The Geographer: Wheredunnit? (autumn 2022)

Alasdair Gray, Lanark

The Geographercrime fiction

The first six months of this year have been some of the most disruptive I have ever known, as perhaps predictably the transition out of Covid throws up all sorts of problems and stresses. Many people are still working incredibly hard, leading to online debate about whether mass staff burnout is imminent. Some are still getting ill. Many are trying to get out and enjoy their renewed freedoms, leading to a larger proportion of people being away than I can ever remember. Some have taken the opportunity to reconsider their career, or their retirement. And others have returned to jobs from ‘Covid emergency’ roles of various kinds and are now playing catch-up. It’s not been easy getting people to convene, let alone to make things happen, and that’s without the backdrop of war, severe strains on public budgets, and rising food and energy prices. It does all feel quite relentless.

Unsurprisingly then, we felt we needed a lighter theme for The Geographer for this autumn. The great thing about geography is that it is so universal that it can easily provide the scope for this diversity. Working with Geographer Royal for Scotland Professor Jo Sharp, Dr Cheryl McGeachan, and leading crime writer Val McDermid, we explore in this magazine the importance of the settings of crime stories, so critical to any narrative. Not only does landscape drive atmosphere within fiction, but fiction can play a very significant role in how we perceive and understand landscape, both real and imagined.

We are grateful for their help, and to the many authors who have contributed to this edition. Of course, we didn’t feel we could ignore all of the current global concerns, so we have features on global food insecurity, a look into recent heatwaves and future national parks, and even some guidance on how to spend a trillion dollars, alongside an interview with outgoing President Iain Stewart, and a short insight into RSGS Board members. We hope you enjoy reading this magazine, and we look forward to seeing many of you again as the face-toface talks kick off again around Scotland, beginning on 19th September.

Mike Robinson, Chief Executive, RSGS

RSGS, Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU tel: 01738 455050 email: enquiries@rsgs.org www.rsgs.org

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The views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the RSGS.

Cover image: ‘Crime scene’ at the Fair Maid’s House. © RSGS

Masthead image: Crime fiction collection. © Euan Robinson

RSGS: a better way to see the world

Dr Mike Robinson

In June, our Chief Executive received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Stirling. Mike Robinson was recognised for his outstanding commitment to delivering and embedding climate solutions to help protect the world, through driving legislation, informing policy, and educating thousands in climate and geographical understanding. At the presentation ceremony, he commented, “I am absolutely delighted to accept this Honorary Doctorate. As a graduate of Stirling it is an especial honour; indeed, it is an important institution in our family – I met my wife at Stirling and my son is also now a student, so it is very close to my heart. I could not be more pleased.”

Doug Allan in Perth for Christmas

We are delighted to announce that Mungo Park Medallist Doug Allan will speak for RSGS at a special one-off event at Perth Concert Hall on Wednesday 21st December 2022! The Scottish wildlife cameraman and photographer, best known for his work in polar regions and underwater, will share some of his amazing experiences from throughout his life and career. Tickets are £15 for RSGS members, £10 for students and under-18s, and £20 for general admission. These are likely to sell fast, so please call 01738 621031 or visit www.horsecross.co.uk to secure your place.

book your tickets now

New Deputy Chief Executive

RSGS welcomed its newest member of staff at the end of July. In the role of Deputy Chief Executive, Ross McKenzie will initially focus on strengthening and developing partnerships to ensure that as many people as possible can engage with the Climate Solutions programme. Ross has 15 years’ experience working in the charity and sustainable development sectors, and brings a wealth of programme design, fundraising, and operational management experience. He previously worked for Raleigh International, which included many years working overseas in Tanzania, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Nepal, implementing programmes focused on water, sanitation and hygiene, livelihoods, natural resource management, and youth leadership. In the months prior to joining RSGS, Ross travelled through South America and cycled the ‘El Camino’ pilgrimage from Pamplona to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

People talks

Face-to-face talks

Starting in September, we are delighted to be returning to live talks at our 13 Local Groups across Scotland. Our 2022 23 Inspiring People talks programme features a stellar line-up of speakers, all with incredible stories to share; audiences will hear in person from leading explorers, photographers, communicators and scientists. Before Christmas, we have adventurer Christopher Horsley, exploring some of the most active volcanoes in the world; geomorphologist Professor Colin Ballantyne, on a journey through time to explore the evolution of Scotland’s diverse mountain landscapes; runner Elise Downing, recounting her feat of running 5,000 miles around the coast of Britain; filmmaker Alex Bescoby, talking about his epic road trip from Singapore to London in a 1955 Land Rover; sea kayaker Will Copestake, sharing fabulous tales of adventure in the world’s wet, cold and wild temperate regions; TV presenter and author Cameron McNeish, reflecting on four decades of chronicling Scotland’s majestic landscapes and outdoor communities; climate and energy scientist Professor Stephen Peake, taking a once-in-a-lifetime tour of our Earth system and energy choices; photographer Colin Prior, on visiting the remote and magnificent Karakoram mountains, and on his sources of inspiration and influence in his work in over 50 countries; freelance journalist Rebecca Lowe, sharing the joys and challenges of her year-long 11,000km odyssey by bicycle across the Middle East; photographer Shabhaz Majeed, on a spectacular photography journey, showing Scotland from a

new perspective; and cyclist Lee Craigie, recreating the 1936 journey of 17-year-old Mary Harvie, who rode her bike 500 miles around the north-west coast of Scotland.

Admission to face-to-face talks is FREE for RSGS members, students and under-18s, and £10 for others. Tickets are available through rsgs.org/events or at the door. Pre-booking may be required for one or two venues; please see the printed programme (sent to all members) or our social media for details.

Online talks

This year’s programme marks the first time that we are offering a monthly online talk, hosted through Zoom, on top of all the usual live talks at Local Groups, allowing the events to be especially accessible to everyone all over Scotland and beyond. We are delighted to bring you interviews with renowned explorers Robin Hanbury-Tenison, David Hempleman-Adams and John Blashford-Snell, endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh, skier and adventurer Myrtle Simpson, and ecocide campaigner Jojo Mehta Tickets for online talks are £2 for RSGS members, students and under-18s, and £6 for general admission. Book now at rsgs.org/events.

book online tickets now

Christopher Horsley, Marum Crater, Ambrym, Vanuatu. © Geoff Makley

Inspiring

for 2022-23: face-to-face and online! come along to a talk!

Clifton Bain FRSGS

In May, we were delighted to present RSGS Honorary Fellowship to author and conservationist Clifton Bain, for his crucial work towards the conservation of peatlands and promoting public awareness of their importance. Over the last ten years, Clifton has worked as Programme Advisor of the IUCN UK Peatland Programme on environmental policy and advocacy to promote the conservation of peatlands. He has also given public talks and written books about peatlands and other ecosystems, highlighting their value to people’s physical and mental health as well as to biodiversity and climate action.

Sail away, Great Tay, John Rae

With new content every week on our online blog (rsgs. org/blog) there’s always something of interest. Recent additions include:

• Circumnavigating the Globe, Part One – on 9th January 2022, Kirsty Fisher set sail from Antigua on board the 72ft sailing yacht Intrepid, bound for a circumnavigation of the world. Read her adventures in part one of her travel blog.

• Amundsen and Scott in the Great Tay Boat Race – artist Michael Durning was inspired to celebrate Scottish explorers, and at RSGS HQ he found that Amundsen’s race to the South Pole began in Perth!

• John Rae: gatecrashing the annual dinner of the Lochaber Agricultural Society – in 1856, a gentleman, apparently a tourist, arrived at the Society’s dinner just as the party were to sit down to dine. “My name is Rae,” he announced at the end of the evening, “and you may have heard it associated with the Franklin Expedition.”

Caring climbing challenge

In August, 82-year-old Nick Gardner from Gairloch completed the Munro-bagging challenge he had begun in July 2020, having never climbed a Munro before. He was joined by family and friends for the final climb, Cairn Gorm, and was met at the top by a guard of honour of supporters. “I’m on cloud nine, it’s absolutely surreal,” he said. “I was walking through the archway thinking, it’s all for me.”

Mr Gardner raised more than £60,000 for Alzheimer Scotland and the Royal Osteoporosis Society through the challenge. “I couldn’t look after my wife any more. She had to go into care and I had to get a project to refocus my life,” he said. “I am elated but I’ve not finished climbing. I have my eye on the Devon and Cornwall coastal path walk.”

New scholarly articles

The first articles for the revamped Scottish Geographical Journal have now been published online (www.tandfonline.com/ journals/rsgj20), with some available to read on open access, and all available free for RSGS members. The latest additions include:

• Periglacial landforms of Dartmoor: an automated mapping approach to characterizing cold climate geomorphology by Sadie Harriott and David J A Evans;

• Ukraine, Russian fascism and Houdini geography: a conversation with Vitali Vitaliev by Chris Philo and Vitali Vitaliev;

• The Anthropocene and the geography of everything: can we learn how to think and act well in the ‘age of humans’? by Noel Castree;

• The spatial variable: Professor Ron Johnston’s inaugural lecture (University of Sheffield, 1975) by Ron Johnston (with a foreword by Richard Harris).

Busy business as usual

Mike Robinson, Chief Executive

The summer months have seen the continuation of much of our ongoing work. Katrina Strachan has done a fantastic job of pulling the 90 Inspiring People talks together and, because of the popularity of online talks, she has also organised a programme of six recorded interviews which we will schedule monthly throughout the talks season.

On the policy front, this is a busy period for government consultations around key geographical topics, from agriculture and circular economy to land reform, national parks and net zero. We will struggle to respond to all of these but, as ever, are keen to present the geographical perspective in these discussions wherever practical, and to provide input to discussions with partner organisations and representative bodies.

I continue to engage with the Cabinet Secretary’s advisory board on agriculture reform (ARIOB) which has just begun to revert to face-to-face meetings, and will determine the basis of future agricultural subsidies and priorities, particularly post-2024. I am also an ambassador for Glasgow’s National Park City campaign, which aims to use the familiar idea of a National Park to inspire a shared vision for Glasgow as a greener, healthier and wilder city for everyone, where people, places and nature are better connected.

External talks continue apace. In July, I was invited to present to the Scottish Science Advisory Committee of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in Edinburgh, on RSGS’s exemplary approach to communicating science and sharing learning, particularly through the Climate Solutions course, and it is great to see this gaining traction in the wider world.

Martin Duddin FRSGS (1952-2022)

Alister Hendrie FRSGS

Martin Duddin was a proud Geordie who started his career in Scotland teaching Geography at Kirkcudbright Academy in 1974. He was appointed as Principal Teacher of Geography at Knox Academy in Haddington in the late 1970s, and was promoted as an Assistant/Depute Rector towards the end of the 1980s. An inspirational Geography teacher, Martin led a large number of foreign field trips, especially to the Alps, and established many links to other countries through the EU Comenius programme. During his time at Knox, he joined the committee of the Scottish Association of Geography Teachers, eventually serving as its Chair in the latter half of the 1980s.

Alongside his day-to-day Geography teaching, Martin worked for the Scottish Examination Board as a Marker and Examiner, progressing to become the Chief Examiner in Certificate of Sixth Year Studies Geography, the forerunner of Advanced Higher. A prolific author, he wrote and edited a series of school Geography textbooks. RSGS recognised his service to the teaching of Geography in Scotland by awarding him an Honorary Fellowship in 1995. In his retirement he enjoyed his membership of Rotary, and pursued his love of walking and of travel. He will be much missed for his wit, storytelling and love of people.

