Highland Council is making climate change worse

There is no shortage of evidence on the rapid rate of climate change and its likely harmful impacts on all of us.

We all have to play our parts in reducing our individual carbon emissions, especially for the sake of young people who have not made the mess but will be ones who will have to live with it and attempt to the deal with damage. Young people themselves have paid attention to the evidence, as demonstrated by their global Friday school strikes, including in Fort William.

However, the major reductions in carbon emissions which will effect significant change need to come at a governmental and regulatory level. But Highland Council, far from acting in a responsible and forward-looking manner, seems to be going out of its way to sabotage the efforts of those trying to limit climate change.

The council is already enacting plans to dig up the peat bog on the Blar in Fort William, seemingly without having carried out any calculations of how much carbon this will release, in contravention of its national and international obligations. Peat bogs are especially important for storing carbon and extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and destroying them is particularly irresponsible.

Building houses and facilities for people is an important aim, but not if it bequeaths to young people and future generations an environment wrecked by climate change. It is simply not fair on them to be so short-termist about planning decisions.

Anyone who wants to get Highland Council to do anything around here knows that the answer will invariably be that it doesn’t have enough staff and it doesn’t have enough money. However, when it comes to environmental damage, resources don’t seem to be a problem. Highland Council has already awarded a £2 million contract to dig up yet more of the Blar, on an area that has not even yet been confirmed in the new Local Plan as being allocated for development, and for which it has not received detailed planning permission.

Highland Council should be a force for good rather than deliberately making matters worse. Susannah Calderan,

Banavie, Fort William.