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A blog from Charles Nathan, Head of Planning and Development at RSPB Scotland and Vice-Convener of LINK’s Planning Group.

One of the best ways to deliver transformational change is not only powerful, it can be easily delivered. A Scottish Nature Network helps focus effort and resources toward improving the ecological health of Scotland’s natural assets, including everything from vast landscape scale interventions, like restoring or planting woodland, to local projects such as enhancing or creating new city parks and community green spaces. Taking a strategic approach like this would result in a healthy and vibrant nature rich world that offers a wealth of benefits to society, not least in helping tackle the climate and nature emergency. This is explored in Scottish Environment LINK’s short film.

The rationale for a Nature Network is strengthened by Scotland’s natural assets. Scottish Government has committed to a target of Net-Zero emissions by 2045 – 5 years earlier than the rest of the UK – and are able to do so because of the wealth of its surroundings, such as vast peatlands and native woodlands, which capture and store carbon. However, to achieve these targets, changes to how we strategically plan, build on and manage land across Scotland, from hill-top to city park are needed. A Scottish Nature Network provides this, giving a common purpose to both rural and urban communities to enable them to enhance and reconnect nature by targeting where best to collectively take action and invest.

Peatland restoration and ambitious tree planting targets are the most familiar examples that demonstrate the power of nature to help society tackle the climate emergency, however many other natural habitats and systems, if in a healthy functioning state, can provide equally important benefits. The Scottish Nature Network identifies the locations and the measures that are needed to achieve healthy, resilient natural habitats that in turn help our society and economy. For example, Scotland faces a trend of warmer and wetter winters which are already increasing the risk of floods. These risks can partly be managed by recreating, altering or protecting parts of rivers. Using nature manages and reduces the impact of flooding. These include planting woodland on floodplains, changing the soil characteristics of adjacent fields or blocking streams in a way that mimics fallen trees and branches that all slow the flow of the water and decrease the effects of flooding.

Having the Network allows stakeholders to collaborate and identify the opportunities to contribute to the Network in their area, drawing together communities right across rural and urban areas from farmers and foresters, developers and health boards, key agencies and community enterprises. This approach would help align efforts to help achieve climate targets, restore nature, increase opportunity for, and investment in, green jobs, and help enhance the wellbeing of communities.

Nature is fundamental to human existence, it’s the very fabric upon which we all depend not only for climate regulation, food, timber, clean water and air but also for our personal and collective wellbeing. The natural spaces in our communities provide a space to breathe and reflect, a space for wildlife to exist in addition to the regulatory functions it plays in balancing water and air quality, temperature and noise pollution. But the advantage of a Scottish Nature Network is that it makes the situation better for nature, not just people, by restoring our natural environment and its ecosystems.

Strong government support for and investment in Scotland’s Nature Network is central to a green recovery. A recovery where we can reach climate and biodiversity targets with speed and efficiency, maximising the benefits to nature and climate and creating a positive change to the economic and social activities of our communities. From here on in we will be calling for the adoption of Scotland’s Nature Network.

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A guest blog by Carla Worth del Pino, consultant at Resource Futures

Why don’t we repair?

If you’re anything like me, you have at least one electrical item gathering dust deep in a forgotten cupboard at home – perhaps it suddenly gave out on you, or maybe you decided to upgrade. The issue of upgrades is being partly tackled by company buy-back/trade-in schemes, like Curry’s PC World recycling old machines for free with cash-back of up to £75 towards a new one. But that’s of no use if an item just stops working. When faced with this, what is stopping you from trying to repair it?

The answer often relates to confidence, particularly around electronics. For many of us (me included) our repair abilities are limited to ‘turning it off and on again’ and giving it a solid tap, hoping that will do the trick. More complex repairs feel daunting. It’s a reason why electronics is the core focus for The Restart Project – a repair network that aims to showcase how electronics can be easier to fix than they seem, even with minimal experience.

We worked with Restart to seek ways to measure confidence, and how to measure the long-term impact that attending a repair event plays in building and maintaining this. Many Restart groups and Repair Cafes engaged with our research, from Repair Café Glasgow all the way down to a range of Repair Cafes in Devon linked to our Community Action Groups network. We found that attendees consistently cited a lack of confidence in repairing electrical items on their own as a major motivation to come, stay, and return to the repair events.

Planned obsolescence

While repair events are typically very successful in fixing broken items, we also found that in some instances, electrical items simply cannot be repaired even by repair experts – a recurring frustration among attendees and volunteers. For example, a manufacturer may have glued a battery into a phone, forcing you to replace the whole device when the battery wears out. In technical terms, this is called ‘planned obsolescence’: a policy of planning / designing products with an artificially limited life, making it obsolete (unfashionable / no longer functional) after a certain period of time.