End of Raleigh International

On 19th May 2022, Raleigh International closed. Formerly known as Operation Drake (1978–80) and Operation Raleigh (1984–88), Raleigh International was a youthdriven organisation supporting a global movement of young people to take action on the issues they care about. Raleigh worked globally to promote the role of young people in decision making and civil society, creating meaningful youth employment and enterprise, protecting vulnerable environments, and ensuring the right to safe water and sanitation.

Operation Drake was launched by HRH Prince Charles and RSGS Livingstone Medallist Colonel John Blashford-Snell, with scientific exploration and community service as its aims. It gave a generation of young people the inspiration to change the world; 55,000 volunteers from over 100 countries completed programmes with Raleigh. The decision to close was taken with deep sadness. Unfortunately, the effects of the pandemic resulted in delayed or cancelled programmes. Reductions in foreign aid and the cancellation of corporate partnerships were also directly impactful. In July, the travel company Impact Travel acquired the Raleigh International brand, which it plans to add to its portfolio. However, this would be a different entity to the registered charity Raleigh International.

RSGS Medals and Awards 2023

The RSGS’s prestigious Medals and Awards allow us to recognise outstanding contributions to geographical exploration and learning.

• Scottish Geographical Medal, the highest accolade, for conspicuous merit and a performance of world-wide repute.

nominate someone inspiring

• Coppock Research Medal, the highest researchspecific award, for an outstanding contribution to geographical knowledge through research and publication.

• Livingstone Medal, for outstanding service of a humanitarian nature with a clear geographical dimension.

• Mungo Park Medal, for an outstanding contribution to geographical knowledge through exploration or adventure in potentially hazardous physical or social environments.

• Shackleton Medal, for leadership and citizenship in a geographical field.

• Geddes Environment Medal, for an outstanding contribution to conservation of the built or natural environment and the development of sustainability.

• Tivy Education Medal, for exemplary, outstanding and inspirational teaching, educational policy or work in formal and informal educational arenas.

• Bartholomew Globe, for excellence in the assembly, delivery or application of geographical information through cartography, GIS and related techniques.

• President’s Medal, to recognise achievement and celebrate the impact of geographers’ work on wider society.

• Newbigin Prize, for an outstanding contribution to the Society’s Journal or other publication.

• Honorary Fellowship, for services to the Society and to the wider discipline of geography.

We are inviting nominations for the RSGS Medals 2023. Visit www.rsgs.org/Pages/Category/medallists for more information and to access the nomination form.

Claire Mack FRSGS

In August, we were delighted to present RSGS Honorary Fellowship to Claire Mack, Chief Executive of Scottish Renewables, for overseeing significant growth in the renewable energy sector, and showcasing her dedication to implementing renewable energy across Scotland. By working closely with Scottish Government, leading NGOs and the public, Claire campaigned effectively for new developments, communicated the potential of renewables, and played an important role in strengthening Scotland’s position as a global leader in renewable energy.

Peak Beyond Peak

A collection of lost essays by one of Scotland’s most remarkable women is being published in September by Edinburgh publisher Taproot Press (taprootpressuk.co.uk). Peak Beyond Peak: The Unpublished Scottish Journeys of Isobel Wylie Hutchison is compiled and transcribed by Hazel Buchan Cameron, who first discovered the essays in a box marked ‘Unpublished?’ while working as Writer-in-Residence for RSGS.

Call for volunteers

We are currently looking for volunteers for our 13 Local Groups (in Aberdeen, Ayr, Borders, Dumfries, Dundee, Dunfermline, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Helensburgh, Inverness, Kirkcaldy, Perth and Stirling) to help host our Inspiring People talks programme. We are also on the lookout for some more volunteers at our Fair Maid’s House Visitor Centre in Perth. To learn more about the local events in your area, or to volunteer with your Local Group, please contact us on enquiries@rsgs.org or 01738 455050.

get involved Bloody Scotland

Professor Iain Black FRSGS

In July, we were very pleased to present Professor Iain Black with RSGS Honorary Fellowship for his invaluable contribution towards the creation of the Climate Solutions course, which provides a simple and quick way to gain significant understanding of why and how to tackle one of the most important issues of our generation – climate change. Iain has worked closely with our Chief Executive to write and deliver the course, and its popularity is a testament to this effort, with an amazing 75,000 people now enrolled. Iain recently joined the University of Strathclyde Business School as Professor of Sustainable Consumption, to lead on the School’s sustainability strategy and develop the Climate Solutions programme.

Chalk Talks Medallists

In June, we were very pleased to present the Tivy Education Medal to a group of inspirational teachers and volunteers, for their collective work in creating free Geography lessons for Scottish secondary school students studying at home during Covid-19 lockdowns. There were limited learning resources for students, so RSGS coordinated a small group of teachers and filmmakers to try and help.

Alastair McConnell, Jennifer McLean, Gill Dean, Keith Turner, Alex Wylie, Carl Phillips, Jacqueline Smith and Shiv Das created 26 virtual Chalk Talks lessons covering the entire National 5 and Higher Geography curriculum, from glaciers to coasts, cities to deserts, and everything in between. Collectively, the lessons have had a fantastic response, accumulating over 35,000 views on RSGS YouTube. The team members were recognised for their exemplary and inspirational contribution to teaching, due to their incredible response during the Covid-19 pandemic, taking on extra work to deliver a public resource when so many were already struggling to adapt to the drastic and changing circumstances.

Based in Stirling, Bloody Scotland established itself as Scotland’s international crime writing festival in 2012. Over the years, it has brought hundreds of crime writers to the stage, for a programme of entertaining and informative events during a weekend in September, covering a range of criminal subjects such as fictional forensics, psychological thrillers, tartan noir and cosy crime. The special tenth anniversary festival takes place over 15th 18th September 2022, and includes several of the writers featured in this edition of The Geographer. See www.bloodyscotland.com/events for details.

Landscapes and Landforms of Scotland

Professor Roger Crofts FRSGS

At last, a comprehensive, up-to-date book on the geomorphology of Scotland. This scholarly treatment by 21 geomorphologists and geologists provides a review of the physical environment, detailed chapters on all parts of Scotland, and an overview of geoconservation. Two RSGS Fellows, Colin Ballantyne and John Gordon, have masterminded this magnificent tome which stands well in the World Geomorphological Series published in high-quality format by Springer. The text is accessible for the general reader and is aided by copious photographs giving examples of many places that are not well known.

Professor Iain Black FRSGS (right) with Professor David Hillier, Executive Dean of Strathclyde Business School.

Dr Nazzareno Diodato FRSGS

In July, we were delighted to present RSGS Honorary Fellowship to Dr Nazzareno Diodato, founding Director and Research Fellow of the Met European Research Observatory, in recognition of his contribution to conservation and protection of the natural environment, and for his role in promoting climate research and environmental hydrology in water and soil conservation. Through his work, Nazzareno has helped to advance fundamental understandings in environmental hydrology, GIS science and nature conservation.

Future Generations Fund

In late June, we launched a very special fundraising appeal to help us create a Future Generations Fund, an investment in activities to support and inspire our young people. We are thrilled that our members responded so warmly to this idea, and we have already received donations of over £10,000! This is a wonderful start to a five-year programme through which we aim to substantially increase our work with and for young people –promoting geography in schools, convening and mentoring young geographers, sharing skills and encouraging travel, providing public platforms, and much more. Thank you so much to those who have already donated. We are still welcoming donations: please visit www.rsgs.org/appeal/future for details.

Professor Andrew Dugmore FRSGS

In August, we were very pleased to present RSGS Honorary Fellowship to Professor Andrew Dugmore, for his invaluable contribution to world-leading environmental geography and humanenvironment interaction in Iceland and the North Atlantic. Andrew was a recipient of the RSGS President’s Medal in 2002, and since then he has continued to strengthen his reputation for his research and studies of long-term changes in environments, and the dynamics of complex socio-ecological systems.

Doors Open Day 2022

Doors Open Day on Saturday 17th September will provide a great opportunity to visit our headquarters in the Fair Maid’s House in Perth. With a European Heritage Days theme of ‘sustainability’, and a VisitScotland theme of ‘Year of Stories’, the RSGS Collections Team has created a special display, Roots, Routes and RSGS, using our visitors book as the centrepiece from which rich stories flow. Everyone is welcome and entry is by donation.

11.30am - 4.30pm 17th September

Bartholomew family visit

We were delighted to welcome over 90 members of the extended Bartholomew family to our headquarters in Perth in July. The descendants of renowned Edinburgh cartographer and RSGS co-founder John George Bartholomew (1860-1920) and his wife Janet MacDonald had travelled across the world from the United States, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Continental Europe, England and Scotland to celebrate their mutual relative. Coming from a celebrated line of map-makers himself, John George held the title of ‘Cartographer to the King’, and was the first to introduce the use of coloured contour layer maps.

RSGS Trustee Lorna Ogilvie warmly welcomed the family, before Chief Executive Mike Robinson addressed the visitors through video. The family members were shown around the Fair Maid’s House – home to the Society’s vast historical collections of maps, diaries, books, photos and artefacts, all gathered from scientific exploration over the past 150 years – by our experienced volunteers. Members of the RSGS Collections Team, headed by RSGS Trustee Margaret Wilkes, arranged a special display for the visitors; this included a small silver matchbox gifted to John George Bartholomew from co-founder Agnes Livingstone Bruce (daughter of the famous explorer and missionary David Livingstone) to mark his idea of founding the Society.

During their visit all members of the family were invited to sign a special map reproduced by artist Colin Woolf from The Times Survey Atlas of The World (1920) which was prepared at the Edinburgh Geographical Institute under the direction of John George Bartholomew, depicting world vegetation distribution and ocean currents. Four generations of Bartholomews signed the special map, including some of the youngest members!

The family group enjoyed a range of special visits while staying in Edinburgh.

Landscapes of Scottish crime fiction

“Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?”

“Because nobody imagines living here,” said Thaw. McAlpin lit a cigarette and said, “If you want to explain that, I’ll certainly listen.”

“Then think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger, because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively… Imaginatively, Glasgow exists as a music hall song and a few bad novels. That’s all we’ve given to the world outside. It’s all we’ve given to ourselves.”

Alasdair Gray (1981) Lanark

Landscapes of crime fiction may not immediately appear to be the most obvious topic for a special issue of The Geographer, but as the quote from Gray’s Lanark suggests, geographical imaginations are key to our sense of identity. How do ‘we’ imagine ourselves as a community? Much of this comes from popular culture and there are no literary (and TV) genres more popular than crime fiction. From serial killers and detectives to crime scene investigators, there is an almost insatiable desire for stories that illuminate the darkest edges of our worlds. This is evident in the increased number of book sales of crime fiction and the steady rise of events that bring together writers and readers on the genre from around the world including Bloody Scotland, Iceland Noir, Quasi de Polar and the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Writers’ Festival to name but a few.

These representations of our landscapes are not just contained within pages of books or on our TV screens.

