Organised by the UHI Policy Research Institute for Remote and Rural Regions In collaboration with the Centre for Mountain Studies, Perth; SDRC, Forres; the Centre for Rural Studies, Lews Castle College, Stornoway; and ERI, Thurso.

International round-table

The economic and social impacts of, and responses to, climate change in the Highlands and Islands

9 November 2007 Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Cowan House, Inverness

Introduction

Climate change, and the related influence of greenhouse gases on global warming, has become a key international issue, sharpened since the Kyoto Protocol agreement in 1997, and its adoption in 2004. It has also been the subject of government and other reports and initiatives, including a report from the Scottish Parliament in 2006.

However, Kyoto, like many other ‘mitigation’ efforts, has been seen by many as a top-down initiative. It focuses on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by the richer countries, and international policy mechanisms to achieve this reduction. While such objectives can only be good, they ignore the fact that global warming will continue even after the Kyoto targets are met and that it is, at least partly, a long-term cycle of climate change.

Rural (and urban) communities will be affected by consequential changes. Those communities will be in the front-line in having to cope with such consequences, as the unfortunate recent events in the western islands, east Highlands and Moray coast made very clear.

The programme

The programme began with a morning seminar where national and international speakers presented a broad perspective on climate change and its local impacts. Speaker reviewed the international context of climate change, the impacts on rural areas, and the responses of rural people, communities, NGOs and governments to these impacts.

Maf Smith of the UK Sustainable Development Commission presented an overview of climate change, identifying some of its drivers and the resulting implications.

Selected Arkleton Trust Fellows discussed findings from their work on rural community impacts, responses and related resilience issues in a wide range of countries and contexts.

The morning session was chaired by John Watt, director of HIE's strengthening communities group.

The seminar was followed in the afternoon by a facilitated round-table debate.   

The full conference briefing with detailed programme can be downloaded here, right. 

Speaker presentations from the conference are available here to download (right). Please note, these have been converted from Powerpoint to Adobe pdf and may have lost some of the original formatting, animation and so on.