Maurice Golden: Green Giant Award 2022

It was a real honour to win the Green Giant Award, especially given that campaigning to tackle climate change has never been more important. Twenty years ago, when I started campaigning on climate change, the battle was to convince government, stakeholders, and the public that it was an issue that needed to be tackled. After some considerable effort, that battle has been won.

The next battle was to convince government to set ambitious targets to drive change, and this has also been won. Those battles were hard fought, but the current one around delivery is proving to be the hardest yet.

Let’s consider the Scottish Government’s record on delivery whilst noting that many of these targets are stretching – and so they should be.

The Scottish Government missed their own emissions targets three years in a row before finally meeting the target in 2020 and only then due to a national lockdown, which clearly isn’t sustainable. In fact, the UK Committee on Climate Change have noted that Scotland has failed to meet seven out of eleven of its targets to date and warned that “the trend of failure will continue without urgent and strong action”.

We see the same alarming trend in the policies set by Scottish Government itself.

That includes their cycling target, which has already been missed and would, in any case, take almost another 420 years to meet. Or their green jobs promise that ended up with just six per cent of the total by the deadline. 

Even the most basic targets, ones that are impossible not to meet, are off track. Somehow, the Scottish Government has managed to deliver the impossible. 

Take the 50 per cent recycling target for 2013. This has still not been met 10 years on. The landfill ban on biodegradable waste was not delivered as promised in 2021 and peatland restoration rates are less than half the 20,000ha the SNP promised to restore each year.

In 2021 I thought it would be the Greens to the rescue – at least on tackling climate change, if nothing else. Sadly, their record is as woeful as their coalition partners. Thus far, the Greens have announced the renewable heat target has been missed, U-turned on their manifesto commitment to ban new incinerators and seemed completely helpless to prevent mounting problems with deposit return. The fact there were no Green candidates for the Green Giant Award speaks volumes.

I fear the 2030 net zero target is already lost. However, there is hope. Scotland now needs to meet the basic, easiest targets in tandem with making transformational changes. If politicians are going to exclaim there is a climate emergency, they need to follow that up with action. I wish the next winner of the Green Giant Award all the best and trust they will have made a meaningful contribution to tackling climate change.