The Centennial bulb, Livermore, California

One of the most notable examples of planned obsolescence is all around us – the humble light bulb. They typically last around 83 days (in constant operation); LED lightbulbs last longer at around 5.7 years. So how can one lightbulb have been in constant operation since 1901 – over 119 years?  Coined the ‘longest burning light bulb in history’, a webcam streams live video of the ‘Centennial bulb’ to thousands of viewers every day.

In the 1920s, major light bulb manufacturers including Osram, General Electric, and Philips formed the Phoebus Cartel, agreeing to make purposely fragile light bulbs that would eventually burn out, as extremely long-lasting lightbulbs would be bad for business. While the cartel has since fallen apart, it shows the commercial viability of planned obsolescence.

The concept has infuriated consumers for several decades. However, abolishing planned obsolescence is not straightforward; there are larger chicken vs. egg arguments at play. What came first, planned obsolescence or our consumer habits? Are companies designing cheaper quality items in response to our consumer culture, or are we quickly consuming items because they are cheaper quality?

The concept is further complicated by the number of players involved: consumers, retailers, manufacturers, media advertising, designers and government actors all intertwine in a ravenous and fiercely competitive consumer culture. Manufacturers may feel forced to make goods at cheaper and cheaper price points to get products featured on retailers’ shelves; at the same time, consumers will understandably prefer to purchase a new item for cheaper than it would cost to repair their old one. It becomes a cyclical system whereby repairs become effectively uneconomical.

For any change to happen, efforts are needed to tackle both ends: our linear ‘take, make, use, discard’ consumer culture and poor-quality design of products.

Right to Repair

While repair events play an important role in slowing down our consumption – instilling confidence, teaching valuable skills and giving individuals an opportunity to experience a local and circular economy – effort is also needed to tackle more systemic issues like planned obsolescence.

Enter the Right to Repair movement: a coalition of European organisations directly involved in advocating for repair at EU level. The group advocates for ambitious policy measures to achieve a universal ‘Right to Repair’ through:

• Asking that everyone has access to repair information and spare parts – not just professionals
• Bringing urgency to policymakers on the need for more repairable and longer-lasting products, at national and European level
• Advocating for an EU-wide repair labelling system to guide consumers towards durable, repairable products
• Reinforcing their network of supporting Member States and business partners
• Promoting repair beyond the EU to accelerate market transformation at global level

Restart is one of the steering members, and advocated for the concept at a ‘FixFest’ in Manchester; the event saw 59 activists from 25 groups come together to draft the ‘Manchester Declaration’ calling for more repairable products. The Declaration has since been endorsed by 17 political figures and many other organisations, such as Green Alliance and Greenpeace UK.

Right to Repair’s advocacy has reached international recognition as well. The European Commission announced in March 2020 that manufacturers of phones, tablets and laptops will face legal obligations to make products easier to repair and reuse under a new recycling plan. The European Commission will extend an eco-design law (which previously set energy efficiency standards) to also cover technical standards so these goods will be made with changeable and repairable parts.

Our consumer culture

The other end of the stick, our consumer culture, is more difficult to change. For this, it’s useful to look to other regions where reuse and repair are more deeply engrained and require less (or no) legislation or advocation for widespread practice. Emma Burlow, whilst Head of Circular Economy at Resource Futures, wrote about her trip to India as a circular economy expert. Her role was to share best practice from the UK on the circular economy and effective waste prevention strategies. She reflects:

“There are the repair shops that are literally on every street corner. Things that get broken are fixed, not thrown away. The age of some vehicles on the road and collections of spare parts in roadside stores shows the demand for repair is huge.”

She muses that perhaps the time has come for an Indian contingent to visit the UK, imparting best practice on creating a cultural revolution.

Our consumerism and disassociation with repair have other noxious effects, not only to the immediate consumer’s detriment but to the detriment of those far way in other parts of the world. Somewhat ironically, India is also a major importer of WEEE (waste electrical and electronic equipment). The large majority of e-waste in India flows to the informal sector, with only a very small fraction processed by formal regulated recycling facilities.

We’ve partnered with E[co]work and others to help support this informal sector through the provision of better managed space, but the fact remains that our (often repairable and reusable) electronic waste is processed by marginalised members of society half a world away, working in unsafe and unhealthy conditions. How do we instil an awareness of the implications of our consumer culture to both consumers and product designers, and could this reinvigorate the appetite for repair and show the major role it has in minimising WEEE?