Recently, for instance, in association with the crime festival Bloody Scotland, Heritage Environment Scotland produced a volume of work that used their properties as a backdrop to various grisly acts of murder. From castle killings to walking mysteries this book utilises the public’s fascination with crime fiction to promote places. While the act of using violence to sell places appears counterintuitive the evidence reveals this most certainly to be the case. Recent television adaptations of Ann Cleeve’s crime novels, Shetland and Vera, have been held responsible for a spike in tourist numbers to the Shetland Islands and Northumbria with some individuals noting their desire to ‘follow in Vera’s footsteps’ and visit the fictional crime scenes that have taken place across the Northumbria countryside. There are Peter May-themed tours of Lewis.

Much of the so-called Golden Age of crime writing was dominated by English writers and is characterised by murder mysteries set in an interchangeable village landscape or country house; it doesn’t really matter where it takes place. More recently there have been a disproportionate number of northern-based authors who explore crimes that are organic to the landscapes within which they are set. The work of writers associated with Nordic Noir (such as Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö, Henning Mankell, Steig Larsson, Arnaldur Indriðason and Yrsa Sigurðardóttir) and Tartan Noir (writers based in Scotland such as those included in this issue and others such as the ‘godfather of Tartan Noir’ William McIlvanney, Ian Rankin, Denise Mina, Peter May and Christopher Brookmyre) is set in dark and complex landscapes, haunted by past crimes and current injustice –so much so that the landscape itself almost becomes a protagonist in the stories.

The essays in this issue seek to address the question of why it is that the landscape is so important to crime writing, and especially to the Scottish tradition of Tartan Noir. First, Val explores the nature of Scotland’s relationship with crime writing, putting the blame for the lack of imagination in Alasdair Gray’s question that we started this piece with at the feet of Walter Scott. McDermid shows how her work, and that of other Scottish crime writers, emerged instead from the tradition of duality at the heart of Scottish culture and a concern with social justice. For her, the turning point was reading the work of William McIlvanney. McIlvanney had won the Whitbread novel prize in 1975 for Docherty, a moving portrait of a miner whose courage and determination were stretched to the limit during the Depression of the 1920s. He was a writer of great elegance and compassion who was never going to be constrained by other people’s expectations. He turned to crime with because he was passionate about writing

lives of working-class people and he saw the

the

Cheryl McGeachan, Jo Sharp, Val McDermid

“‘If a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.’”

detective story as a milieu where he could effectively do that. Whatever he wrote was always going to be set in the Scotland he knew – a country of urban communities living cheek by jowl, a landscape of steel mills and coal mines and shipyards, a precarious world where poverty and unemployment were always lurking in the wings. These were stories that were animated by emotional, living landscapes: The derelict tenements were big darknesses housing old griefs, terrible angers. They were prisons for the past. They welcomed ghosts.

William McIlvanney (1977) Laidlaw

Of course, alongside the picturesque ‘Scott-land’ representations of our nation was another tradition, going back to traditional murder ballads (such as The Twa Corbies) and the dark dualities of Jekyll and Hyde. In a conversation with us, Louise Welsh explores some of the darker moments in this duality, and the ‘hauntings’ of older landscapes that would also characterise the work of many recent Scottish crime writers. The layering of old and new landscapes comes literally to embody social relations, crime emerging from the landscape itself. For instance, both Denise Mina and Liam McIlvanney write about the changes to the landscapes of postwar Glasgow in a way that captures the tensions and conflicts of the time. Liam McIlvanney highlights that the relocation of people from city centre tenements to the peripheral estates helped to generate extreme levels of interest and anxiety amongst the city’s population: when living in city centre tenements, people knew their neighbours – they shared outside toilets, back courts and washing lines. The new high-rise buildings broke up these horizontal bonds of communities, and the provision of such modern norms as private bathrooms and washing machines limited contact with neighbours. Any one of whom could be the Quaker or Bible John:

The screen showed more half-demolished buildings, disfigured streets. It looked like the footage from Europe after the war. Bombed cities. Smoking ruins. Sometimes it felt like they were fighting a war. The enemy was one man but he could have been anyone. He struck at various points in the city and left his dead for some civilian to discover. You responded by flooding a district with uniforms, knocking a thousand doors, but you never got close.

Liam McIlvanney (2018) The Quaker [emphasis added]

Although he has lived in the city for much of his life, it took Doug Johnstone until his 11th novel to look directly at Edinburgh. In part he struggled with the weight of literary representations of his new home, but the juxtaposition of different urban areas, and the sense of the palimpsest of historical landscapes revealed through the experiences of his three generations of funeral director-detectives opened up new possibilities for him.

In her conversation, Welsh points to the persistent fascination with the Scottish countryside in crime writing. Contributions from Ann Cleeves, Lilja Sigurðardóttir and Lin Anderson reveal the complexities of these landscapes that move us on from

the idyll of Scott-land. For Ann Cleeves, it is the combination of the rapid social change and dislocation caused by the influx of oil money (and outsiders) with the extremes of the northern landscape that makes the Shetland Islands such a fertile location for her writing. Similarly, Lilja Sigurðardóttir notes the similarities between the northern attitudes of her place of birth, Iceland, and her new home, Scotland, exploring the ways her own writing has opened up now that she has wider vistas than her claustrophobic homeland. Lin Anderson celebrates the way that the diverse landscapes of Scotland provoke different narrative possibilities for her work, whether through the rapid turn of the weather or the dramatic possibilities of communication black spots. Our final contribution is from a soil scientist, rather than a crime writer. While most forensic scientists chafe at the misrepresentation of their work in many popular TV shows, there is considerable collaboration between forensic scientists and crime writers in Scotland, which has led to joint events and publications, and even the ‘Val McDermid Mortuary’ at the University of Dundee! Professor Lorna Dawson writes about the benefits of working with crime writers and demonstrates the intricate relations between fact and fiction in the creation of crime novels.

In putting together this collection, we are drawing inspiration from the collaborations between crime writers and forensic scientists in Scotland to make the case for opening discussion between crime writing and geography. Exploring the ways in which the effects of crime ripple through our landscapes as much as individual lives or societies points us to new exciting considerations of place, community and the darkest edges of our geographical imaginations.

“The new highrise buildings broke up these horizontal bonds of communities.”

Image by Vishnu Prasad from Unsplash.

"I now describe my country as if to strangers."

Val McDermid

I chose this quote from the Scottish band Deacon Blue as the epigraph for a novel called The Distant Echo, which was published in 2003. Although Scottish crime fiction had started to make an impact far beyond our borders, it still seemed to me that when people thought about Scotland, what they conjured up for themselves was not a real place. Why did it take us so long to embrace a genre that appears to have been designed specifically for our dark winter skies and the dour Presbyterian side of our national character? I believe the answer can be laid at the door of one man. When visitors get off the train in Edinburgh, they alight at the only railway station in the world named after a novel: Edinburgh Waverley. When they emerge from the station, they’re confronted with an ornate Gothic spire stained black by years of pollution. It’s the biggest monument to a writer anywhere in the world. It was built by public subscription –though the city council did struggle towards the end, literally sending people from door to door with a begging bowl – and it honours the memory of Sir Walter Scott. In his obituary, the Edinburgh Evening Courant wrote that “Cervantes has done much for Spain and Shakespeare for England but not a tithe of what Sir Walter Scott has accomplished for us.” He published 21 novels between 1814 and 1832, and those novels, coupled with the myth he constructed around himself, were responsible for the confection of Scottishness that has proved remarkably persistent in spite of its lack of grounding in any recognisable historic reality. Tartan and shortbread; the romantic image of the Highlands and their noble way of life; the shocking transformation of our history into sentimentality. All of this can be laid at the door of Scott. For many years after his death, Thomas Cook was running Tartan Tours. Cook said, “Sir Walter Scott gave a sentiment to Scotland as a tourist country.”

And the historian Lord Macaulay wrote, “Soon the vulgar imagination was so completely occupied by plaids, targes and claymores that, by most Englishmen, Scotchmen and Highlander were regarded as synonymous words. Few people seemed to be aware that a Macdonald or a Macgregor in his tartan was to a citizen of Edinburgh or Glasgow what an Indian hunter in his war paint is to an inhabitant of Philadelphia or Boston. At length this fashion reached a point beyond which it was not easy to proceed.”

We accepted the bogus tartan caricature. It lingers still in dozens of city centre outlets whose only ingenuity is revealed in the number of things to which tartan or Harris tweed can be attached. And for a long time, it hogtied us.

As the novelist and historian J M Reid wrote in the 1920s, “Nineteenth century Scotland was one of the chief centres of the industrial world. Its society was complex and curious enough to feed and excite any keen observer of human nature. Yet there is no Scottish Balzac or Dickens, not even any Thackeray or Trollope. Scottish writers and their readers both inside the country and elsewhere preferred Scott-land to Scotland.”

It was quite a straitjacket to burst out of. There was however one kind of fiction that it did lend itself to, and that was the

adventure novel, because the scope of the adventure novel could be played out against a rural backdrop rather than an urban or industrial one. In Kidnapped and later Catriona, Robert Louis Stevenson used Scott-land to great effect. But because he was unquestionably a better writer than Walter Scott, he wrote about the landscape more evocatively and more effectively. His descriptions of the Highlands and Islands add another dimension to the fiction, creating a vivid

“We accepted the bogus tartan caricature.”

The Scott Monument. Image by Ric Brannan from Pixabay.

backdrop for the action to play out against. Some years later, John Buchan did much the same thing in The Thirty-Nine Steps with Richard Hannay’s flight across the Scottish borders. But in spite of the landscape’s service to the narrative, Scott-land was still in the ascendant. Because the engagement with that landscape was these books’ only engagement with the country, they reinforced the prevailing image rather than exploring what lay beneath.

It’s true that Tartan Noir has some significant forebears. James Hogg is usually identified as the first of these, with The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Published in 1824, it’s often cited as an early example of modern crime fiction. And if, as I do, you consider Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Booker Prize shortlisted novel, His Bloody Project, as a crime novel, then clearly Hogg fits the category. It contains murder; it’s largely narrated by its criminal anti-hero; and the action takes place in a historically and geographically defined Scotland. However, it also features angels, devils and demonic possession and it has elements of metafiction, satire and the gothic. Many attempts have been made to translate its complexities to the screen and all have failed. To be honest, it’s a tough and complicated read. It’s not the sort of book to kickstart a genre.

The next in line is Robert Louis Stevenson. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published in 1886, is generally viewed now as an early example of the psychological thriller. At its heart is the idea that repressing our dark side is bound to have terrible consequences. But the threat of violence and murder runs through its pages like a sinister black thread. There’s no doubt it deserves its place in the pantheon of the genre. But again, like The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, it’s too far from the mainstream to be the kind of pioneering work others can readily follow. Strange chemical potions and radical personality shifts work brilliantly here, but it’s not a template that’s easily adapted.

It also reminds us that it’s virtually impossible to write about a Scotland that isn’t Scott-land. For Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’s adventures are not set in Stevenson’s native country. It’s not Edinburgh’s smoke-darkened streets and straitjacketed society that feature in its pages. Even though reading it always conjures up for me the close-packed warren of the city’s Old Town, that’s not where Stevenson tells us his story is taking place. Jekyll and Hyde’s city is London. London had a fictional, imagined identity already. There was nothing

ground-breaking in setting a novel of sensation where so many had previously taken place. But that safety net probably allowed Stevenson to unleash his imagination in different directions.

The next Scot to make a mark on the landscape of crime fiction was, metaphorically, even more of a monument in the literary landscape than Walter Scott. And he too chose London as the setting for his detective, even though that detective’s roots were very firmly in his home city of Edinburgh. The story behind the creation of Sherlock Holmes is well known, but I’ll recap briefly.

