Towards a successful and sustainable Highlands and Islands 2025 - seminar series
UHI Policy web seminar series – September 2006 - June 2007
What does sustainable development mean for a peripheral region of the UK?
At the start of the 21st century, countries across the world have to face the global challenges of unsustainable development where our current lifestyles will generate significant consequences for our children and children’s children. This is no longer a threat, it is happening right now.
Unsustainable development across the world is changing habitats and climates, overexploiting resources and creating pollution. If current patterns continue, damage to the natural world will accelerate not diminish. Yet at the same time, we have witnessed dramatic economic and social progress - two of the important principles of sustainable development. Life expectancy is improving, education is more widely available and economic opportunities create inclusion and prospects previous generations would have only dreamed about. But what does this mean in practice for a region like the Highlands and Islands?
The area has had a greater reliance on environment-based industries – for example, farming, fishing and forestry, renewable energy production, whisky production, and outdoor recreation and tourism - than other parts of Scotland. And its well-known landscapes and biotopes form a part of the quality of life which helps to retain and attract residents. We are also relatively dependent on the private car for personal mobility, recreation and tourism, with high rates of car ownership. As with most other rural areas in the richer countries, there is an increase in commuting to the local towns, and new settlements are increasingly dependent on this commuting behaviour.
Do these often-specific features of the region mean we will experience a disproportionate need for change in the area? In more recent decades, the area has witnessed a growing population and economy. What are the challenges in maintaining this growth, in an economically, socially, culturally and environmentally sustainable manner, against a background of dynamic external change? And what are the new opportunities emerging which we can take advantage of?
Drawing on principles in the UK shared Sustainable Development framework, HIE with UHI policy web organised a seminar series - with a range of senior speakers who presented their thoughts and visions on the sustainable development challenges for a UK peripheral and rural region in the first two decades of the 21st century.
Objectives
There were three main objectives for the seminar series.
- Raise awareness of main sustainable development issues for the area and also how stakeholders propose to respond to challenges and opportunities;
- Allow stakeholders to think more strategically about the implications of sustainable development for their own organisations, and to ‘join up’ their own thinking with others;
- To assist in the development of UHI by providing a series of events, and potential output, to bind those UHI partners involved in a sustainable development research assessment exercise submission in 2007-8.
The series was a collaborative venture between four UHI partners – UHI PolicyWeb, Centre for Mountain Studies, Lews Castle College (research on rural and community development, human ecology and the impacts of ICT and on-line learning) and the Sustainable Development Research Centre - with closest engagement in sustainable development of regions such as the Highlands and Islands, and managed by the UHI PolicyWeb.
Seminars took place between September 2006 and June 2007 in the UHI Executive Office Conference Room in Inverness.
Drawing on the principles for sustainable development from the UK shared framework and Scottish strategy, the lecture themes were centred around:
- Achieving a sustainable economy
- Living within environmental limits / Using sound science responsibly
- Ensuring a strong, healthy and just society / Promoting good governance
Use the links below to see and hear speaker presentations, summaries of each seminar or watch a short summary of the whole series.