making investing in green projects more accessible than ever before.

These crowd funding platforms also allow organisations to raise finance at reduced interest rates, and breaks down some of the power once held by larger financial institutions and even governments that had something of a monopoly on finance.  This has been great news for environmentally focused projects that have often found it hard to raise funds through the mainstream banking sector.

The rise of crowd funding

There are now more than 65 crowdfunding platforms, many of which enable investors to take out Innovative Finance ISAs (IF ISAs) and some of which specifically support environmentally focused projects and businesses.

An IF ISA is essentially a way to invest in projects and businesses via a crowdfunding platform. IF ISAs are a relatively new savings product introduced in 2016 to offer investors an alternative to the traditional Cash ISA and Stocks and Shares ISA.

IF ISAs are a great option for those looking for transparent investments that can help tackle climate change. The most ethical platforms support investors to create a portfolio of projects aligned to their principles; cutting out the traditional middleman or fund manager, that will often also invest your savings in environmentally damaging sectors.

At the moment IF ISA’s still account for less than one percent of the UK ISA market, but with £290 million invested in only the second full tax year of their existence (2017/18), eight times more than the 2016/17 figure of £36 million, IF ISAs are rapidly growing in popularity.

How and where you invest your money is an area ripe for change, the Ethical Consumer Markets Report showed a 6.3% growth in spend related to ethical investments between 2016-17 alone.

Making up for government mistakes and market failure

The growth of crowd funding platforms marks a real shift in power at a time when government failures around the management of our power sector are becoming increasingly clear. Yet even with public sentiment and support shifting towards renewable energy, our Ethical Consumer Markets report revealed earlier in the year how new government rules had a hugely negative impact on the solar sector.

Sales of solar panels fell by 87.4 percent in 2017 after the government reduced support for at-home solar energy generation.  In 2016, the government cut incentives for solar panels known as Feed-in Tariffs (FITs) by 65 percent and, in 2017, it ended subsidies for solar thermal schemes. The market has been declining ever since and, in 2017, it was less than a quarter of its 2010 size, when FITs were first introduced.

Meanwhile is also a growing mistrust in large banks and financial institutions as they continue to finance industries with a high climate impact such as fracking or palm oil.

The most ethical investment platforms

Of the more than 65 crowdfunding platforms Ethical Consumer has awarded four Best Buy status in our new guide to Ethical IF ISAs; they are Abundance, Energise Africa, Ethex and Triodos.
Each of these platforms arrange crowdfunding for projects that all have social and environmental goals. Perhaps equally important with the option to invest as little as £5 into some of the projects it makes a people’s revolution in green finance a real possibility.

• Abundance has allowed customers to invest even very small amounts, from £5, in different projects. It only funds what it calls ‘socially useful’ projects. These have largely been green energy in the form of wind turbines and solar farms, but have also affordable housing.
• Energise Africa is designed to provide working capital to projects that install and sell solar home systems in sub-Saharan Africa. The aim is to provide more than 111,000 rural families access to renewable energy over the next three years. Home systems tend to provide simple electric lighting and phone charging facilities.
• Ethex recently funded the Solar for Schools Community Benefit Society (CBS) that was set-up in 2016 to enable schools in England and Wales to derive some financial and environmental benefit from solar panels.
• Triodos is the first UK bank to launch its own crowdfunding platform. Since its launch the Triodos crowdfunding platform has raised £20 million for eight pioneering organisations delivering positive change. An example is the £1.8 million bond that was successfully raised for Mendip Renewables in 2018, which owns and operates a 5MW community solar scheme and uses its retained profits to support charities in Somerset.

Investing sensibly

Whilst only Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)-regulated platforms can offer an Innovative Finance ISA, they come with no other protection. IF ISAs don’t qualify for the savings element of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) that protects up to £85,000 should a firm go bust.

Neither do they get the FSCS investing element that covers up to £50,000 in case your investing platform goes bust and hasn’t done what it is meant to with your money.

Some platforms have “reserve funds” that they claim can cover you in the event of defaults with loans or businesses failing. However they are under no obligation to use these funds and it is at the discretion of the platform.

It is also more difficult to access your money with an IF ISA. Most of the assets (or loans) will be fixed term, making instant access impossible.

You should, therefore, take into account the length of time the asset is held for when making a decision about what projects to invest in.

Time to invest for a greener future?