When Arthur Conan Doyle was a young medical student at the University of Edinburgh, one of his teachers was one Dr Joseph Bell. Bell was renowned among his students for his diagnostic skills. Not only could he adduce what ailed the patients who presented themselves at his door, but he could also draw inferences about their lives and their occupations from details of their clothing and aspects of their appearance. Conan Doyle, like many of his fellow students, was entranced by this and when he was embarking on his career as a writer, he remembered his former mentor and decided to enhance Joseph Bell’s skills and give them to the great consulting detective. But although his family’s often straitened circumstances meant that Conan Doyle knew the underbelly of his native city as well as the polite drawing rooms of lawyers and professors, still he turned his back on it and used the teeming metropolis of London instead. It’s hard not to see that as the result of the familiarity of writers and readers with London. At the very least, Edinburgh must have felt like something of a risk. It’s always easier to take the more well-trodden path, especially if the stories you are writing are breaking new ground, as the Sherlock Holmes stories were.

By choosing London for their great popular success, it seems to me that the Scottishness of Stevenson and Conan Doyle was somehow buried. Their work contains the elements of what we have come to know as Tartan Noir – the fascination with what lies beneath, the psychology of crime, the idea of duality and the doppelganger, and those occasional shafts of black humour – but London disguises that distinctiveness. The so-called Golden Age of crime fiction – that period between the two world wars – was almost exclusively an English phenomenon. Scots novelists were being published –the likes of Jessie Kesson, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and Neil Gunn – but they weren’t killing people for fun.

Val McDermid is a writer and broadcaster. Her most recent novel is 1989.

This article is an excerpt from her longer essay, I Now Describe My Country As If To Strangers, published in New Zealand (Dunedin: Dalriada Press, 2022)

“The scope of the adventure novel could be played out against a rural backdrop.”

In conversation with Louise Welsh

Louise Welsh is an author and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. We sat down with Louise to chat about the role of the Scottish tradition in crime fiction, the importance of landscape in her writing, and the hauntings of the past in our contemporary worlds.

Jo: What are the key Scottish influences on your work and how important do you think the Scottish tradition is to your crime writing?

It’s funny isn’t it, because I guess, here I am a Scottish writer. You know, you don’t think about it in that way. You don’t go to your desk and think, here I am, a queer Scottish writer writing at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. You don’t. You’re not conscious of that as you’re writing, but of course, your place, your politics, your own personal history. All of that impacts on your work.

Also, that connection between politics and social realism, that’s still important within my work, and I think that’s something that you get in the Scottish tradition. I read James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner probably every couple of years as a text that I go back to and a text that I didn’t discover until I was a young adult. But it’s a text that means a lot to me and I think that part of what that has is this element of social realism but also this element of absurdity, which I think is quite important to crime fiction, because in a way it’s an absurd genre. But we’re asking the reader to really invest. And then there’s moments where you can have this release.

I guess the other thing about Scottish crime fiction is it’s an international fiction, so we are influenced by Scottish texts, but we’re possibly equally influenced by European texts or texts from America. I’m increasingly interested in Chester Himes, who I think has this element of real hard social realism. The grit. And then this strand of absurdity. Himes says that the life of a black person in America is absurd and so I wrote an absurd fiction because the degree of prejudice that he faced was, it’s like Kafka.

Cheryl: As geographers we are really interested with this issue of landscape and how you use and think about landscape in your work. Do you think landscape is particularly important in crime fiction?

Yeah, I think it’s massively important and I think it’s also one of the pleasures of writing. When I’m editing I have to pull back on the landscape because I could just, it’s the bit where I get carried away and when you come back there’s often a lot of that that I have to take out. But I guess my books tend to be quests. You know, just that straightforward ancient form. And within that the person is always moving through some kind of landscape and often, for me, it’ll be a cityscape. So, what does it do? I guess we’re always looking at how the person responds to their environment. It has to be what they see. So, in this book [The Second Cut], Rilke is not me. We had breakfast outside in the central garden this morning. So, I go out and I think I’ll look at that lovely clematis. Isn’t that gorgeous? And these daisies are coming up and Rilke doesn’t think that, he doesn’t notice the flowers. He notices something else; you know?

And then there’s also the way in which the urban landscape again reflects politics. I went out to the local pub and sat in the window and looked out. And there was a moment when I was like, look at this place because the road is a mess. The actual road itself is a total mess. There’s graffiti everywhere. The building opposite you can see that there’s bits crumbling at the top. There is just the remnants of a street light which is no longer a street light. It’s just a great big bit of rusted pole at the edge of the ground. There is so much decay in this little square. This view from this window, is so reflective of this built environment, this urban landscape that I’m looking at, is reflective of so much. The people that are going across it. So many people with compromised health. Just within half an hour of sitting looking out the window, you could see a lot about the world, and that finds its way into your book because the book is political, even though it’s a story it has political underpinnings. And I see myself very much as a storyteller, and a story is like music as well, isn’t it? You have this sort of build-up and release like you do in music. And I think you have that in the novel as well. And the other thing that you have, of course, are repeating moments that you don’t really want people to notice or repeat in moments, but they’re also part of the build-up too. And a lot of that’s just done unconsciously because I think you know how to tell a story. I think it’s build up, release, build up, release, and landscape plays its role in that and sometimes it’s a quieter moment. But it is not just a quiet moment, it must be stuff where you’re still entertaining. You’re still somehow transferring some ideas that you might be building in there. You might be burying. You know, this is gonna come up again later. And I want you to remember it, but I don’t want you to notice it.

Jo: In your work, landscape is never simply a kind of superficial thing.

Cheryl: There is a real sense in which the past continually reemerges through your writing.

I think I understand the world historically. Maybe this is part of the reason that the crime form appeals to me because often it is asking how did this happen and how did we get to this point? And I think within politics or any sort of issue, how did we get to this point, how did we get here is important, and that’s part of what history tells us. Also, if you occupy a city for a long time or a country for a long time you begin to become familiar with the history. You also have your personal histories. As you walk along the road you think, oh yeah that pub used to be called this… you can see what used to be there as well as what is there.

And this is a fundamental form, and in my opinion, crime writing is a fundamental form. Ghost writing, romance, etc, they’re all things that connect to the stomach and the heart. You know, the gut. And what you can see in these are people’s politics and what people are scared of. There are points where they’re really scared of women’s liberation. And there’s also a kind of colonial ghost stories where you think people are aware that something has been done that’s wrong, and that these people who they’ve wronged may come back and get

Professor Jo Sharp

, School of Geography

& Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews, Geographer Royal for Scotland, and RSGS

“The person is always moving through some kind of landscape and often, for me, it’ll be a cityscape.”

them. And that’s expressed in some of these ghost stories. Jo: I remember being struck by listening to Sarah Paretsky who was talking about, how do you write about crime when your entire country is a crime scene? And that was when Trump had just been elected. And it does seem that so much Scottish crime writing is not just about the individual crime at the heart of the story, but there is that sense of wider injustices, that using Cheryl’s language, kind of haunt the landscape that the protagonist is moving through?

Definitely. And I think this is part of the international nature of the genre as you mentioned Sarah Paretsky there. She’s so right, isn’t she? And this is, I think the same for a lot of us. We might be politically engaged in whatever way that we are, we might make personal choices too. But I think a lot of us feel quite overwhelmed at the moment. You can feel that our country is changing in a way that’s massively distressing and we don’t know if we can get it back. Will we be able to regain

the National Health Service after this decade of austerity?

One of the things that we can do is write. And so, I think it’ll be really interesting to see how the genre develops because there’s so much happening and it’s all happening so quickly. How do we express this and how do we embed our politics? And I wonder, will there be a rise in historical fiction that somehow embeds some of this in it? Because to write in the contemporary world is difficult.

RSGS Trustee; Dr Cheryl McGeachan, School of Geographical & Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow

“Just within half an hour of sitting looking out the window, you could see a lot about the world.”

Image by Fer Gregory from iStock.

On Edinburgh

Doug Johnstone

On one level, my last four novels have been love letters to my beautiful and idiosyncratic home city of Edinburgh. This was deliberate; they’re a series of books about the Skelfs – three generations of women who have to take over the running of a funeral directors and a private investigators when the patriarch of the family dies.

Those businesses are based in a large Victorian pile on Greenhill Gardens overlooking Bruntsfield Links, with a view of Edinburgh Castle in one direction and Arthur’s Seat in the other. While that location was deliberate, so was the idea that the women would be running two concurrent businesses spread across the whole city. In the operations room of the house (which is really just their kitchen), the Skelfs have a huge map of the city, covered in pins for all the locations they regularly use in the funeral game. A spider’s web of cemeteries, graveyards, crematoriums, care homes, hospices, hospitals and the city mortuary, a city of death that lies beneath our everyday experience, was an idea that appealed to me greatly.

So the women venture to all corners of Edinburgh dealing with the dead and helping the living at the same time. From Leith to Corstorphine, Silverknowes to Blackford Hill, the books take readers to the parts of the city that tourists rarely see.

But it took me a long time to reach this point. The Skelfs series started with my 11th novel, but my first few books barely featured Edinburgh at all. My debut novel, Tombstoning, was set mostly in the seaside town of Arbroath where I grew up. When it was published in 2006, I had lived as long in Edinburgh as I had in Arbroath, having moved to the city to study in 1988.

But, looking back, I was subconsciously scared to write about Edinburgh. My next two books avoided the city in similar fashion: The Ossians was a road trip around the Scottish Highlands, while Smokeheads was about a disastrous whisky-tasting trip to Islay. All three of these books featured characters from Edinburgh travelling elsewhere. It’s almost as if I couldn’t bring myself to look directly at the place.

No doubt this was because Edinburgh feels like a very wellmapped literary city, from Sir Walter Scott through Muriel Spark, Ian Rankin, Kate Atkinson, Irvine Welsh, Alexander McCall Smith and beyond. As a novelist just starting out, who was I to tackle this wonderful place? But eventually I began to realise that I had all this wealth of experience living in Edinburgh that I wasn’t tapping into. And, after all, everyone’s version of a place is completely different; why not try to depict mine?

So I did. Initially, this was in geographically contained small doses. Over a number of standalone thrillers, I set the action in compact and distinct areas of the city – again, the lesser-travelled parts. Gone Again was set almost entirely by the beach in Portobello, The Dead Beat in the student-friendly Southside, Breakers in the schemes of Craigmillar and Niddrie. I even wrote one novel, Faultlines, in an alternative version of the city plagued by earthquakes, and with a newly created volcanic island in the Firth of Forth.

But all that time, I longed to write about the city as a whole. Swimming in Wardie Bay, scattering ashes at the top of Crow Hill next to Arthur’s Seat, visiting a widow in Craigentinny, investigating an escaped black panther in the back gardens of The Grange, I wanted to do it all.

I don’t know if Edinburgh is unique amongst small cities, but both the layering of history and the present, and the jostling of rich and poor neighbourhoods next to each other, are endlessly fascinating. It’s a ten-minute drive from the most deprived parts of town to the most affluent, and that creates a visceral sense of tension and friction on the street.

Like police officers or journalists, funeral directors are one of the very few professions that go across these barriers and reach all parts of a city. Everyone dies, after all. It’s that ability of the Skelfs to delve deeply into the psychogeography of Edinburgh that keeps me writing about them, and I don’t see that stopping any time soon.