The way forward

Industry and manufacturers do not create an insatiable consumer culture in a vacuum: we as consumers gladly (or perhaps blindly) play a part. However, I believe times are changing. Examples from alternative consumer cultures, coupled with the growth of the Right to Repair movement and widespread circular economy efforts, demonstrates that opportunities for a circular, sharing economy are bigger now than ever before. Studies have even shown that the Covid-19 pandemic may be changing our appetite for learning new skills and being more resourceful.

We might not be able to radically change our culture to emulate the resourcefulness in India, but we can encourage repair in new and innovative ways. In Sweden, for example, families can access tax breaks of about £2,500 a year to cover labour costs paid to repair businesses for repairs of appliances. We can develop people’s confidence in, and motivation to, repair, supported by a political framework that prioritises repair through reducing unnecessary planned obsolescence.

The Scottish Government has a unique opportunity to design and introduce ambitious policy to support this vision, facilitate this growing movement and help transition Scotland toward a more circular economy. Scotland’s upcoming Circular Economy bill is an ideal place to further drive the right to repair in Scotland. While the importance of repair is mentioned in connection with keeping resources in use for as long as possible, ambitious and explicit policy should be designed to the tune of the Manchester Declaration and the EU’s right to repair regulations.

On an individual level, as someone with very little experience in repair, I encourage everyone to seek out a Repair event in your community – there are several organisations hosting repair events; try searching ‘Restart Project’, ‘Repair Café’, ‘Transition Town’, or ‘Remade Network’ for an event near you. The experience of fixing something with your own hands that you thought was beyond hope is immensely satisfying and leaves a lasting impression. And next time you purchase an electrical item, maybe you will consider spending a bit more on an item that will last longer.

Can the repair movement gain enough momentum, at an individual, community, and institutional level, so that planned obsolescence becomes obsolete?

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Last week, the Scottish Parliament was asked to vote on a motion, tabled by Mark Ruskell MSP, to declare a nature emergency. Disappointingly, the opportunity was missed to take this bold step, with SNP and Conservative MSPs voting instead for an amendment removing the words ‘nature emergency’ altogether and congratulating current efforts. Scotland would have become the first country to formally recognise the urgency of this decline as an emergency.

Yet, Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon declared a climate emergency in April 2019, and in the following May addressed the related biodiversity crisis, stating that “The challenges facing biodiversity are as important as the challenge of climate change, and I want Scotland to be leading the way in our response.” The Scottish Government may be a leading voice on climate change but an increase in ambition and investment in policies and projects to increase biodiversity is vital to nature’s recovery.

2021 will be a key year for making progress on reversing biodiversity declines. An international deal for nature will be agreed at the Convention on Biological Diversity conference in the autumn. This must be matched by domestic ambition. For over a decade, Scotland has striven to meet bold climate change targets, the same must now be put in place to address the nature crisis. In 2019, the State of Nature report found that 49% of UK species have declined as well as 1 in 9 species at risk of national extinction. Nature is in crisis, both in Scotland and around the world.

It is great to see growing recognition of this amongst MSP Species Champions. At the beginning of November, 30 Species Champions signed a letter to the Cabinet Secretary for the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform calling on the Scottish Government to deliver an ambitious, legally binding set of targets and milestones to secure nature recovery. At a time when environmental issues are increasingly brought to the fore, the need to have informed, passionate and supportive MSPs in Parliament ensuring our wildlife has a voice has never been more critical.

We were delighted to see Species Champions standing up for nature at the debate last week. Mark Ruskell MSP, Species Champion for white-tailed eagle, stated “Just as our legally binding climate targets have brought focus and scrutiny, so, too, are nature recovery targets needed in law to commit to halting the decline within a decade and fully restoring nature soon after.” For over a decade, Scotland has embarked on an ambitious programme to address climate change, with legally binding targets, and specific milestones and timeframes, which are stretching but achievable, and which are monitored and reported upon. The same must now be put in place to halt the loss of nature by 2030. Claudia Beamish MSP, Species Champion for forester moth, highlighted that Scotland has missed many of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets set in 2010. She stated that “Scottish Labour wants targets for nature recovery to be set into legislation”.