That said you can limit your risk by investing in these Best Buy options. They work closely with projects on their platforms to ensure that they succeed and by investing small amounts of money into a number of projects spreading your risks.

If you can afford to take a risk with a small amount of your hard earned cash then these platforms provide consumers the opportunity to invest directly into projects that have tangible positive environmental impacts and could help pave the way for a revolution in clean, green energy financing.

This Author

Tim Hunt is a director at Ethical Consumer magazine.

In 2018, at an exhibition of Dutch masters at the Holburne Museum, Bath, I was particularly taken by a painting of Dordrecht harbour by Aelbert Cuyp. My attention was first drawn to the rhythms of the composition as whole, to the interplay of cloudy sky and calm sea.

My eye was taken more deeply into the picture by the artist’s use of light and shade. This led me to the closely observed detail – a flight of birds, a flag fluttering in the breeze, two men punting a lighter towards a ship – and back to better appreciate the whole. All this accomplished, quite unobtrusively, by a master’s skill with oil paint. 

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

I had a very similar experience reading How to See Nature. There is profound yet unobtrusive elegance in Paul Evans’ writing. His words and metaphors subtly alter our gaze, weaving observation, science, myth, poetry into stories of beauty and tragic loss.

Attraction to light

As I finished each chapter, I wanted to close the book and let the images play through my mind, rather than rush on to the next. The book is not a blow-by-blow instruction manual as the title might suggest. It is more of an exemplar, drawing us to see things through Evans’ eyes. This is a man who knows how to look at Nature, and we could all do well to follow his example.

Since I dislike the street lights that blare down on our neighbourhood, and often worry about the impact of light pollution, I was particularly interested in Chapter Two: Gardens of Light. The first paragraphs draw us into the strange beauty of pipistrelle bats hunting insects under a sodium street lamp.

The insects confuse the light with the far more distant moon, are drawn closer, and the pipistrelles follow them. Evans describes the sophisticated echolocation by which the bats hunt down the insects, and the evolution of the insects’ ability to evade them.

He invites us to wonder what it is like to be a bat: maybe we draw a little closer to them as we learn that, slowed down, a bat’s ultrasound emission sounds like birdsong; slowed even further, like the sounds of whales and dolphins.

But the attraction of insects to the street light has a wider impact. It may advantage pipistrelles’ feeding, but it disrupts their circadian rhythms, interferes with flight paths that require darkness. Some one-third of insects die as a result of encounter with artificial light, which confuses and disorients them; it exhausts them, makes them vulnerable to predators, and diverts them from pollinating flowers.

As the chapter continues, the reader sees the relation between light, insects, bats and flowering plants through the author’s eyes and sensemaking, so feels present with both the wonder and the disturbance of the phenomenon.

Intrinsic value

Each chapter picks up and explores a theme: rosebay willowherb cracking open seed pods like “fans of white feathers” leads to a reflection on plants of the wasteland; the warning call of grouse takes us onto the wild moors; the glimpse of a pine marten (or was it a polecat?) to questions of reintroduction and rewilding.

That all is not well with Nature we learn in particular in the chapters on The Greenwood and Blight, where we see how human interventions often have unforeseen impacts, unbalancing ancient relationships.

The book ends with a Bestiary of British wildlife, “idiosyncratic in its selection and based on personal encounter”, which brings the reader closer to Adder, Badger, Crow … Yellowhammer, Zooplankton.

Nature writers in this time of ecological devastation face two challenges: one is to draw attention to the losses caused by human action; another is to tempt us into an ever-deeper appreciation of the intricate beauty of the more-than-human world.

Who can say which is the more important? In this book, Evans successfully integrates both. He writes, “I intend the perspective of this book to be one of advocacy for what we see – bringing overlooked wildlife into focus as a way of revealing how much it matters… [For] seeing Nature as a resource to be exploited and commodified is a denial of its intrinsic value.” 

How to See Nature is handsomely produced by Batsford; readers will enjoy the illustrations by the author’s wife, Maria Nunzia. It shows that even in these times of ecological catastrophe, human culture can reflect the intricate beauty of the world around us.

This Author

Peter Reason’s latest book, In Search of Grace: An Ecological Pilgrimage, is published by Earth Books. 

Some of the most famous inventions and breakthroughs in design and technology have been inspired by nature. 

This is called biomimicry: but really, what is it? Biomimicry – or biomimetics – is the examination of nature, its systems, its procedures, processes and elements to then take inspiration for new inventions that help humans solve problems in which they are facing.

