As delegates return to their home countries from COP28 (in many cases by jet aeroplane), a reminder that catastrophic climate breakdown is not some future threat, which we have plenty of time to avert …
For many years, corporate and financial interests invested in fossil fuels worked hard to deny climate change. In the face of ever-more convincing evidence, denial shifted to downplaying – and one form of this is the suggestion that the ‘effects’ of climate breakdown are ‘coming’: we have to prepare for them, we have time to do that, and meanwhile any tweaks and changes and ‘forward planning’ which acknowledge the need for transition can run in parallel to ‘business as usual’.
But recurrent extreme weather events here in Scotland show that the need for change is immediate and urgent.
Look at what happened during Storm Babet in October. A man killed when a tree fell onto the van he was driving in Forfar; a woman killed when she was swept into the Water of Lee. Major roads and rail links were closed for days and, in some cases, seriously damaged. Seawalls and coastal paths including in North Berwick, Dunbar and St Andrews were destroyed. There was huge flooding in the north-east, with Brechin one of the towns most affected. Hundreds of people in other parts of Angus were evacuated from their homes. The Dighty Burn in Dundee overflowed dramatically … many other details could be added.
Aberdeenshire, Angus, Perth & Kinross, Fife, South Lanarkshire, Highland and Moray will be eligible for Bellwin funding and additional assistance. Beyond the necessary reactive work which this will allow, we will need expensive infrastructural changes to be able to cope with the frequency of extreme weather events accompanying the climate crisis – and to play our part as a country in effecting real change to address the causes and drivers of the all-too-real catastrophe which is developing.
This article draws on Cathie Lloyd’s December 2023 ‘Environment Report’ to her SNP branch in Edinburgh.