Doug Johnstone is the author of 13 novels, drummer with the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers, and co-founder of the Scotland Writers Football Club. His most recent novel, The Great Silence, is out now.

“It’s a ten-minute drive from the most deprived parts of town to the most affluent, and that creates a visceral sense of tension and friction on the street.”

Image by Jim Divine from Unsplash.

On Shetland

Ann Cleeves

I first went to Shetland in the 1970s and then it was a place of contrasts. Oil had just arrived into the islands and Lerwick, the main town, had a gold rush feel. Men (and it always was men) spilled out of the bars by the harbour, and islanders with a truck or building skills, or the initiative to set up a cleaning company to service the accommodation block at Sullom Voe, could make more money in a few months than their parents had after years of crofting.

Shetland Islands Council had the sense to allow the oil to come ashore on their beautiful islands only if a percentage of every barrel was paid to the community. Suddenly, there were swimming pools and leisure centres, new schools, new care homes, subsidised theatre and music. All this for a population of a little over twenty thousand. There were new people too. Some made no effort to integrate and some tried too hard, using dialect words with abandon, or learning to spin. It seemed to me that islanders usually accepted the strangers. Shetland is used to incomers – or ‘soothmoothers’ as they are known – from Vikings to whalers to Eastern European workers in the fish processing plant. Crime fiction is often populated by outsiders.

I was working in Fair Isle, the UK’s most remote inhabited island, where little had changed in generations, and the oil had no impact. Edie still milked the Midway cow by hand, hay was formed into stooks to dry, and we all turned out to round up the hill sheep for clipping. Women knitted the old patterns, or invented new ones, and no celebration was complete without traditional music and dancing. I fell in love with the place, its people and its stories, and though of course the isle has changed, I love to go back. It still feels like my place of sanctuary. Shetland’s contrasts make it a perfect setting for the crime novel. There are few trees in the islands. There are too many sheep and the winds are too strong to allow any natural vegetation to take hold. Mainland is long and thin with inlets called voes cutting into the coast. The sea is everywhere, there are no tall buildings to break the horizon. The sky is enormous. It would seem in this bleak and open landscape that nothing could be hidden. And yet, in small communities everywhere, there are secrets. Some are known, but never

spoken of, because without a degree of privacy we would all become slightly crazy. Some are unknown, but held, brooded over, almost cherished. It’s in these secrets that most of my stories begin.

Shetland lies so far north – on the same line of latitude as parts of Alaska and Greenland – that each season is very different from the others. In midwinter it doesn’t get light until ten and dusk comes again in the middle of the afternoon. This is a place where weather matters. There are winds strong enough to rip an opened door from a car, to stop the daily ferry to Aberdeen, to ground planes. Of course, the background howling of the storm, the dark days, the contrasting warmth of peat fires in croft kitchens, provides atmosphere. Readers who enjoyed the darkness, literally and figuratively, of Nordic Noir found something similar in Raven Black, the first of my Shetland novels.

Midsummer is altogether different. Then it’s light nearly all night. Islanders call this the simmer dim, or summer dusk. It’s possible to read a newspaper outside at midnight, and the birds are still singing. I asked a crofter once what happened at midsummer. “We single neeps and clip sheep.” He paused and grinned. “And we party!”

The oil and the gas no longer provide the income they once did, but still the islands thrive. Fishing has always been more important to the economy. Soon they’ll be exporting wind-driven power, though without, it seems, the same splendid deal as the oil. I sense some resentment as the giant turbines appear on the bare ridge in North Mainland. Tourism, especially cultural tourism, has grown by nearly 50% in the last 20 years. There are folk festivals, jazz festivals, a film festival curated by Mark Kermode, and Wool Week when people from all over the world come to learn about the famous textiles. I’ve stopped writing novels about Shetland, but I’m still fascinated by the place; there are still stories to be told.

“I fell in love with the place, its people and its stories.”

Ann Cleeves is the creator of the Vera, Shetland and Matthew Venn series. The new Vera novel is The Rising Tide Image by Robert Witanski from Unsplash.

Eight degrees better

Lilja Sigurðardóttir

When you look at the top of a globe you can see that the Norwegian Sea is enclosed by countries that make almost a perfect circle around it: Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Scotland. This vast sea was but a pond to the seafaring Vikings who travelled it constantly, exchanging goods and services, robbing, killing and taking slaves. They understood the world as a circle of countries inhabited by different peoples who all spoke or could at least understand Old Norse, or Icelandic as we call it today. Our sagas rhyme with Scottish tales of great clans and their disputes, we also have selkies, the Shetland trows have the same characteristics as our ‘hidden people’, except trows are small and live in the ground but hidden people are human-size and live in rocks.

Some of my favourite crime authors are Scottish and I have been influenced by them in many ways. Now that I have a second home in Glasgow, and am getting to know the city quite well, my writing world has expanded and my stories are reaching out towards Scotland for material. It gives me freedom to not be bound to an Arctic island with almost no murders. The protagonist of my new series, Áróra, is half Icelandic, half English, and living in Edinburgh. And although the story starts with her leaving Scotland for Iceland to look for her missing sister, she as a character has possibilities an Icelandic character doesn’t have. One of these possibilities is looking at Iceland as an outsider looking in, a reflection important to me as I have spent so much of my life abroad. The similarities between Iceland and Scotland are reassuring to me because the Scottish environment is not something I struggle to make sense of, and neither are its people or their culture. I feel at home in Scotland.

It has the same stark difference between the long days of summer and the dark melancholy winters, but there is at least some daylight in winters and some darkness in summer so you can sleep. And Scotland has lots and lots of trees. Iceland mostly has moss and shrubs. With roughly eight degrees of latitude between Reykjavík and Glasgow, making it an exactly two hours flight, the weather in Glasgow is so much better than in Iceland. I am told I might be the only person who comes to Glasgow for the weather, but these two hours on an airplane take me from knee-high snow in late March to sitting in the sun on the green grass of the Glasgow Botanic Gardens.

The food in Scotland is also a little bit better than in Iceland. I am not talking about the price here (as then I would say much better!), but it is fresher, because Scots both grow more produce and are closer to the European food markets so vegetables and fruits still have flavour when they arrive in Scotland, but have lost it as the gas-filled shipping containers finally reach Iceland. The same goes for culinary delights: it is undeniable that haggis is better than our slátur, the scones are better than our skonsur and whisky is better than brennivín. Icelandic crime fiction is shaped by the Nordic social structure and sense of justice. We have a very mild view on crime and

punishment. The maximum prison sentence is 20 years but everyone gets parole after twothirds of it is served. The Nordic attitude toward crime – that the reasons behind crime are mostly of a social root and therefore everyone deserves a second chance – is reflected in the crime fiction. I always feel Scottish crime fiction also has this sense of ‘sympathy for the devil’ as well, and have always found it to be much closer to Nordic Noir than for example the English crime fiction.

Like everything else, Scottish crime fiction is slightly better than the Icelandic. By better I probably mean more developed as a genre. When we compare the debut dates of William McIlvanney, the godfather of modern Scottish crime fiction, who wrote Laidlaw in 1977, and his colleague Arnaldur Indriðason, the godfather of Icelandic modern crime fiction, who wrote Sons of Earth in 1997, we see that the Scottish crime fiction has exactly 20 years on us.

In literature a lot happens in 20 years. I can only hope that in two decades Icelanders will have more authors and that we will have developed a more defined sense of Icelandic-ness, just like Scottish crime novels always give you a strong sense of place but also a strong sense of the national identity of the people.

Lilja Sigurðardóttir is an award-winning Icelandic writer for page, stage and screen. She lives in Reykjavík with her partner but spends a lot of time in Glasgow where she has a second home. Her latest book out in English is Cold as Hell, a missing persons mystery and the first in an exciting new series.

“I might be the only person who comes to Glasgow for the weather.”

A sense of place

Prior to becoming a crime writer, I’ve been lucky enough to live and work all over Scotland. From Glasgow to Orkney, from the Highlands to Edinburgh and parts in between.

The inspiration for my protagonist Dr Rhona MacLeod came from one of my former Maths students at Grantown Grammar School, Emma Hart, who studied forensic science at Strathclyde University.

Throughout the series of currently 16 novels, Rhona has attended crime scenes in all of the places I have either lived in, or spent time in. In fact, all the stories have been inspired by such places.

The opening scene of each of my books has always come to me as a visual image. The location may be rural or urban, but the place itself immediately becomes a character in the story, essentially providing the question that drives the tale. What if you were stranded on top of Cairngorm at Hogmanay in a snowstorm? (Follow the Dead). What if a storm drove an abandoned cargo ship against the cliffs at Yesnaby on the Orkney mainland? (The Killing Tide).

Once I’ve decided the location, everything arises from it. In Follow the Dead, four young climbers take refuge from a blizzard at the Shelter Stone near Loch A’an on Cairngorm, after which three of them are found dead. Speaking to Willie Anderson, team leader of Cairngorm Mountain Rescue, I learned that in such circumstances his team would essentially be the first forensics on the job. Protecting the locus, taking photographs and bringing in Rhona by helicopter to study the crime scene in detail. In our discussions I also learned that light aircraft frequently come down on Cairngorm, especially

in poor weather, many from Norway. He showed me a photograph of one such icicle-clad aircraft, which sent me to Stavanger in Norway to interview the police there, which both inspired the character, Police Inspector Alvis Olsen of the Norwegian National Bureau of Investigation, and informed the story.

The latest book in the series, The Killing Tide, was inspired by my reading about a ghost ship which came aground south of Cork. I immediately wondered where such a ship might meet land in Scotland, and, having lived on Orkney, knew the perfect place would be on the cliffs at Yesnaby. When the ship is boarded by the coastguard, three bodies are found in what appears to be a gladiatorial fight to the death. The difficult location of the ship, the possibility of it becoming an environmental disaster, the international nature of the incident, all played into how Rhona might examine the crime scene, and who would take charge of the investigation, Police Scotland or the Metropolitan Police. Rhona’s base is at Glasgow University (my Alma Mater), where I have placed her lab with a view to die for over Kelvingrove Park, which in reality, I am well informed, is where the Principal’s office is. The geography of her workplace, the park, her flat in Park Circus, all play a role in the books, and are a great contrast with the loci outwith the city.

The characters that surround her, and those she meets during her work across Scotland, are also informed by the locations they inhabit, as are their reactions to the crime.

I had a lot of fun with this in None but the Dead. Set on the Orkney island of Sanday, which does not have a police station, and where the ferry from Kirkwall takes an hour and a half to reach this northern isle, presents a difficulty for DS McNab. A townie, he finds himself as though in a foreign land, where there is no signal for his mobile phone, little internet access, no local police, and where he is totally reliant on locals to supply him with information. As for Rhona, she is comfortable wherever she goes. For her, the geography of the locus is as important as what she finds there, because it forensically informs what has happened to the victim, which is her overriding concern.

“Once I’ve decided the location, everything arises from it.”

Lin Anderson is a writer and screenwriter, best known for her series of forensic thrillers starring Dr Rhona MacLeod. Her most recent novel is The Party House

Lin Anderson

Glasgow University. Image by Charlie Irvine from Pixabay.