The goal is that humans create far more sustainable designs in order to both progress with innovation whilst having the future of the planet in mind.  

Biomimetic design

Nature has been continuously evolving for the past 3.5 billion years – with all that right on our doorstep, it’s no surprise that humans are increasingly looking to the environment for technological inspiration.

Humans are continually looking for new ways to improve already-invented designs and, surprisingly, nature is helping humans construct better designs than ever before. The approach to human innovation through mimicking nature is called biomimetic design and has been the fundamental basis of many inventions, including buildings and cars.

RS Components has researched how nature is inspiring technologies that will affect our everyday lives – take a look at the infographic here.

With that said, researchers have formulated a mathematical solution that can help minimise noise and maximise aerodynamics in design to help wind turbines and air vehicles. Not only has this technology been inspired by owl feathers, but “it can actually be used for any application with a blade turning through the air”.

Similarly,  scientists from Salk and University of California San Diego have discovered that a fruit fly brain has the elegance and efficient innovative methods of performing similarity searches – could they be the search engines of the future? The fruit fly’s brain could possibly help design computer algorithms very soon.

Innovative technology

There are some inventions that we thought we’d never see – camouflaging material and skin being one of them. However, using octopus skin as an inspiration, engineers at Cornell University have reported on their invention of stretchable surfaces with 3D texture morphing a synthetic “camouflaging skin” – this is inspired by modelling the real thing in octopus and cuttlefish.

Similar to the above, scientists have used gecko skin as an inspiration for one of their inventions. Gecko’s gravity-defying grip is due to their rows on tiny hairs (setae) on their toes. Gecko-skin technology has been used frequently by scientists over the past few years, so we can only expect to see more nature-inspired technology in the future.

Nature isn’t just being used for tech though. EDAG – a German car company, has modelled its new cars off a turtle’s shell. So far, the design is just a potential idea but has recently been brought to life using a 3D printer, designed to improve passenger safety.

We very often see streamlined trains – for example, Virgin and Bullet Trains, but now there is a new invention that has been inspired by the kingfisher bird. The birds dive headfirst into the water to hunt their prey, but there is no splash due to their streamlined beaks.

The new trains have been modelled after the long narrow kingfisher beak in order to protect the train’s structural integrity. As well as the trains looking far more futuristic and innovative, they are quieter and faster which, in turn, helped them used less electricity.     

Energy efficiency

Solar panels have increased by 168 percent over a seven-year period according to the solar job census, and now scientists are looking at ways to improve this renewable energy to ensure it is being used as efficiently as possible.

Scientists are currently looking to imitate the micro-lenses in the compound eye of an insect, as it will enable them to pack small solar cells together and improve the amount of energy generated.

Another animal that has been used as inspiration for a new invention and that has become very close to humans, includes the household cat – researchers at Harvard University recently published a study in the journal PNAS, describing the structure of a cat’s tongue. This has resulted in a possible commercial product called the Tongue-Inspired Grooming Brush.

Moving onto more, Velcro: an everyday invention that many people use – mostly children who are learning the fundamental basics of tying shoelaces, doing up jackets and general connecting to things together.

You probably don’t think much about velcro, but in actual fact, it was invented by a Swiss called George de Mestral. Mestral was walking his dog one day when he noticed many burrs stuck to his sock whilst walking through the fields. Burrs are the seeds from burdock plants that have tiny hooks on the ends that enable them to catch fabrics, fur and other catching materials – this is where the idea spurred from for velcro.

Morphing wing

One invention that often gets ignored when discussing biomimicry is the aeroplane. Leonardo da Vinci designed a flying machine that flapped its wings and had a tail – a lot like a bird, and since then, people improved on that design, creating the aeroplane wing that still works similarly to birds.

Looking toward the future, scientists and professors are looking to develop a prototype for a “morphing wing” that moves dependent on weather conditions and situation of the plane  – whilst this invention clearly is inspired by birds, one researcher is looking to make aeroplanes mimic frogs in the way they leap to certain locations. What will the future of aeroplanes look like?       

Nature continues to adapt and evolve – as will technology. This is because inspiration can be found almost everywhere. It is clear to see that when it comes to biomimicry, we are only limited to how much humans are willing to explore the world and look for further inspiration – the possibilities are endless.

