Climate Change 2045

Save Seil Sound were represented yesterday at the Glasgow workshop for the Scottish Government's Climate Change for Action initiative.

We were interested to find what steps are proposed in relation to our coasts and seas, given the enormous extent of Scotland's territorial waters, coastline and seabed.

Of the seven interest categories on offer we selected LULUFC, which translates as Land Use Land Use Forest Change, for the morning session, but quickly learned that "land" means dry land and not land covered by sea. While the session was most interesting and showed that Scottish Government have a very good grip on issues around urban and rural planning and forestry, we opted for the "agriculture" table for the afternoon.

Again the focus was on dry land and most interesting. An issue for our farmers is bluntly that in the absence of current EU subsidies they simply won't be there in a few years time. Our hosts were confident that the UK Government has undertaken to replicate farm payments, for a few years at least, which may give some comfort.

There was an important contribution from Evie Murray, founder of Crops in Pots, a city farm in Leith, on the possible linking of city based food production and school meals programmes.

Among this group were several with a tangential interest in the health of our seabed and water column. Those contributors had strong views about the inability of Marine Scotland to maintain proper scientific independence, which our hosts would have noted.

Aquaculture stands in the way of efforts to reduce carbon emissions, before one gets to the other ways it damages the environment. World wide, huge amounts of energy are used in hoovering up from the World's seas unmarketable "trash fish", to use a term found in sections of the industry, ranging from sand eels to small immature fish that would be marketable if allowed to grow, then transporting them here. There follows the growing process itself, carbon emissions therefrom and finally transporting the finished product around to markets far away. We can add the sheer waste through onsite mortality, with resultant transporting and dealing with waste.

If these negatives are assessed and factored in to the calculations they will surely impact very badly on attempts to meet the Scottish Government's 2045 target.