Alongside calling on the Scottish Government to set legally binding nature targets, MSP Species Champions highlighted the importance of delivering a Scottish Nature Network in order to increase connectivity of habitats and establish important links for wildlife. Claudia Beamish MSP stated: “We need to enhance, connect and expand all habitats and look to build a nature network”. A Nature Network across Scotland represents an investment in a wide-reaching natural solution with benefits for today’s climate emergency and nature crisis, as well as a thriving and resilient country. A Nature Network is a strategic, long term approach to manage, restore and enhance Scotland’s habitats and landscapes. Its approach builds a nature friendly landscape, which is pervious to nature and provides life affirming wildlife and nature encounters to all people. Sarah Boyack MSP, Species Champion for small skipper, supported Claudia’s Beamish’s statement by highlighting “We need to link biodiversity and tackling the nature emergency as part of the key policy framework in the upcoming national planning framework… we need a joined-up approach to land use management that brings wider benefits.”

In order to address the nature crisis, Scottish Environment LINK’s Holyrood 2021 manifesto calls on the next Scottish Government to set new, legally-binding targets for nature recovery to increase the abundance of wildlife species in Scotland and the restoration of their habitats. An ambitious set of targets is needed to clean up our air, soils, seas and rivers, by driving the development of policies that deliver the recovery of Scotland’s natural habitats and increase biodiversity. Nature is declining at an alarming rate and the climate emergency is intensified by the emerging global biodiversity crisis. Tackling the emergency that threatens the very existence of many species in Scotland needs to start right now. Restoring the obstacles humans have put in nature’s path so nature can move freely is more important than ever.

Juliet Caldwell

Nature Advocacy Officer at Scottish Environment LINK

© Mae Mackay

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Scottish Environment LINK, a coalition of Scotland’s leading environmental charities, has today welcomed initial improvements to the Scottish Government’s EU Continuity Bill, which delivers crucial post-Brexit environmental protections, including an environment watchdog.

From 1 January 2021, the EU’s world-renowned environmental protections will no longer apply to Scotland. The Scottish Government’s EU Continuity Bill seeks to establish a new environment watchdog to protect Scotland’s nature going forward, but campaigners have warned that major omissions mean the Bill must urgently be strengthened.

MSPs voted for several key amendments to the Bill this week (Tuesday 24 November and Wednesday 25 November) to increase the independence of Scotland’s new environment watchdog, Environmental Standards Scotland (ESS). The legislation now requires members of the watchdog’s board to have environmental expertise and Ministers have also agreed to discuss further changes that ensure that ESS has sufficient funding, and that this sufficiency is subject to parliamentary scrutiny ahead of the final vote on legislation in December. These changes will increase the watchdog’s independence from Scottish Ministers, heeding the concerns raised by thousands of supporters of the Fight for Scotland’s Nature campaign.

MSPs also secured commitments from the Scottish Government to discuss and seek to agree new measures in December to ensure Scotland’s process of maintaining alignment with the EU (the so-called ‘keeping pace’ power) secures high environmental standards. The Fight for Scotland’s Nature campaign has said that these new measures will be vital for ensuring that Scotland can be a progressive leader on the environment in the future and that there will be no backsliding in protections for nature.

However, Scottish Environment LINK has expressed concern that vital amendments to empower the watchdog to take enforcement action on individual complaints about environmental damage raised by citizens have not received government support. Without these changes to the draft legislation, people in Scotland are at risk of losing access to environmental justice once the UK leaves the EU at the end of 2020.

Vhairi Tollan, Advocacy Manager at Scottish Environment LINK, said:

As part of our EU membership, Scottish citizens have enjoyed rights to raise complaints about cases of environmental damage and have the EU watchdog investigate and take steps to enforce changes. However, similar powers are not included in the Scottish Government’s proposal for a new Scottish watchdog. Environmental Standards Scotland would be unable to take enforcement action on individual complaints, raising concern that we will lose this crucial means of accessing environmental justice at the end of 2020. At a time when 1 in 9 Scottish species is at risk of extinction in Scotland, key changes to the Continuity Bill must be made ahead of MSPs’ final vote in December to ensure Scotland’s new watchdog is a credible and robust enforcer of environmental protections.

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Environmental Standards Scotland should act on local concerns, argues Miriam Ross, coordinator of the Fight for Scotland’s Nature campaign.

When a local beauty spot – a beach, a wood, a hillside – comes under threat, local people are very often its most passionate defenders. Meetings are held, alliances formed, knowledge rapidly acquired and shared, and politicians lobbied in a quest to save a much-loved piece of nature. Instinctively, we know we have both the right to enjoy a healthy environment where we live, and the responsibility to ensure it remains so. For many, the sense of connection to local nature has increased during the pandemic.

It seems extraordinary, therefore, to propose that a new institution being set up to defend Scotland’s natural environment will not be able to act in response to people’s efforts to protect a specific place or environment from harm.