Janine Benyus, the Biomimicry 3.8 Co-Founder believes “biomimicry ushers in an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her. This shift from learning about nature to learning from nature requires a new method of inquiry.”

For more information on how nature has inspired technology and the types of inventions we can expect to see in the near future, visit this infographic done by RS Components.

This Author 

Alexandra Berger is a senior marketing leader with over eighteen years’ experience across an international business-to-business environment. She is senior vice president for RS Components. Alexandra’s broad experience has seen her lead digital transformation programmes, brand development initiatives and customer experience programmes. 

Image: John Turnbull, Flickr. 

Dorset County Council has recently started work on a stretch of new cycleway between Bridport and West Bay. The Council had put on an exhibition about the proposed route for a week last July, outside Bridport, and felt that this ticked the procedural boxes. 

It did not occur to anyone to seek out the views of biologist Professor Tom Brereton, a Bridport resident and keen cyclist, who became aware of the proposal only when yellow road-signs warning of traffic-delays went up.

Five species of wild orchid are present on the threatened site. There is an alternative route which would inflict no damage at all. A concrete path already exists directly opposite, quite adequate for pedestrian use and easily widened to accommodate cyclists. 

Local knowledge 

The council responded to Brereton’s inquiries by saying that it was now too late to alter the route and that there would, in any case, be mitigation.

Scrub running along the site could be cleared to create more orchid habitat.But the scrub is home to nesting chiffchaffs and, in some years, lesser whitethroats.

An online petition attracted almost 800 signatures in a few days.

You need to be familiar with a place to know which orchids are present because they don’t appear every year, especially not when the council keeps cutting them down. We all want cycleways but to get them right we need also to seek out and respect the fine-grain knowledge of people who have stuck around. 

Spring of a sort is here. Or, rather, the hottest winter’s day ever has just been recorded. Ninety-seven percent of the country’s wildflower meadows have been lost since 1945; Bridport has recently hosted an Extinction Rebellion event: the line running through all of this also runs through that patch of grassland on the edge of town.

This Author 

Horatio Morpurgo is a journalist and campaigner.

Watching sheep graze in lush meadows is a lovely way to pass a sunny afternoon. In stark contrast to that benign pastoral image is the ugly truth that the wool industry is wreaking havoc on the living planet.

More and more people are taking notice of this issue, especially since the Boohoo group’s U-Turn on banning the sale of wool garments. 

The groundbreaking “Pulse of the Fashion Industry” report ranked the production of sheep’s wool as more polluting – for cradle-to-gate environmental impact per kilogram of material – than that of acrylic, polyester, spandex, and rayon fibres. 

Greenhouse gasses

As with other forms of animal agriculture, raising sheep for wool gobbles up precious resources. Land is cleared and trees are cut down to make room for grazing, leading to increased soil salinity and erosion and a decrease in biodiversity.

Sheep, like cows, release enormous amounts of methane gas into the atmosphere and have been referred to as the “Humvees” of the animal kingdom. 

Manure generated by farmed animals – including in countries like Australia and New Zealand, where vast flocks of sheep have been expanded to meet the world’s demand for wool –has significantly contributed to the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases over the last 250 years.

On top of the horrendous environmental impact of wool, sheep suffer terribly in the industry. PETA has released video exposés recorded at nearly 100 facilities on four continents revealing that sheep are mutilated, abused, and skinned alive – even for “responsibly sourced” wool on disingenuously named “sustainable” farms. 

Sheep are sensitive prey animals who are prone to panic when held down. This means that for millions of sheep worldwide, shearing is a terrifying, painful ordeal. Shearers are usually paid by volume, not by the hour, which exacerbates the problem, as they work at breakneck speed in order to maximise their earnings.

Eyewitnesses saw gentle sheep being kicked, punched in the face, and stamped on in a crude attempt to restrain them. 

Animal cruelty

This violence has been documented in Argentina, Australia, Chile, and the US – and recently, in the UK, where workers were recorded slamming sheep’s heads into the floor. 

Shearers left large, bloody wounds on sheep’s bodies from fast, rough shearing, and they stitched up gaping wounds with a needle and thread and no pain relief. One farmer was seen dragging two sick, lame sheep into a shed and leaving them there to die.

Several sheep died during shearing, possibly from the shock of the violent handling – or what onefarmer called a “heart attack”.

Industry initiatives like the “Responsible Wool Standard” haven’t reduced or stopped the egregious suffering of sheep the world over – they’ve simply createda veil to hide behind while the cruel business continues as usual.