Forensics, geography, crime fiction and a sense of place

Professor Lorna Dawson CBE FRSE, Head of Forensic Science, The James Hutton Institute

I am a forensic soil scientist (and before that a biogeographer) contributing to the criminal justice system on the question of from where something has likely originated. This can be in the forensic examination of a questioned sample from an object such as a vehicle, tool or footwear/clothing to ascertain from where it likely had originated. From this examination, areas can be identified where a sample could not have come from (ie, is totally different/exclude) to assist and guide the police to search within a limited area of where it could have come from (ie, it cannot be differentiated from/include). I am invited by police forces from the UK and across the world to make such assessments in relation to objects and soils from crime scenes (ie, the site where a body or objects were recovered from).

Working mainly within a nation that works under an adversarial system of law, involving juries as the triers of fact, I believe it is important that forensic scientists endeavour to make their science easy to understand by the layperson and the findings clear to evaluate. For that reason, I am delighted to work with crime writers as they explain the use of my science (forensic soil and ecological sciences) in their novels, in describing locations (places) and crimes in ways that are easily understood.

I have had the pleasure in working with many UK crime writers over the last 20 years. One of these is the well-known Scottish crime writer Alex Gray, who has utilised my expertise in forensic soil science/ecology several times in her novels. She writes:

“Facts within fiction matter. Take, for example, the search for a missing person, especially in cases when it appears that the likelihood is of finding a dead body. Now, Lorna has a superb track record when it comes to tracing samples of soil to their original geographical location, and so having her work alongside William Lorimer, my fictional detective, was a real coup. The story of The Stalker, when Lorimer’s teacher-turned-children’sauthor wife, Maggie, is off on a book tour, follows several locations around Scotland, mainly destinations I have visited during my own book tours. What the reader discovers, however, is that Maggie’s stalker who follows her around the country has in fact killed women before, burying one of his victims in a remote Ayrshire wood.

“Enter Professor Dawson, having been given the missing woman’s wellington boots, and lo and behold, the very deposition site is discovered!”

Therefore, demonstrating the many ways in which fact and fiction collide in crime fiction.

Lin Anderson is another leading Scottish crime writer who has used soil geography in her novels to great effect, describing place in an eloquent manner. In Sins of the Dead (2019), she used soil forensics as an integral part of the plot, illustrating that soil can be useful in an urban environment as well as in a rural setting. In her novel None but the Dead (2016), Rhona, her forensic scientist, used the spatial distribution of soil on the map of Sanday to help the reader work out where someone had driven or stood.

Another great crime writer, sadly no longer

with us, is beloved Alanna Knight, who embraced the sense of place within her novels. For example, in The Darkness Within (2017), Alanna revisited her beloved Orkney:

“The sea road was rough and dangerously narrow, running in many places close to the cliff edge and requiring care and skilful attention from the driver. It was not for a nervous passenger. Faro was glad that he had no fear of heights, watching the translucent, wild-green Atlantic rollers crash on to the long stretches of pale gold sand.”

(The Darkness Within, 2017)

Not only did Alanna “walk the paths and touch the stones” as she used to say, but she captured place as seen through the eyes of real historical figures: “Wild and desolate. As the road twisted its way out of Ballater into the mountainous countryside, the late Queen’s words in her journal described the scene most aptly. She had loved to draw it, as I did now, as we progressed west along the road with far below us tantalising glimpses of a gleaming river.”

(The Balmoral Incident, 2014)

Alanna Knight was also a fine artist; her many watercolours of landscapes in Scotland are prized by those friends who gratefully received them over the years.

In a lovely twist of fate, soon after meeting Alanna I discovered that her husband, Dr Alastair Knight, was a colleague at the same laboratory where I started my career as a soil scientist. I would often chat to him in the canteen of the then Macaulay Institute, now the James Hutton Institute, about his recent inventions, and so admired his skills in analytical chemistry. I imagine Alanna had used gems of his knowledge in her wonderful historic crime novels.

This article is dedicated to the shining light of crime fiction, Alanna Knight MBE (1923–2020), born Gladys Allan Cleet, a British writer who was based in Edinburgh.

Soils on the island of Sanday, Orkney.

“I am delighted to work with crime writers as they explain the use of my science in their novels.”

Mapping murder in Assynt

Chris Fleet FRSGS, Map Curator, National Library of Scotland

This hand-drawn sketch map by the Sutherland estate and county map-maker, Gregory Burnett, shows the location and details connected to a brutal robbery and murder that took place in Assynt. In the early morning of 20 April 1830, a man’s body was found floating in Loch Tòrr na h-Eigin (marked as 22 on the map), about a mile south of Drumbeg. The body was subsequently identified as Murdoch Grant, an itinerant peddler from Lochbroom, who had mysteriously disappeared a month earlier whilst passing through Assynt. Locals initially wanted Grant to be buried as a suicide, but it was observed that the peddler’s pockets had been turned inside out, and his death had been caused by wounds to the head inflicted with a blunt-edged iron instrument. Grant had also been known to be carrying a large sum of money from recently selling his wares.

For several months the crime was unsolved, but suspicion eventually fell on Hugh MacLeod, a young schoolmaster from Loinn Mheadhonach (26 on the map), an isolated settlement less than half a mile south of Loch Tòrr na h-Eigin. It was

observed that MacLeod had been enjoying new-found wealth, settling several long-term debts and acquiring large quantities of whisky, and he was arrested. But no firm evidence could be found to convict MacLeod until, a month before his trial, a tailor’s apprentice from Clashnessie, Kenneth Fraser, claimed that it had been revealed to him in a dream where the peddler’s pack was hidden, by MacLeod’s house. A search was made and a small collection of Grant’s goods were found. MacLeod was subsequently found guilty, and made a full confession before a crowd of over 7,000 people in Inverness before being hanged on 24 October 1831. Although some were to credit Kenneth ‘the Dreamer’ with second sight, others had a more prosaic explanation. Kenneth had earlier been invited to a two-day drinking bout paid for by Hugh MacLeod, and perhaps details were inadvertently revealed…?

“This hand-drawn sketch map shows the location and details connected to a brutal robbery and murder.”

G Burnett, Sketch of the grounds in the Parish of Assynt relative to the murder of Murdoch Grant, 1830. Image courtesy of Sutherland Estates. View

An interview with Professor Iain Stewart MBE

Mike Robinson, RSGS Chief Executive

Many people will know you as the enthusiastic presenter of several TV series about geology and Earth sciences. How did that impact on your career?

My life has changed a lot since I started in TV in 2004, when I made the big switch from academia. I had this parallel world going on between academia and telly which ran to about 2015. I think TV changes you because the TV requires you to see the bigger picture. I remember going in to pitch some ideas to this production company. To my astonishment they said, “Okay, that’s all very interesting. That would be the first ten minutes of a one-hour show – what else do you have?”

I thought, “Oh my goodness, that’s my whole year’s lecture programme I’ve just given you.” Basically, TV is a sponge – it just soaks stuff up, so you have to constantly get broader and broader. So then I started putting these weird connections together. I joined RSGS in 2012, and of course the thing about geography is that it’s everything. Geography allows you to dabble in all sorts of things that are all very interesting –from the physical, economic and social all the way through to the political – so I started embracing all of that. What do you think has changed in the time that you’ve been RSGS President?

The thing that strikes me about RSGS is that it is a comparatively small organisation and yet its impact has grown enormously over the last decade. The net effect has been a really purposeful shift of RSGS. It is now being valued as a critical boundary organisation – one you need in order to connect and to address real issues – at that interface between government and education, universities and public bodies, and NGOs and industry. You’ve not been afraid to get involved in advising critical sectors like farming, transport and climate, nor to sit back and be ‘too academic’. RSGS is the glue that holds a lot of this stuff together. Without something like RSGS, they would all just disappear into their own disciplines. This has built steadily over the last ten years, and our confidence has grown with it, because we can see the results. It’s been really fantastic to watch and be a part of that. I’ve also really enjoyed getting to know the members, and loved the talks programme: I’ve spoken for many of the Groups, and my mum and dad still go along to them.

I was going to remind you of when we presented a Medal to David Attenborough at his house – I think it was quite soon after you became President. He answered the door with a rock in one hand, and asked you what it was.

And I probably didn’t answer very well. For the time he could give us, he was very engaging. He’s a remarkable person: he’s incredibly personable, and the stuff he has done over the last few years for climate change has been incredible. Him on one side and Greta on the other really marshalling the climate community has been critical. I remember talking a few years ago to climate scientists who had been despondent at the whole process, and now they feel quite upbeat about our ability to communicate the urgency to the public. I think the scientific community fell into a trap of thinking that more research was needed, but more research can become a panacea for no action. We don’t need more information, we know it’s happening, we should be doing something about it.

You were heavily involved in COP26 and in Scotland’s Climate Assembly.

They both came at the same time from different directions. At COP I hosted the final session on Adaptation Loss and Damage, but the key thing for me was that it was my first COP and everyone I spoke to was incredibly genuine and trying to do their best for a really complicated set of things, struggling with mixed demands of what their government wanted and their citizens wanted, and what was good for the science. I came away with a really positive view that people were trying; it just wasn’t happening fast enough. And for the citizens’ assembly, it was the process of watching it all unfold: a hundred ordinary people, some few of them already passionate activists who knew all about climate change, some from the other end thinking it was a scam, and others just not engaged. Watching that group of people transform over six months to this group of hard-nosed analysts; that whole process was just fantastic.

You have inspired many to study Geography. Has your career influenced your own kids?

No. I think seeing their dad on telly in the school classroom didn’t help. I did climate change programmes and my daughter didn’t believe in climate change; she wanted to put a sticker on the car that said ‘Climate Change is Rubbish’.

It stayed that way until she saw Leonardo DiCaprio talk about it and then she came to me in tears talking about how bad climate change is.

Do you recall any stand-out moments as your time as President?

I think one has to be the first AGM, where I referred to the RSGS throughout as the RGS. I don’t think many people noticed that one but it stuck in my mind. I also remember a bad winter with really heavy snow. I somehow made it through to Dundee and up to the university, to find that the door was shut. I knocked on the door and said, “I’m here for the lecture,” and they said, “Oh, it’s cancelled – the speaker can’t make it,” and I said, “I am the speaker!” But they still wouldn’t let me in.

So, what’s next for you?

I’m out in Jordan right now. I decided that sitting in lovely Devon talking about global challenges starts to wear a bit thin after a while, so there was a real sense of wanting to come to a place where there’s really a lot of work to be done. Jordan is the second most water-scarce country in the world, it imports 93% of its energy, and something like 35% or 40% of its population is refugees. All the climate models say it’s going to get dryer and harder to live here. So this felt like a place to be, to try and do things, try to do interdisciplinary work, really think about communication of the science. COP27 is down the road in Sharm El-Sheikh in Egypt in November. The next one is in Dubai, so it seems like an important place to be and I will concentrate on this for the next few years. I’m a bit out of my comfort zone and learning loads.

Is there anything that you would like to see us do now?

I think the campaigning spirit of RSGS needs to be kept going: keep moving the debate and informing action in areas that really matter to people. I think the new President,

“Geography allows you to dabble in all sorts of things that are all very interesting.”

Professor Dame Anne Glover, knows that policy work very well, and she’s very savvy; she’ll navigate really appropriately. I think it’s the right time for that shift across. It might have been the right time for me when I came on board with the media and telly side of things, but it’s gotten too serious now. It needs to shift into that new domain, and Anne is definitely the person to do that.

