As part of 10:10 week at Edinburgh University, Transition Edinburgh University collaborated with the University of Edinburgh and the World Development Movement Scotland to put on a panel discussion entitled ‘The Role of Civil Society after Copenhagen’. It was definitely a valid question to bring up. Just what are we supposed to do about climate change when our world leaders are unable to come to a binding agreement themselves? The result of the Copenhagen summit felt a bit like ‘civil society’ was a little girl who’d fallen over and broken her arm being given a 2.5cm squared Disney plaster to patch herself up with, when really an ambulance would have been in order. Let down, for some of us, was an understatement. Of course, to be fair to the world of international politics, it was a global first. Humanity has never faced such an immense problem with such varied impacts on different countries and agreement demanded of such differing political viewpoints, and as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, climate change is a problem requiring solutions on ALL scales, not just the global.

The discussion was chaired by Professor Martin J. Siegert (Head of the School of GeoSciences and Assistant Principal for Energy and Climate Change) with presentations given by Navraj Singh Ghaleigh LLB LLM (Lecturer in Public Law) and Dr. Andy R. Kerr (Director of Scottish Alliance for Geoscience, Environment and Society). Navraj Singh Galeigh gave a good outline of the international legislation that has come into place regarding climate change since it was identified as a global problem for the UN to deal with (back in the days of ‘global warming’ some might say), while Professor Siegert and Dr. Kerr focused mainly on the place of Universities and higher education in relation to climate change. Dr. Kerr, who directs the interdisciplinary centre for research on the environment and society at Edinburgh University and across Scotland (SAGES) stressed the importance of research across academic discipline boundaries in an inspirational way. He definitely made me feel I’d taken the right course doing an interdisciplinary MSc in Environment Culture and Society. Individually, we have skills for the sake of skills, but together we have the RIGHT skills to tackle the problem. For example, a physical scientist can identify climate change but it takes a social scientist to tell you if it’s dangerous climate change.

The discussion could be criticised for not necessarily dealing with ‘civil society’, but to be honest it would probably have taken a discussion twice as long to figure out just what ‘civil society’ is and who it encompasses, so I for one was perfectly happy for them to focus in on ‘our’ (i.e. the people in the room, who were all, generally speaking, part of the University community) role in figuring out what to do about climate change. There were also two politicians (whose names I didn’t catch) in the audience who made a fair contribution regarding the broader ‘civil’ picture, at least from a governmental perspective. As for the grassroots, that’s to be determined by grassroots action rather than a panel discussion, so it would have been unfair and self-defeating to expect ‘top-down’ direction on that front.

All in all, it was a fruitful discussion with a variety of viewpoints expressed  through audience questions and an inspirational underlying message that so many people were willing to give up their Wednesday evenings to come and discuss what to do about a global problem on a local level.

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