Consumers who are worried about the carbon footprint and sustainability of synthetic materials have a wide variety of eco-friendly options to choose from.

Vegan fabrics

Colombian university students who invented the revolutionary Woocoa, a wool-like material made from coconut and hemp, won an award at last year’s Biodesign Challenge for their pioneering work.

Then there’s Nullarbor, a vegan wool made from coconut by-products. Other environmentally sound wool replacements include Tencel, organic cotton, bamboo, hemp, soyabean fabric, linen, and recycled fibres.

It pays to remember that, according to the researchers behind the “Pulse of the Fashion Industry” report, even when consumers purchase clothing made from synthetic materials, the impact on our planet is stilllower than that of buying wool items. 

Just as we’ve seen with the shift away from fur, angora, and mohair,consumers are increasingly looking to purchase products that live up to their own ethics and their concern for animals, humans, and nature.

With so many fabulous vegan fabrics available, there’s no need for anyone to buy or wear anything made of wool or any other animal-derived material.

This Author

Elisa Allen is the director of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

It was a crisp, bright day in February 2017 when politicians, academics and business figures came together to discuss the problems of the Scottish fossil fuel sector. A year before, world leaders had thrown their weight behind a clean energy transition with 195 countries signing the landmark Paris Climate Agreement. Six months after that, the UK had voluntarily ramped up its own emissions reduction target.

But this meeting was different. It was convened to explore how the UK could keep the North Sea’s oil and gas industry going, not wind it down. The Scottish energy tycoon Sir Ian Wood summed up the mood when he declared the industry was “nowhere near the end of its life”.

Can Scotland really have it both ways? Is Aberdeen preparing for the low carbon future the UK and the world is promising, or is it still investing in a future where oil and gas remain the spine of its economy?

Fossil-fuelled future

A DeSmog investigation has revealed a region that continues to put the industry at the heart of its economic planning. In the energy, education, and transport sectors, Aberdeen and its surrounds continue to build on the basis that oil and gas is the future, making the gamble that climate policies won’t make the industry a relic of the past.

Since the oil price crash of 2014, in separate silos of conversation to that of UN climate talks and national emissions targets, the oil and gas sector in the Scottish north east has been working hard to buoy their once profit-churning industry. Both the UK and Scottish governments have been keen to help too, ostensibly to protect jobs and tax revenues, offering no shortage of tax breaks.

And the government-industry duo has largely succeeded, with a flurry of business in the past 18 months that some have even referred to as a ‘North Sea renaissance’.

Notably, this has often been achieved through what the industry nebulously refers to as ‘cutting costs’ and ‘increasing production efficiency’; explanations which, on the ground, have frequently amounted to suppression of worker’s wages, with ensuing acrimony and even strikes in tow.

The 2017 meeting in Aberdeen, the city at the heart of the UK’s fossil fuel wealth, was for the opening of the Oil and Gas Technology Centre (OGTC), an £180 million innovation venture tasked with supporting oil and gas companies. Money came from both the UK and Scottish governments as just one part of a network of measures designed in the past few years to extend extraction in the nearby North Sea.

Some have suggested that the work of the OGTC could unlock 3.5 billion barrels of new oil – equivalent to around six years’ worth of what the industry is currently pumping out.

Policy contradictions

Far from looking at how to make a just transition to a low carbon economy, state-led industry protection like this was called for following a 2014 paper by Sir Ian Wood which laid out a vision for how the North Sea could continue to prosper well into the future.

The paper set a new tone of conversation for the sector and, in the face of fluctuating oil prices and increased international competition, coined what’s now a mantra for both government and industry – maximising recovery from the North Sea.

Elsewhere, on the same day as the OGTC’s opening, the Department of Transport released a research paper on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from road freight. More widely, the government was under pressure to make a legally binding commitment to ‘net zero emissions by 2050’, meaning it wouldn’t be able to emit more carbon than it offset elsewhere.

How can these policy contradictions sit so comfortably next to each other?

Last year researchers at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research carried out a report for Friends of the Earth Scotland which showed that 70-80 percent of Scotland’s existing fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground for Scotland to fulfil its obligations under the Paris Agreement. How do industry oil and gas handouts fit the science?

Asher Minns, head of Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research said: “One of the many climate and sustainability policy challenges is lining-up the policies so that they are complementing rather than pulling at each other.”