Do you have any advice for Anne taking on the role? Only to have fun! I’ve had loads of fun, and I’m sure she will too. I am very pleased you asked me to be a Vice-President, because cutting off completely would have been quite hard. Your last message to the members as outgoing President? It’s to celebrate the gem that RSGS is. It is very easy to take it for granted, and very easy to see it as an organisation that puts on some talks, and every so often sends out some interesting things. I’d like more of our members to see that we are a completely unique charity that has the ability to connect across all these multiple sectors in Scotland. I sometimes think that the membership doesn’t get to see that up-close in the same way that I have been able to. So I hope they really appreciate what we have got, nurture it, and help to keep it going.

Professor Stewart is a geologist and specialist in geoscience communication, known in particular for his work on popular TV documentaries about the Earth. After many years as Professor of Geoscience Communication and UNESCO Chair in Geoscience and Society at the University of Plymouth, he is currently Jordan-UK El Hassan bin Talal Research Chair in Sustainability at the Royal Scientific Society in Jordan. He served as RSGS President from February 2012 until March 2022, and is now an RSGS Vice-President.

“I think the campaigning spirit of RSGS needs to be kept going.”

Professor Iain Stewart in the Croll Garden, Fair Maid’s House, Perth. © RSGS

Mighty Boreray, St Kilda.

Stag Portrait, Argyll.

Ryvoan Vortex, Cairngorms. Onward, Stac Lee, St Kilda.

Viewing Scotland

All images © Graham Niven, Niven Photography, www.nivenphotography.com

Bothy Universe, Ryvoan, Cairngorms.

Mighty Liathach, Torridon.

Suilven Pony, Assynt.

Buachaille Rose, Lochaber.

Bass Rock Squall, North Berwick.

Heavy Westerly, Ben Lui, Argyll.

Rising hunger in a world of wealth

Paulsen, Director, Office of Emergencies and Resilience, UN Food and Agriculture Organization

At a time of staggering wealth and technological advancement, progress in reducing hunger is reversing and levels of both acute and chronic hunger are rising rapidly.

Since the Global Report on Food Crises began to compile data on global levels of acute food insecurity, there has been a steady upward trend in the number of acutely hungry people, that sharply accelerated in 2020 and again in 2021, from 108 million in 2016 to 193 million people in 2021. While improved reach of analyses can account for some of that increase, it is clear that the outlook for the future is dire. According to the 2022 edition of the Global Report, in just 41 out of the 53 countries/territories analysed, as well as Cabo Verde, between 179 million and 181 million people were already forecast to be in ‘Crisis’ or worse (IPC/CH Phase 3 or above) in 2022. For most of the world’s major food crises, acute food insecurity is expected to persist at similar levels to 2021 or increase.

In June, the Hunger Hotspots report issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) indicated a worsening situation in 20 countries of concern, in particular flagging an alltime high of up to 49 million people in 46 countries experiencing ‘Emergency’ conditions (IPC/ CH Phase 4) and at risk of falling into famine or famine-like conditions, without immediate life- and livelihood-saving assistance. Midway through 2022, some 750,000 people were facing ‘Catastrophe’ (IPC/CH Phase 5) and both Somalia and Yemen face famine risks.

Fragile food systems and rural marginalization, together with environmental, political and economic crises, are the root causes of food insecurity. In food crisis countries, pre-existing fragilities have progressively been exacerbated by the impact of different crises and shocks with a cumulative effect. Not only are all those crises impacting at the same time, but the compounding effect of each is making the situation worse year after year.

Hunger hotspots.

Conflict is the primary driver of acute hunger, accounting for 120 million people in acute food insecurity in 2021, although violence rarely plays out in isolation. Layered over the immediate and long-term impacts of climate change, economic upheaval, decades of marginalization and limited development, conflicts are pushing families and communities to breaking point, forcing them from their homes, their lands, their fishing grounds and forests, destroying critical infrastructure, reducing their access to basic essential services, and eroding their livelihoods and means of recovery.

Any further shocks or stresses can lead to starvation. Events unfolding in Ukraine are further proof of how conflict feeds hunger, forcing people out of their homes and wiping out their sources of income, disrupting complex food systems, global supply chains and markets.

Likewise, climate shocks destroy lives, crops and livelihoods, undermine people’s ability to feed themselves, and displace millions from their homes each year. Rural people who rely on some form of agriculture for their survival are particularly exposed to climate impacts – both long-term changes and extreme events – and their remoteness from state institutions can leave them extremely vulnerable to violence and instability and hard to reach for humanitarian and other forms of assistance. In addition to pre-existing economic upheavals, the economic consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic are driving hunger to unprecedented levels, further aggravated by the spillover effects of the war in Ukraine.

During 2021, domestic food price inflation in many low-income countries rose significantly, particularly those with weak currencies and a high reliance on food imports, in those where border closures, conflict or insecurity disrupted trade flows, and where weather extremes severely curtailed food production or availability. These factors hugely undermined the purchasing power of the poorest households, many of whom were still experiencing job and income losses due to pandemic-related restrictions.

Rural people are particularly affected by acute food insecurity. The smallholders who produce about one-third of the food consumed in the world and up to 80% of that consumed in developing countries are regularly experiencing hunger and malnutrition. Where they exist, social protection systems that provide essential safety nets in times of shock frequently do not cover rural populations, and especially rural women. Within the humanitarian response to hunger, just 8% of the funds that went into the food security sector in 2020 were directed to supporting agriculture-based livelihoods, meaning the large majority of rural people hit by crises never receive

Rein

“The war in Ukraine is compounding existing challenges faced by millions.”

critical forms of aid like seeds, fishing nets or animal health support that can help them quickly resume producing nutritious foods.

Agricultural seasons don’t wait for donor budget calendars or for other priorities to be met, and as they pass, so too do once-a-year opportunities to tackle acute hunger among the majority of those in need.

The alarmingly high incidence of acute food insecurity and malnutrition starkly exposes the fragility of global and local food systems that are under mounting strain. The war in Ukraine is compounding existing challenges faced by millions and has further underlined the urgency of addressing the drivers of acute hunger. Some countries facing food crises are particularly vulnerable to the risks to food markets created by the war in the Black Sea area, notably due to their high dependency on imports of food, fuel and agricultural inputs, and/or vulnerability to global food price shocks.

While the international community has stepped up to calls for urgent famine mitigation action, global humanitarian and development funding for food crises is failing to match growing needs.

The international community must anticipate and act to mitigate the severe consequences for those already experiencing the highest levels of acute food insecurity, as well as for those in food stress. The situation calls more than ever for at-scale action to protect lives and livelihoods and support sustainable food systems and production where it is needed most.

Alongside tackling immediate threats, greater efforts are needed to address the root causes of these crises, including

structural rural poverty, marginalization, population growth and fragile food systems. That requires a truly steppedup collaboration among humanitarian, development, peace and climate actors to meet immediate needs, while investing in resilience building to pave the road towards lasting peace and food security and nutrition for all. That means anticipating crises with on-the-ground real-time early warning and rapid action when a deterioration is forecast. It means strengthening social safety nets, so when a crisis happens, people have somewhere to turn and don’t end up back at the bottom. It means advocacy, backed up by political commitment and sufficient funds, to rectify the overwhelming burden of climate change on the most vulnerable. From national governments to local organizations, UN agencies and NGOs to the private sector, everyone’s contribution is critical to radically transform global and local agri-food systems so that they are more inclusive, more resilient and more sustainable.

Acute food insecurity is when a person’s inability to consume adequate food puts their life or livelihood in immediate danger. Acute food insecurity is measured using the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a common global scale for classifying the severity and magnitude of food insecurity and malnutrition, and results from a partnership of various organizations at the global, regional and country levels. Every year, the IPC informs around US$6 billion in food crisis response globally.

“Greater efforts are needed to address the root causes of these crises, including structural rural poverty.”

Image by Robert Wiedemann from Unsplash.

Coordinated policy responses to overcome the food crisis

Organization (FAO)

Food prices began to rise sharply almost two years ago, culminating in the benchmark FAO Food Price Index making a giant leap up and reaching an all-time high in March 2022, and it has not eased significantly since then. The ongoing war in Ukraine has now sparked new emergencies and threats in food systems on top of existing challenges that were already undermining the global community’s willingness to reduce the number of people suffering hunger.

Together, Russia and Ukraine are among the top three exporters of wheat, maize and sunflower oil, and Russia is a major exporter of natural gas and fertilizers, so the war is causing enormous disruptions in global trade and food price trends.

With up to 828 million people affected by hunger globally, the effect of food inflation is felt most profoundly in poorer countries. An increase in prices has grave consequences for countries that rely on imports from Russia and Ukraine, even as the world has already seen a steep rise in hunger and malnutrition because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The food import bill of these countries has increased by US$24.6 billion.

The 2022 sowing season in Ukraine has already been deeply affected due to extensive and targeted damage to farm and food systems infrastructure, and severe environmental pollution from the use of weapons. Even if the war were to end soon and even with the deal reached by the United Nations to free up grain exports from Ukraine’s besieged Black Sea ports, its implications for global food markets will last until at least the coming year, with the global agricultural trade at stake worth some US$1.8 trillion.

One major difference to the previous food crises is the link between energy and fertilizers. In particular, increased fertilizer prices have caused a significant decrease in affordability by farmers; and input prices, in other words fertilizer prices, are growing faster than food prices. Farmers cannot afford these inputs anymore and this could put in effect a problem for next year. If we add to this equation the potential of lower global yields because of the lower use of fertilizers, that could produce a dangerous situation in terms of food availability in 2023, in addition to the food access problem we are already facing.

But other crises have been instructive about how trade policy shapes the consequences and how high food prices can fuel social discontent. Thus, a globally coordinated policy response is urgently needed to address the immediate humanitarian crisis and to build food systems that are more resilient to diverse shocks which themselves are becoming increasingly frequent.

Firstly, we must invest in countries most in need that are severely affected by the increase in food prices.

As a first step, FAO proposes to equip the economically vulnerable countries with large food import needs with a Food Import Financing Facility (FIFF) that helps ease their immediate food import financing costs. By tapping into the FIFF, vulnerable countries could mitigate long-lasting impacts on their agri-food systems and reduce future needs for emergency assistance. Our first estimates suggest a funding volume of nearly US$24.6 billion, covering the 62 most exposed countries, with a total population of 1.78 billion people.

We propose to equip the facility with ‘smart conditionality’ options. For instance, making access conditional on commitments to invest in sustainable agricultural productivity growth would help contain future replenishment needs and could function as an ‘automatic stabilizer’ for the facility. Higher investments in agricultural productivity would lower food import needs and thus reduce the need to tap into the facility in the future. More generally, it could help promote agriculture-led overall development.

Above all, to boost availability in addition to providing timely food aid, we must focus more attention on producing nutritious food locally. Currently only 8% of all food security funding in emergencies goes to assist agricultural production. Strategically this is short sighted, since investing in agriculture and rural livelihoods is seven to ten times more cost-effective than traditional assistance.

Secondly, countries must put policies in place that both increase productivity and protect natural resources.

Transforming agri-food systems to deliver healthy, nutritious diets, and deliver outcomes that are more equitable, will require significant financial investment, estimated at 8% of the size of the agri-food market.

Furthermore, we must keep our global trade system open, and ensure that agri-food exports are not restricted or taxed. Market transparency and coordination is crucial in times of uncertainty and helps stabilize markets and prices. FAO remains committed to enhancing global market transparency through the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS, www.amis-outlook.org), which is an essential tool to foster confidence in global markets.