But the Scottish government has done just that, in a bill currently before parliament.

The bill is the EU Continuity Bill, and the institution Environmental Standards Scotland, the new environment watchdog proposed in the bill to replace the crucial role the EU has played in monitoring and enforcing environmental standards.

There is much to welcome in the bill, including the incorporation of key European environmental legal principles into Scots law. And the creation of a new watchdog to fill the gap that would otherwise be left after Brexit is a very positive step, indicating an understanding that governments must be held to account on their compliance with environmental law.

But the new watchdog, as set out in the bill, contains a major omission which would leave Scotland’s people without real recourse to justice on the environment. The new body won’t be able to take action in response to complaints from people who believe that their local environment is at risk due to the failure of the responsible authorities to uphold the law designed to protect it.

In other words, if a local person, a community group or a charity makes a complaint about a decision to pollute a beach, chop down a wood or bulldoze a hillside, Environmental Standards Scotland won’t be able to do anything about it.

Complaints such as these make up the bulk of the European Commission’s environmental work, and so their exclusion belies the Scottish government’s stated intention to ‘replace the system of environmental governance provided by the institutions of the European Union’.

The European system of addressing individual complaints has real value, not least because judgements have often set legal precedents, helping to protect places far beyond the one referred to in the original complaint. And, because the Commission has the power to enforce its judgements, it holds weight with governments: often just the suggestion of a complaint to Europe is enough to persuade the relevant public authority to up its game.

The insufficient degree of independence the new Scottish watchdog is also concerning. The Scottish government is proposing that its own ministers should appoint the senior officials at Environmental Standards Scotland, with little oversight from parliament, calling into question how effectively it will hold that same government to account.

For people in Scotland, the ability to complain to a watchdog that can actually enforce the law becomes even more apparent when you consider the lack of affordable alternatives. The cost of seeking a judicial review is beyond the reach of most citizens, and judicial review can only look at procedural errors rather than examining the merits of the case.

The Scottish parliament is scrutinising the EU Continuity Bill over the next few weeks. The strength or weakness of the new institution it creates is likely to have profound implications far into the future. MSPs have the opportunity to amend the bill to establish a watchdog with the power and independence to defend Scotland’s people and nature, at a time when the challenges we face have never been greater. Now is the time to get it right.

This article was originally published in the Scotsman on 10 November 2020.

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30 MSP Species Champions signed a letter to the Cabinet Secretary for the Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform calling on the Scottish Government to deliver an ambitious, legally binding set of targets and milestones to secure nature recovery. The letter, organised by Scottish Environment LINK, calls on the Scottish Government to champion nature.

Real action is needed to protect our environment so that it can continue to amaze us but also to continue performing the critical functions that enhance our health and wellbeing and are the foundation of our prosperity as a nation. In order to be world leading on nature recovery, Scotland must support a clear global goal to restore nature, with legally binding targets to address the nature emergency.

While fun and light hearted, the Species Champion initiative ultimately looks to address failing environmental policies and increasing threats on our natural environment by highlighting the need for habitats and species to be better protected, for the benefits of a thriving natural environment to be considered in all aspects of decision-making. At a time when environmental issues are increasingly brought to the fore, the need to have informed, passionate and supportive MSPs in Parliament ensuring our wildlife has a voice has never been more critical. By signing this letter, MSP Champions have taken the opportunity to champion not just their given species and its habitat but also wider policies and strategies with a significant impact on Scotland’s environment, climate, land and sea management. Thank you to the 30 Species Champions for standing up for nature and supporting the development of Scottish nature recovery targets.

Click here to view the letter – Species Champions Joint Letter

Juliet Caldwell

Nature Advocacy Officer at Scottish Environment LINK

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‘Today nature is vanishing at rates never seen before in human history,’ warned David Attenborough in September’s hour-long documentary looking at how our planet’s wildlife and habitats are faring. It made for necessary, but uncomfortable, viewing highlighting trends that have been identified by researchers and campaigners across the world: species and habitats are declining and the pressures driving this decline are intensifying, from climate change to growing urban developments and mass consumption.

The UN described this moment as a crossroads for humanity in a major new review of global biodiversity trends that was released in September. It points to the international community’s failure to act collectively to reduce environmental harms, calling the past decade ‘a lost decade’ for nature.

However, the UN Secretary-General noted there is an unprecedented opportunity as we emerge from the immediate impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic to seize the initiative to make sustainable transformations across our society and economy that will put us on track for nature recovery. Next year, world leaders will once again come together at an international summit to determine a new set of targets to reverse biodiversity decline and it is vital this marks a turning point in countries’ commitment to restore the natural world.