Roads to nowhere

Policy contradictions are nothing new, and are not unique to climate and energy policy. But the kind of regressive expediency fed by the UK’s oil wealth could be seen clearly when Kirsty Blackman MP for North Aberdeen told the House of Commons in 2015: “From a small airport through to traffic congestion and limited housing stock, Aberdeen has struggled to keep up with the demands of the oil and gas sector.”

To the casual observer, it would seem that Scotland’s climate policy commitments and the reality of its infrastructure decisions are an example of a country’s right hand not knowing what the left is doing — or being wilfully indifferent to it.

Sam Gardner from WWFScotland said: “Our response to the climate change emergency must be comprehensive and consistent. And yet we’re still seeing decisions being taken leading to ‘high’ and ‘low’ carbon infrastructure, or a ‘green’ and ‘black’ economy.”

One example of this well-known to inhabitants of Aberdeenshire is the decades-long saga of the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route (AWPR), a 26 mile stretch of bypass road around the city.

Aimed at reducing congestion, the AWPR was first mooted in the late nineties and given the go ahead in 2003. A string of court challenges caused significant delays to the £745 million project, of which the final stretch opened in February 2019.

Financial justification

As with many infrastructure issues in the north east of Scotland, the oil and gas sector was at the forefront of the decision. A 2012 Scottish government document said that the road would bring an estimated cost reduction of two percent to the oil and gas sector just five years after completion.

The document says: “One of the key benefits of AWPR is the improvement of accessibility into and around Aberdeen and the north east of Scotland. Market conditions for key industries in the area such as oil and gas exploration, paper, fish, retail and tourism will be enhanced.”

Separately, the Scottish Government claimed the road would help indirectly attract an additional £6 billion to Scotland’s north east economy and create 14,000 jobs over the next 30 years.

But these figures came under fire recently as their calculations were based on figures from before the 2008 financial crash, when Aberdeen had a growing fossil fuel sector fuelling its local economy.

North East conservative MSP Tom Mason lambasted the lack of an update to this modelling as “naive economics”, suggesting that the road’s financial justification relies on outdated projections of a burgeoning oil and gas sector.

“It seems they have taken a gamble and it’s my sincere wish these sums won’t look foolish in another 30 years,” he added.

Increasing risk 

But beyond being built on the promise of an industry that – in theory at least – the government is meant to be rapidly shutting down, the road also has a more basic symbolic problem: building a big road encourages more cars, which emit more carbon dioxide.

That’s why, broadly, the project has been opposed by environmental groups and some local politicians, as the £745 million project has deflected vital funds from long-term sustainable transport.

Gardner said the government still thinks high-carbon decisions can be justified by mitigation elsewhere. “But we must commit to only investing in and supporting net zero solutions,” he said. “Anything else is simply an exercise in increasing risk and placing costs on the next generation who will be faced with the burden of stranded assets or the costs of retrofit.”

Martin Ford, a Scottish Green Party councillor for the of Aberdeenshire Council, has been a vocal opponent of the AWPR for years. “It is an opportunity cost,” he said. “In that we could have invested in sustainable public transport which would have been good for us right on into the future, as opposed to a 1950s transport solution of building a new and bigger road.”

One of the central problems is that the government makes estimates of how many more people there will be on the roads in the future, and then makes its investment decisions based on these figures. This goes against the rationale of a sustainable transport transition, campaigners like Transform Scotland argue, where policy makers should be steering people away from car journeys and toward more public transport and active travel.

The costs for the new AWPR have escalated dramatically over the years. In 2005 the Scottish Government forecast this to be around £295‑395 million before raising it to £703 million in 2012. The final sum sits at £745 million.

Joined-up thinking

Research by Transform Scotland has shown that, since 2011, road spending has seen a 34 percent increase in spending while aviation has seen an increase of 70 percent. Meanwhile in the year to the Scottish government’s 2017-18 transport budget, funding for bus travel fell by three percent. The overall result of these trends is a tiny two percent fall in transport emissions since 1990, and annual increases in recent years. The Committee on Climate Change has said that overall UKtransport emissions must fall by 44 percent between 2016 and 2030.

Under the environment section of the public page for the AWPR, the government even states that the new road “will provide a fast, direct link to Aberdeen Airport” that will “increase the airport’s catchment area and potentially lead to inward investment, including new airlines and routes coming to the city.”

