Charity Spotlight: Edinburgh Science

CHECK OUT THE ’CLIMATE ACTION’ HUB!

Edinburgh Science Foundation is an educational charity best known for organising Edinburgh’s annual Science Festival and their science and education outreach programmes. Their mission is to inspire, encourage, and challenge people of all ages and backgrounds to explore and understand the world around them.

We asked the charity about climate change education, the impacts of collaboration, and how to develop useful digital tools.

Charity Digital: How did Edinburgh Science start to become engaged with climate action and sustainability, and where do you see yourself now on that journey?

Edinburgh Science: Edinburgh Science have always ‘programmed for the planet’ through our annual Science Festival and year-round Learning and Community programmes, advocating for the beauty and wonder of Earth and showcasing green skills.

In 2019, we awarded the Edinburgh medal to Cristiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who was instrumental in bringing about the Paris Climate Agreement. We, and our networks that we convened for a round-table event that day, were so inspired by her encouragement and advocacy for ”extreme collaboration” and seeing the Climate Emergency as the biggest opportunity for innovation that society is to face, that we started doing loads more in the climate space, initially by convening our networks to help them collaborate on climate goals.

CD: The annual Edinburgh Science Festival has explored climate change in a range of different ways. What has your experience been in engaging audiences in climate change, and what advice do you have for organisations who want to start having these conversations in their own communities? 

ES: We have found our audiences to be very engaged on climate, particularly where the method of engagement was interactive. At #EdSciFest 2022, we had a large-scale exhibition called ‘Consumed’, which looked at the ways we use food, energy, stuff, and fashion. Most people would take away one surprising fact from this exhibition, which was staffed by trained science communicators. One example is that tomatoes grown in Scotland are more carbon-intensive than those flown from Spain due to heating required.

We did a course with the Media Trust on ‘Communicating the Climate’, which gave our organisation so many valuable pointers with regards to engaging with, and inspiring, the public. I would highly recommend the course; it’s an excellent free initiative so definitely apply!

In line with the messaging of the course, our advice to organisations wishing to start these conversations would be to keep the messaging realistic but can-do (“This is the greatest challenge of our time, but if we work together now, we can do it!”) and focus on interconnected of actions that individuals can do in your community as well as the responsibilities of governments, businesses, and decision-makers.

It can at first seem tricky to do this without making it seem like individuals are solely responsible for saving the world, which of course isn’t true – we know as well as anyone that businesses must play their part – but giving individuals some agency goes a long way.

For example, if you can encourage one positive change in someone’s lifestyle – like reducing eating meat to special occasions – and pairing that with an idea of the carbon they could save, it’s very empowering in a space that can otherwise feel a bit helpless and overwhelming.

Bringing people together at small-scale local events to express their concerns and share ideas of sustainable actions that they can take also goes a long way in alleviating climate anxiety – which is fairly rife at the moment.

CD: Please can you tell us more about your ‘Climate Co-Lab’ roundtables? What do you think is the impact of this type of cross-industry collaboration?

ES: The round table that we pulled together on the day of Ms Figueres’ visit to the Science Festival in 2019 made us realise the power that we have to convene corporates, scientists, government leaders, and other great minds. This sparked further round tables, which became a series known as the ‘Climate Co-Lab’.

At Co-Labs, senior leaders from our networks come together to tackle the thorny issues of the climate emergency –for example, how do we finance this? How do we up-scale our energy supply chains? How do we find people with the right skills and how do we encourage better co-operation between governments and businesses to decarbonise and improve society in time to mitigate the worse effects of climate change?

Because our networks are diverse, you get people who would not normally find themselves in the same room as each other, which leads to fresh new ideas being shared between different types of organisation and ultimately gives professionals a different perspective which they might introduce into their work – leading to better progress toward net zero.

It also allows people to meet potential collaborators – for example, we have had start-ups find investment at our events; and had banks working with public sector agencies to re-wild land.

As a charity with corporate sponsors, it is also a great way to open up our networks to more prospective funders - whilst helping to save the planet!

CD: Your NetZeroToolkit is a free online resource to support any small-to-medium enterprise to build an effective carbon reduction strategy. What’s the story behind why and how you created this? 

ES: The NetZeroToolkit was an idea raised at one of the early Climate Co-Labs in 2019. Back then it was beginning to be understood that businesses – small and large – were the key to decarbonising emissions, but small businesses didn’t have much support or direction when it came to this challenge.

Many initiatives were asking businesses to pledge to get to net zero, without giving them any support or information to use in order to inform what were essentially empty pledges. Edinburgh Science responded by creating a hands-on, practical, and jargon-free online toolkit where businesses could go and suss out how to build the basis of their carbon reduction strategy, helped along by easy-to-follow prompts and supported with a concise bank of useful resources which we created to help them with each component of their emissions reduction strategy.

CD: Has there ever been a time when Edinburgh Science faced a challenge with digital technology, and how did you overcome it? 

ES: Our original NetZeroToolkit website was hosted on a platform which was unsuitable for the scope of the toolkit, and as such users were losing the information they had input and were unable to access links.

Plus, we were unable to see users’ interactions with the toolkit, which made it difficult to report on depth of engagement, for example to funders. This was overcome by an investment in a shiny new NetZeroToolkit website, which has abolished these problems and is a lot more enjoyable to use. 

CD: How does digital technology interact with tackling climate change in your work?

ES: Digital tech enables us to run The NetZeroToolkit on our platforms and allows us to reach out to other organisations who may be able to make use of The NetZeroToolkit. It also allows us to work from home more frequently and attend events virtually, reducing the need to travel.

For our own Science Festival & Learning events, nothing will ever beat the in-person format, however, technology gives us a platform to provide an on-demand programme of events which may mitigate the need for some people to travel.