The events of recent months have shown us just how necessary protecting nature is: Covid-19 emerged due to an intensification of human activity bringing humans and wild species into closer contact. As industrial agriculture, forestry and mining expands into new areas, bringing urban societies into more frequent contact with wild animals, there is an increasing risk of similar viral diseases jumping from animals to humans.

Scotland is no exception to the global trend of biodiversity decline. The latest State of Nature Scotland report showed that 1 in 9 species is at risk of extinction from our country. Yet many of us have recently come to appreciate the nature on our doorsteps more than ever, with local walks and garden bird watching providing a much-needed respite as lockdown restricted our travel.

It’s not too late for Scotland to turn this situation around and, if we act swiftly now, we can reverse nature’s decline. The natural world has an amazing capacity to recover from crisis and by taking steps to expand our native woodlands, restore carbon-locking peatlands, move to nature- and climate-friendly farming and step up protections for Scotland’s seas we can look ahead to a brighter future.

To drive success in the coming years, a clear commitment from the Scottish Government to address the nature emergency head on is needed, backed up by measurable targets and action plans to take us on a path to nature recovery. Commitments to nature recovery targets from Scotland’s political parties ahead of next year’s Holyrood elections would be a signal that politicians are taking the loss of Scotland’s nature seriously.

Nature has brought comfort to so many of us during these tough times, it’s now time for us to stand up for Scotland’s nature.

Vhairi Tollan is Advocacy Manager at Scottish Environment LINK

A version of this blog was published as a Scotsman column on 27 October 2020

Photo Credit: Sandra Graham

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A guest blog by Sophie Unwin, founder/director, Remade Network

IKEA has made the news as it launches its plans to buy back unwanted furniture – going beyond recycling to include repair and refurbishment, as part of its multi-billion dollar plans to become a ‘truly circular climate positive’ business by 2030.

It’s clear that repair is becoming more mainstream in the large business community. Will this mean that repairing and mending becomes more prevalent in society as a whole?

Remade Network’s Govanhill Repair Stop opened in July 2020 – at the height of the pandemic. Working collaboratively with Repair Café Glasgow, Govanhill Baths Community Trust, and the Glasgow Tool Library we offer an affordable repair service for electronics, textiles, and small electrical goods – currently £5 or £10.

Having come out of three months of social isolation ourselves, for the team, one of the things that has given us the most pleasure is engaging with happy customers – who bring in their items (safely) and hand them to our hatch at Govanhill Baths’ Deep End site. From record players, to jeans, to blenders and phones – each fix involves problem solving and creative thinking in order to return the item to its owner. The technicians have fixed over 120 items in the first two months alone, with an 85 percent success rate, and making no charge if the repair is unsuccessful.

Many people have carried out clear outs during the pandemic and are keen to donate unwanted household items and ensure they go to a good home or to fix the items they have. As one customer said to us, “This project helps us look after our household goods, as they in turn look after us.”

Of course, repair is not a new idea. Look to other cultures and go back in time and an ethic of ‘make do and mend’ was much more commonplace. When there are fewer resources, people need to make them go further. And repair and mending has often been unpaid women’s work, done at home.

The ethos of Remade Network was born 20 years ago, after I spent a year living in rural Eastern Nepal. With new goods hard to find, we reused, repaired and repurposed everything we owned and found. Milk came straight from the cow, vegetables unpackaged from the market, and sacks of rice were refilled at the local shop. In a year our household of six created just one dustbin of rubbish.

This experience led me to set up Remade in Brixton, which became the Remakery in Brixton, and then the Edinburgh Remakery. In a ‘developed’ economy it’s not always possible to make a business case for repair, as buying new is cheaper – but I wanted to show that it would be viable to have a business model centred around repair education – to help people learn the skills that I knew I lacked, practical skills that are really essential for living more lightly on the planet.

A group of volunteers and then a staff team in Edinburgh grew the project from £60 through various phases, to a turnover of £240,000, 80 percent traded income, and 10 members of staff in 2017, when I left. By then, the project had a bustling hub on Leith Walk, and was £15,000 in surplus.

At that point, other communities had started asking about how to collaborate to set up their own repair social enterprises. This seemed an ideal way to share the learning of the previous 12 years. Repair Café Glasgow was one of the first projects to get in touch, which is what led to the Govanhill project.