Increased flight traffic – one of the major obstacles to a low carbon future – has rarely been used as an environmental justification for an infrastructure project.

Ford said: “Essentially, this doesn’t deliver on the stated transport policy of modal shift to public transport, cutting carbon emissions and all the rest of it. If you test it against those propositions, it’s probably overall perverse and it certainly doesn’t take you further forward. So why not do something else which does deliver on what you say is your transport policy?”

Campaign groups like WWF agree, and have tried working with the government to provide basic joined-up thinking across the range of its infrastructure decisions, but often without success.

Public or private

Gardner said part of the problem is that government checks on infrastructure projects like the AWPR often only look at the carbon embodied in construction, not the carbon that will likely be generated as a consequence of its existence.

Gardner continued: “It’s when you step back and look at the totality of an infrastructure pipeline – that’s when the contradiction becomes quite stark.”

Beyond the roads and research centres, campaigners and researchers have argued that pursuing endless economic growth based on infinite use of resources is at fundamental odds with the changes needed to avert climate breakdown.

But Ford said this reality is hard felt in areas where access to housing and basic services are at a squeeze, and smart use of public money is needed to improve people’s lives.

He pointed out that in the Scottish north east, the high wages of the oil and gas sector have sent house prices rocketing over the past 20 years while people working outside those wealthy sectors have struggled.

“We have issues of housing affordability, we find it very difficult to recruit teachers and health professionals from other parts of the UK – all because housing prices are very high,” he said. “Therefore, what looks like a very good salary in many places doesn’t look very good in the north east when you take into account housing costs.”

To help with these issues, City Region Deals were launched by the UK government in 2011 to partner central and local administrations in working together on regional development. In Scotland, they exist between the Scottish Government, UKGovernment and local government, and are “designed to bring about long-term strategic approaches to improving regional economies” and, ultimately, “transformative change”.

18 have been launched across the UK so far, but in the north east of Scotland, corporations rather than people and the environment are at the centre of these large investment channels.

Economic leadership 

The 10-year Aberdeen City Region Deal was announced in November 2016, worth £250 million of direct Scottish and UKgovernment funding, and a total of £826 million once private sector investment is included.

But what’s unique about the Aberdeen deal is the presence of a fourth partner alongside the three levels of government in the form of Opportunity North East (ONE), an industry-led and privately funded economic development body.

At the head of ONE’s economic leadership board sits Sir Ian Wood – the oil magnate. What’s been the flagship investment of the Aberdeen deal so far? £180 million toward innovation in the oil and gas sector in the form of the OGTC. Or, as a recent House of Commons Library briefing paper recently explained, “support for the oil and gas industry to exploit remaining North Sea reserves.”

Aberdeen has a history of putting industry-led bodies at the heart of its public planning, as ONE replaced another body in 2015, the Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Future (ACSEF). ACSEF was a partnership of private and public sector representatives which stated that part of its strategic aim was to “anchor” the oil and gas sector to the north east.

Coincidentally or not, this is the same language used by transport body Nestrans when it supported the AWPR, which it said will offer easier transport of goods for energy firms and will help “anchor” them to the north-east.

Not only do these top-table seats help corporations decide where public money goes, but they also give access to facilitating the deals themselves. Investigations by the Guardian and The Ferret have shown how Scottish financiers sought to make major gains through their involvement in these lucrative public contracts.

Oil and gas hasn’t been the only benefactor of the Aberdeen City Region Deal’s millions – there are also high speed broadband projects and innovation funding for other industrial sectors, including the life sciences. So, unsurprisingly, business leaders have heaped praise on the deal’s direction.

But with its flagship aim of benefitting Aberdeenshire as a proxy to giving direct support to the oil and gas industry, Ford said it was controversial in its beginnings.

“Aberdeenshire Council expressed strong views that the City Region Deal should be about the future – diversifying away from oil and towards renewables,” he said.

Significant investments

Ford and other members had argued that propping up a North Sea oil with ailing profits was not only bad for the climate, but short-sighted with regard to Aberdeenshire’s long term future.

“There were earlier iterations of possible inclusions of significant investments in public transport, significant investments in affordable housing, and – though in the end there was money to pay for transport studies, which is a plus – essentially the deal became very much oriented away from reducing emissions or diversifying the economy, and toward prolonging the status quo in terms of energy, oil and gas specifically,” he said.

