Hansard

I am grateful to Claire Baker for highlighting for us today the continuing success of Greener Kirkcaldy and for detailing the many projects that the organisation is undertaking on behalf of the people of Fife. I convey my congratulations to Greener Kirkcaldy on the tremendous work that it is doing, and offer it my thanks. I hope that those who are involved take great pride in their achievements; indeed, I encourage them to do so because they are worthy of pride. Greener Kirkcaldy and groups like it are at the forefront of the delivery of action on climate change and the environment in Scotland.

Kirkcaldy is perhaps most famous as the birthplace of the great 18th century Scottish philosopher, Adam Smith, the father of modern economics and author of “The Wealth of Nations”. He and fellow Scottish thinker David Hume were two of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish enlightenment. Hume spent his time thinking about the psychological basis of human nature. He concluded that desire and passion, rather than reason and logic, govern human behaviour. Although I am hesitant to take a different view from that of an eminent man such as David Hume, I believe that there is a real place for passion in climate change action and, from everything that I have read and heard about Greener Kirkcaldy, I can say that the people who are involved in it are nothing if not passionate.

However, I think that we can all agree with Hume that actions that are rooted only in desire, without reasoned consideration of their likely consequences, are likely, in many cases, to lead to trouble. We see the effects of some such actions in the severe weather patterns that are being unleashed around the world and on our doorsteps and which are causing immeasurable damage and despair. In our defence, we may say that, as a society and across the globe, we did not realise that the CO2 emissions from our activities would have such a terrible legacy. However, we know the truth of the matter now, and we also know that, to keep global warming within tolerable limits, we need to make transformational changes in how we—as individuals, as communities and as a wider society—live and interact with our wider environment. That is why, in a spirit of enlightenment, the Scottish Parliament passed our world-leading climate change legislation and emission reduction targets.

The Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 not only sets necessarily ambitious and challenging targets but requires us to report to the Parliament annually on progress towards them. No other country in the world has such demanding legislation. Although international leadership carries great responsibilities, it is also something in which the Scottish Parliament can take great pride.

Today, representatives of WWF are with us in Parliament to encourage our continuing support for the organisation’s worldwide earth hour initiative. Particularly in 2014, when the eyes of the world will fall on Scotland, I encourage all members to attend the promotional earth hour event and to lend their support to its global reach and symbolism. The Scottish Government will again play its part this year, switching off non-essential lighting in our properties, and we anticipate a great response from the rest of the public sector, too. I urge all my colleagues across the Parliament—sadly, too few of whom are here today—and the people of Scotland to play their part in earth hour.

I have talked about political leadership and also touched on, through my reference to earth hour, the role that the public sector can play in delivering climate change action. However, we all know that, as Murdo Fraser, Claire Baker and Jayne Baxter said, we need the support of the whole of Scottish society. That is why the leadership that is shown by community groups such as Greener Kirkcaldy is essential. Greener Kirkcaldy has received funding from a variety of sources; its three climate challenge fund projects have been in receipt of just over £797,000 over three years. Greener Kirkcaldy is a well-deserving recipient of climate challenge funding. Having successfully delivered its first project, the organisation is working on a further two complementary projects that are promoting energy efficiency and local food in two contrasting areas of the town.

As a mature CCF project, Greener Kirkcaldy also provides leadership, inspiration and a valuable example to the wider climate action sector in Scotland. It is involved in the Scottish communities climate action network and supports the CCF’s community action and support network, playing a lead role in developing a regional network of CCF projects in Fife. That is the first of 12 CCF regional networks, which are designed to share and cascade experience and good practice across communities.

Since we launched the climate challenge fund in 2008, awards totalling nearly £55 million have been made to 468 communities in support of 635 individual projects that are tackling climate change. Those include energy efficiency advice and food projects such as Greener Kirkcaldy—I was interested in the examples that David Torrance gave of individuals having seen substantial impacts on their costs of living—along with projects to improve community-owned buildings, to promote waste recycling and composting and to promote sustainable travel, including car clubs and increased cycling. Many projects are multistranded and all are expected to be resilient, building in adaptation to our changing climate as well as emissions reduction. The Fife diet, which is one of the partners of Greener Kirkcaldy, has received almost £804,000 in climate challenge funding for three projects.

The projects take place across Scotland in our cities, towns and villages, on the mainland and on our islands. With the junior climate challenge fund, we are successfully involving younger age groups and, since refreshing the CCF in November 2012, we have increased the reach of the fund to support, in particular, more disadvantaged and hard-to-reach groups including black and minority ethnic communities. Murdo Fraser talked about the Government committing to longer-term finance, and Claire Baker also asked about such support. We are trying to make it possible for CCF projects to become self-financing. We have to be careful about doing that within European state aid limits, but we are encouraging projects to come forward with ideas about how they can recycle income to ensure that they are sustainable in the longer term.

The climate challenge fund has supported more than 240 projects that have included some element of food growing. Interest in local food has grown over the past few years, along with a desire to know where our food comes from. Demand for suitable land to allow people to grow their own food is high. A commitment was made in the 2011 Scottish National Party manifesto to updating the allotment legislation, and proposals for that have been included in the draft community empowerment (Scotland) bill. Communities can be empowered by ensuring that people have access to land that can provide both health and social benefits and a connection to the local environment. Our proposals for new allotment legislation have been set out to encourage local authorities to take a more proactive approach to allotment provision, with the ultimate aim of increasing access to allotments in places such as Kirkcaldy and elsewhere, so helping to increase access to healthy, sustainable food for all.

In the time that I have remaining, I would like to pick up a couple of points that were made in the debate. I have addressed the funding issue. Beyond 2016, we will be into a new session of Parliament. We will consider the issue that Murdo Fraser raised and provide feedback, but we will be into a different spending review period in 2016 and it will perhaps not be as easy to commit to that funding as it may seem.

I missed the district heating debate, unfortunately, but Jayne Baxter’s point about the £2.6 billion cost of heating our homes in this country shows the scale of the prize that is available to communities if we can cut the cost of our heating and get that money recycled through the economy in other ways. That will help not only to address fuel poverty, but to provide people with more disposable income to give them a better standard of living.

There are real prizes to be gained from the work that is being done by groups such as Greener Kirkcaldy. The success of the climate challenge fund in generating such community action and leadership on climate change is heartening. I commend all climate challenge fund communities, such as Greener Kirkcaldy, for their efforts. They deserve our on-going praise and encouragement.