Lauren Crilley, who works at Repair Café Glasgow one day a week alongside her role at Remade Network explains: “Repair Café Glasgow is built on the idea that our possessions have lots of life left in them when we maintain and repair them. We have been running repair events in community spaces across Glasgow and beyond since 2017. Over the last two years we have built a wonderful community of volunteer fixers and have saved 12 tonnes of CO2e [carbon dioxide equivalent] emissions through repairing electronics, electrical goods, clothes and more. The project has also spawned a new social enterprise – the Pram Project –  devoted to repairing prams and redistributing them to refugee families and other families in need.”

Repair cafés are run by volunteers and are an excellent way to bring people together and build community – as well as save goods from landfill. What makes Remade Network’s approach different is that its focus is on creating jobs. We’ve grown from 1 member of staff to 7 over the past year, and continue to recruit new technicians as the volume of repairs grows. Repair creates 10 times as many jobs as recycling, and it seems the ideal model for building quality green new jobs as we navigate our way to a future beyond COVID-19.

In April our future seemed precarious for a moment, but we have been relieved and delighted that we can keep going and growing by responding to the need across the city – both for repair and also for distributing refurbished donated computers to vulnerable families across the city, diverting an additional 117 tonnes of CO2e in the process.

Responding to the pandemic has also drawn parallels with the Remakery in Brixton, a project born from Transition Town Brixton’s work in 2008 at the time of the financial crash. The motivation for this project, too, was to create jobs for the people who had the kind of useful skills we all rely on – but who weren’t earning a livelihood from them. My elderly neighbour was an AfroCaribbean immigrant who used to fix bikes in his front garden, but barely make any income. The Brixton project was gifted a set of unused garages by Lambeth Council, which my co-founder Hannah Lewis converted to the Remakery thanks to a grant from the Lottery. Each garage then became a different social enterprise for repairing and reusing a different material stream – from bikes, to chairs to musical instruments.

Our Remade projects create jobs, build skills, and help build a sense of community as we work at the heart of different neighbourhoods – rather than blaming people for not doing enough, shifting wealth and decision-making to local communities. We are both making it easier for people to behave differently and recognising that those who consume the least are often the people who are disproportionately affected by the impacts of climate change and pollution.

At their heart, we believe that repair is not just about saving waste, it can be a way to tackle inequality too. Is there a tension in mainstreaming something into business practices? Perhaps only if it’s seen that repair is a means to an end of growing business, rather than looking at how business can serve communities. Repair can be not just part of a circular economy; it can be part of a circular economy towards a fairer footprint – one of Scottish Environment LINK’s core aims.

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© Louise Greenhorn (rspb-images.com)

This blog post is by RSPB Scotland, and was first published on the RSPB Scotland website.

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These are extraordinary times. Scotland is emerging slowly and cautiously from lockdown and considering how we recover, as a nation, and as part of the global community. Attention has rightly focused on the public health crisis and treatment of the most vulnerable, but as governments begin to look to life beyond lockdown it is clear that the lockdown and its aftermath is having severe consequences for the economy, both globally and nationally. Livelihoods, particularly in hospitality, retail and tourism, are under threat and millions of jobs are at risk.[1] The Scottish Government forecasts an immediate downturn in economic activity of up to 33%[2], while the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts a downturn of 35% for the UK as a whole[3]. Indeed, current predictions from the Bank of England suggest that this will be the deepest economic recession in living memory[4].

However, we should not be mistaken that this is the only crisis for which we need an immediate solution. Science shows us that we have 10 years to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and 10 years to reverse the loss in biodiversity^[5], happening across the world and in Scotland^[6]. While there are a number of paths the Scottish and UK Government could choose to embark upon to lead us out of this crisis, we must not repeat the mistakes of the 2007-08 financial crisis and the following decade and more of austerity measures have crippled the public sector, including environmental services, and driven up inequalities in our society[7]. We must learn from the recent past and choose an alternative path. A recovery that takes us back to the old ways of running the economy is not inevitable – it is a political choice towards an unstable climate and failing ecosystems.

Welcome statements from the Scottish Government Ministers have signalled the intention that the economic recovery should be ‘green’[8]. However, for this to be real, there is a  level of ambition for action that is not yet visible. Before the Covid-19 pandemic swept Scotland, we were already facing nature and climate emergencies and the Government’s Environment Strategy recognised that significant action was required[9]. The Government’s response to the Economic Recovery Group Report^[10] produced quickly and under limited resources, has some good points but overall lacks the ambition,  commitment and urgency that are needed to drive the level of change we need to see. Our tests[11]^[12] show that a green recovery must stimulate national and local economies that work for people while delivering benefits for nature and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These issues are not separate to economic considerations – for example, Scotland’s £6bn tourism sector[13] and £14bn food and drink sector[14] depend on a thriving environment.