Ultimately the council’s views seemingly fell below the priority of those business leaders choosing where the public money should go. But was this a case of a wealthy region like Aberdeenshire’s economic demands taking precedence over the pressing needs of national climate policy?

“From my perspective as a member of Aberdeenshire Council, you can turn that upside down,” Ford said. “The council wanted a much more enlightened deal than the government wanted. So it was national policy imposing old thinking on a region that knew it needed to break out of that.”

Renaissance

Thanks to this continued influx of both public and private investment to support the North Sea oil and gas sector, the industry is now doing well after the oil price downturn of 2014.

The Chinese state-owned oil giant CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Corporation), Total and Euroil recently announced the discovery of a new gas field of nearly 250 million barrels of oil equivalent, one of the largest in decades.

If the enormous size is confirmed, it would match a 2008 discovery by Maersk Oil which is expected to start producing gas this year and could provide up to five percent of the UK’s energy – together both these fields may produce nearly 10 percent.

Maersk said that its operations had been helped considerably by tax breaks which the former chancellor, George Osborne, declared as “a clear signal that the North Sea is open for business”.

But the Maersk project has been criticised not only from a climate perspective by environmental groups, but by centrists and conservatives for the recipient of its profits.

Despite the government reiterating the importance of the North Sea for the UK’s prosperity, only half of the £3 billion development investment will be spent here after large parts of the infrastructure were ordered from Singapore and other countries.

Economic nationalists see such arrangements as bizarre at best, naive at worst.

Terrible news

Friends of the Earth Scotland said that the discovery is “terrible news” for the climate. “It’s high time our governments stopped supporting fossil fuel development, and get serious about planning a just transition away from this industry,” it said in a statement.

But at the same time as the Scottish parliament assesses the government’s new Climate Change Bill, the handouts keep coming. Earlier this month a parliamentary report from Westminster recommended that the government offer a new sector deal to the oil and gas industry, including a fresh £176 million for technology innovation.

This is important, the report said, to simultaneously “maximise the recovery of the 10–20 billion barrels of oil and gas” and help “the industry reduce its carbon footprint”.

What’s clear is that arguments for rescuing the North Sea fail by their own logic: what’s seen as protection of the UK’s prosperity via fossil fuel tax revenues has actually resulted in zealous tax breaks, largely benefiting big business in Aberdeen and the other nation’s economies. It’s a fallacy.

But those representatives that stand to gain from the financial success of that fallacy were those meeting together in Aberdeen in February 2017, and are still making decisions alongside politicians now.

In such a situation, that the UK is struggling to meet its climate targets doesn’t really matter.

This Article

Simon Roach is a freelance journalist covering politics, the environment and other bits between. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

At least 22 UN staff died in an Ethiopian Airlines plane crash on Sunday, along with many delegates travelling to a major environment summit, according to officials.

The acting head of UN Environment Joyce Msuya confirmed the loss of colleagues, although full passenger lists of the flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi are yet to be publicly released.

She participated in the opening ceremony of the UN Environment Assembly in the Kenyan capital on Monday, and said: “The environmental community is in mourning today.”

“Many of those that lost their lives were en route to provide support and participate in the UN Environment Assembly. We lost UN staff, youth delegates travelling to the assembly, seasoned scientists, members of academia and other partners.” 

Grounded fleet

All 149 passengers and 8 cabin staff died in the accident, the airline said. The cause of the crash has yet to be determined. The airline has grounded its fleet of Boeing 737 8 Max aircraft – the same model involved in a recent disaster in Indonesia. Ethiopian Airlines said that it had contacted the families of the dead.

At the opening of the assembly, head of UN Habitat Maimunah Mohd Sharif said 22 UN personnel were known to have died. UN offices lowered the organisation’s flag to half mast on Monday.

The Associated Press reported that 32 Kenyans were killed in the accident, nine Ethiopians, eighteen Canadians as well as multiple citizens from China, the US, Italy, France, the UK, Egypt, the Netherlands, India and Slovakia.

Msuya said: “The entire UN Environment Assembly will honour them in our efforts this week.” 

The assembly aims to generate a sharper political focus on biodiversity, climate change and the natural systems that support human civilisation.

This Author

Karl Mathiesen is Climate Home News’ editor. He has written for national newspapers, newswires and magazines in Australia and the UK. Before joining Climate Home News in 2016, he worked mostly with the Guardian’s environment desk. This article first appeared on Climate Home.