Our response must therefore be a step change in policy, with tangible results within the next decade, as urged by international scientists and policy-makers[15], and including natural solutions to climate change and reversing biodiversity loss with wide-reaching positive impacts on society and the economy. There are 3 vital elements that are present in part, but not at the scale needed, in the Government response to the proposals:

1. Partnerships: The scale of the challenges cannot be tackled by government and the private sector alone. It is very clear that we will only achieve the level of buy in and action that we need  through proper partnership working – not just between business and government but with local communities and with communities of interest in the arts, culture, environment and care sectors. Together we can create jobs, build the skills base needed and involve everyone^[16]. A top down approach simply will not work.
2. Investment: government cannot fund us out of these crises. They simply cannot afford it. The funds identified in the report are a good starting point. But they must be matched against private investment and leveraged by local ingenuity and charitable sector creativity. That way we may see the scale of investment able to make a positive impact. That investment must also be in the right place and at the right time. The Scottish National Investment Bank has a clear leadership role to play here.  In meeting its mission and objectives, it should firmly focus its limited public funding in de-risking green investments and thereby leveraging much greater private investment in initiatives that build back better for society and the planet.
3. Embedding climate and environmental sustainability into decision making: this is now unavoidable if we are to avoid disasters of massive and long term recession, climate instabilities and uncontrollable ecosystem feedback loops. The Infrastructure Investment Plan for example with 3 strategic outcomes that mirror the green wellbeing economy outcomes, and include climate action and nature restoration is  a part but must be so far embedded that environmental sustainability is the fundamental basis of economic growth and not an optional add on. Embedding this across Government is a powerful lever to lead and drive change. When it is matched across the rest of society, business and industry, we start to see a very effective mechanism to move towards the future we all want to see.

This all takes ambition, leadership, drive and commitment. With an election coming up, this is what we want to see in Party manifestos ready to be enacted immediately in June^[17]. This has to start now: unless such ambition is clearly committed to in Party manifestos, the scale of change we need to see for Scotland to lead by example and come out of the pandemic, the climate emergency and the nature crisis, simply will not be achieved.

References

[1] International Labour Organization, 2020. As jobs escalate, nearly half of global workforce at risk of losing livelihoods. https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_743036/lang–en/index.htm

[2] Scottish Government, 2020. State of the Economy: April 2020. https://www.gov.scot/publications/state-economy-april-2020/

[3] Office for Budget Responsibility, 2020. Coronavirus analysis. https://obr.uk/coronavirus-analysis/

[4] Chaplain, C., 2020. UK recession: Bank of England warns of worst recession on record in 2020. The i.  https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/uk-recession-bank-of-england-worst-record-2020-economy-coronavirus-lockdown-2845697

^[5] https://ipbes.net/node/37466

^[6] https://www.scotlink.org/publication/state-of-nature/

[7] United Nations, 2019. Visit to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: Report of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. https://undocs.org/A/HRC/41/39/Add.1

[8] Scottish Government 2019. Climate Change Plan update. https://www.gov.scot/news/climate-change-plan-update/ AND Scottish Government, 2020. Economy Secretary’s statement 21 April 2020. https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-update-economy-secretarys-statement-economic-impact-covid-19-tuesday-21-april-2020/

[9] Scottish Government, 2020. The Environment Strategy for Scotland. Available at: https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/documents/govscot/publications/strategy-plan/2020/02/environment-strategy-scotland-vision-outcomes/documents/environment-strategy-scotland-vision-outcomes/environment-strategy-scotland-vision-outcomes/govscot%3Adocument/environment-strategy-scotland-vision-outcomes.pdf

^[10]https://www.gov.scot/publications/economic-recovery-implementation-plan-scottish-government-response-to-the-advisory-group-on-economic-recovery/

[11] https://www.scotlink.org/publication/5-key-tests-for-a-green-recovery/

^[12]https://www.scotlink.org/publication/the-5-green-tests-applied-to-the-scottish-governments-economic-recovery-plan/

[13] Scottish Government, 2018. Tourism in Scotland: the economic contribution of the sector.  https://www.gov.scot/publications/tourism-scotland-economic-contribution-sector/pages/2/

[14] Scottish Government, 2020. Food and Drink. https://www.gov.scot/policies/food-and-drink/

[15] IPBES, 2019. Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lec/about-us/news/why-citizens-assemblies-matter

^[16] https://www.scotlink.org/publication/green-recovery-1-people-land-and-sea/

^[17] https://www.scotlink.org/publication/green-recovery-summary-for-msps/

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