Investment in the medium and long term should also be in hard infrastructure (roads, irrigation, electrification, digital) and in value chain infrastructure (storage facilities, cooling facilities, banking infrastructure, insurance infrastructure)

Máximo Torero, Chief Economist, UN Food and Agriculture

“A globally coordinated policy response is urgently needed to address the immediate humanitarian crisis.”

Image by Anastadios Antoniadis from Unsplash.

which we know not only increases access to markets and facilitates trade, but at the same time helps to reduce inequality.

There are quick wins we can accelerate in terms of improving efficiency in the way we produce and consume today. First, we must reduce food loss and waste. Currently one-third of all food produced around the globe is lost or wasted at some point in the food supply chain, and this could feed around 1.26 billion people per year. If we reduce food loss and waste by 50%, there would be sufficient fruits and vegetables available in the food supply to cover the recommended amount of 400 grams per person per day. Inefficiencies along the food supply chain and in consumption also have a major impact on the environment. Limiting food loss and waste can therefore help both to fight hunger and to reduce the environmental negative impact.

Second, it is also especially evident now that we need to ensure better and more efficient use of available fertilizers. In terms of availability in the short term, it is important that the US has agreed to provide ‘letters of comfort’ for those who seek to purchase fertilizers from the Russian Federation.

To this purpose, we should use technology to improve fertilizer use efficiency and science-based redistribution of applications across the production process that will allow for lower applications at the planting stage. This work could be supported by fast implementation of detailed soil maps that would support the most vulnerable countries to use their

fertilizers efficiently. Besides, in the medium and long terms there is a pressing need to speed up the transition to better use of manure (eg, nitrogen technology), to use technology to improve fertilizer use efficiency (nano-urea, nano-fertilizers, etc), bio-fertilizers, and to shift the way fertilizers are being produced (ie, the shift to green ammonia).

Last but not least, a key accelerator to all these points is the importance of innovation, science and research. Technological and social innovation can significantly reduce market failures in agriculture and improve market functioning.

In conclusion, the ongoing war has triggered new challenges facing different parts of food systems, including international trade, food production, sustainability and public policy, on top of existing challenges that were already undermining the global community’s momentum towards achieving ‘zero hunger’. In this context, governments may be tempted to respond by defending their national interest in the short term. Such policies could have severe immediate impacts on those who are worst affected by the crisis and, more generally, may produce negative impacts in the long term.

On the other hand, coordinating policy responses following the international recommendations can build stronger trust in food markets, and ensure that food and resources currently available can quickly get to where they are most needed to prevent hunger and malnutrition, providing a holistic response and longer-term strategies to transform our food systems.

Assessing the impact of war on landscapes

The correlation between war and its impact on landscapes, associated living spaces and the risks of future calamities, is being thrust into the spotlight by the increasing scarcity of natural resources, their overconsumption, and the contamination of the environment.

Understanding the overall impact of war requires a range of research tools and the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and remote sensing techniques to identify changes in the environment and environmental planning, but this requires reliable baseline data, good data gathering (including optical or multispectral types of remotely sensed data for emergency monitoring), collection, visualization in different band combinations, and analysis.

In such context, it is possible to use a range of GIS techniques for assessment of hazards such as fires, difficult weather conditions caused by fire, wildfire, floods caused by undermining dams and dykes, oil spills, concentration of gases and pollutants, temperature bands and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) visualization, etc.

• Different types of data processing, such as time averaged maps, correlation, time series, etc, at the NASA Giovanni platform.

• Extract satellite images (Sentinel, Landsat) with custom script visualization by EO Browser.

• Google Earth Engine for time period analysis, automatic land cover classification, focusing on surface water and NDVI changes, temperature changes and depicting the trend, detection of other changes.

• QGIS extensions for thematic data processing and advanced spatial analysis, especially Remote Sensing Change Detection, visualization in different band combinations, histogram building and enhancement, trend estimation; satellite image time series and timelapse building; calculation of normalized indices (NDVI, NDMI, NDWI, Burn Area Index); 3D model visualization; classifications and division into corresponding classes; thematic processing; digital map creation; environmental troubleshooting and reporting.

The results gained allow us to confront unique phenomena, their rapidity and slowness, mobility and immobility, stability and instability, spatial and temporal scales, etc.

“Only 8% of all food security funding in emergencies goes to assist agricultural production.”

“The results gained allow us to confront unique phenomena.”

Viktoriia Udovychenko, Ukrainian Geographical Society

Covid-19 and food insecurity: what crisis can teach us

The Covid-19 pandemic affected many in numerous ways, creating new problems and exacerbating existing ones. Food insecurity, an experience that ranges from worrying about being able to obtain enough food to going hungry, belongs to the latter category. The scale of pre-pandemic food insecurity in the UK shows in statistics on food bank usage. The Trussell Trust, the UK’s largest food bank operator, more than doubled the number of food parcels handed out in the UK as a whole between 2013-14 and 2019-20. The number in Scotland trebled over the same period. Independent food banks have published similar figures. There are many reasons for these increases, but changes in how the welfare state operates, who it includes and excludes from its provisions, and how it continues to function as a ‘safety net’ need to be considered when explaining food insecurity. Furthermore, the number of those on low and precarious incomes has increased steadily over past decades with the result that food banks are now frequented by an ever-increasing number of working poor. Without a doubt, the recent cost of living increases are the latest contributing factor to what amounts to a UK-wide food security crisis. Until March this year, the Trussell Trust had delivered 2.1 million food parcels, an increase of 14% compared with levels before the pandemic. While the ‘big picture’ behind the increase in food insecurity is important, understanding how it plays out for those most vulnerable can also provide useful insights for policy makers. Moreover, as crises test the normal operations of policy systems, these systems’ weaknesses and frailties are exposed and can be more easily understood. Such issues motivated our research project on food insecurity during Covid-19 and how it was experienced by four specific demographic groups in Scotland: the homeless, young carers and young adult carers, (destitute) asylum seekers, and people with disabilities. These groups are at high risk of food insecurity even in ‘normal times’, but the research showed that Covid-19 had a detrimental impact on these groups in three ways. First, it led to income reductions in already challenging circumstances. Second, it created challenges to accessing food, including food distributed by food aid services. Third, with food banks having to close due to the pandemic or to refashion into food delivery services, their users lost important social spaces.

The pandemic brought about income reductions which affected those already on low incomes, but also introduced new people to a life on low income. For example, young carers’ households suffered income reductions through the loss of casual work not covered by the UK Government’s furlough scheme. Disabled people were vulnerable to the consequences of the pandemic as their cost of living rose further, struggling practically and financially with the sudden need to buy groceries online, whilst their disproportionately precarious employment was placed at risk. The many asylum seekers who were taken into hotel accommodation lost any (already diminutive) cash entitlement as it was replaced with food that was not always culturally appropriate nor of sufficient nutritional quality. With regards to food access challenges, the research

demonstrated the profoundly geographical impacts of the pandemic on the UK’s food system and emergency food access support services. The closure of food banks meant that homeless people had more difficulty accessing food. Travel restrictions made access to food banks and shops difficult; for example, asylum seekers found access to culturally or religiously appropriate food increasingly difficult. Shielding and self-isolation by those vulnerable to the effects of coronavirus meant increased reliance on food box deliveries.

Lastly, Covid-19 impacted on food aid services themselves. Just as the demand for food aid rose throughout the crisis, food banks had to close or reorganise to comply with social distancing and lockdown rules. Shielding requirements for those over 70 also diminished much of their volunteer base. Those food aid services remaining operational often became geared towards large-scale food delivery services whilst suspending ‘wrap around’ support services including benefit advice and mental health support. It also meant a shift towards a charitable model of ‘doling out’ food that runs counter to ‘good practices’ developed over years regarding dignity and agency.

Despite the best efforts of food banks and other food aid providers, the crisis showed that the emergency food aid sector was ill-equipped to deal with the surge in food insecurity created by Covid-19. Crisis management resembled a ‘firefighting approach’. In the future, resilience to shocks should be strengthened by policy changes that tackle low incomes and a welfare state with insufficient benefits and services. In addition, mechanisms are needed to deal with the surging cost of living. Such policy changes should take heed of the views of those who have experienced food insecurity, and food banks and other food aid providers could be locations where these voices can formulate their demands.

Damian Dempsey works as a housing policy practitioner in local government, and is conducting research on the relationship between housing and regional economic development policy. Hartwig Pautz is co-lead of the UWSOxfam Partnership, which emerged in 2011 as a result of prior collaborative work around the development of Oxfam Scotland’s anti-poverty advocacy and campaigning.

FURTHER READING

Damian Dempsey and Hartwig Pautz (2021) Food insecurity in times of Covid-19 (uwsoxfampartnership.org.uk/wp-content/ uploads/2021/04/Food-insecurity-in-times-of-Covid-19-2021WEB-FINAL.pdf)

Damian Dempsey, PhD student, and Dr Hartwig Pautz, Senior Lecturer in Social Sciences, University of the West of Scotland

“The emergency food aid sector was ill-equipped to deal with the surge in food insecurity created by Covid-19.”

A perfect storm: the global food crisis

Elisabeth Faure, Director, World Food Programme UK

In 2022, 345 million people in 82 countries are facing acute food insecurity, up from 276 million at the start of the year. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has been warning of the combined effects of climate shocks, conflict, Covid-19 and spiralling costs of food and fuel on global stability. We are now watching this perfect storm unfold dramatically, creating a hurricane of hunger around the world.

In April, the Global Report on Food Crises demonstrated a 25% increase in acute food insecurity between 2020 and 2021. In June, the Hunger Hotspots report warned that the ripple effects of the crisis in Ukraine were sowing the seeds of political instability across the globe, with a surge in inflation and rising costs already impacting economic and political stability in the form of protests, particularly in the Middle East, Asia and Southern Africa. In July, global hunger rose once again, to affect up to 828 million people, according to the 2022 Report on the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI). At WFP, we are concerned that this is just the beginning of what may become a major global food crisis.

Food prices and global stability

The wave of collateral hunger triggered by the Ukraine conflict, which has upended global food and energy markets and piled further pressure on food and fuel prices, is leaving millions at risk of hunger and unable to afford a basic meal. According to the latest SOFI report, the conflict in Ukraine could lead to a severe shock to global grain and oilseed markets, resulting in a 21.5% increase in the international wheat price and pushing an additional 19 million people into food insecurity in 2023.

A crisis of this scale will destabilize many parts of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia. High dependency on imported wheat as well as low-income levels make these regions extremely vulnerable to price shocks. Without urgent action there is a frightening possibility that on top of today’s food pricing crisis the world will also face a food availability crisis over the next 12 to 24 months. Up to 50 million people in 45 countries are already right on the edge of famine and risk being tipped over. Over 880,000 are struggling for survival in famine-like conditions in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen – ten times more than five years ago.

We have already seen social unrest triggered by food price spikes in several countries. In Haiti, 4.5 million people,

nearly half the population, are estimated to be going hungry as they face the brunt of the global food crisis and surging gang violence. This is further compounded by the increase in political instability, rising prices and climate shocks. In Sri Lanka, six million people are struggling to meet their food needs amid the worst economic crisis since independence in 1948. This is likely just the beginning: the conditions for foodrelated instability today are far greater and the risks of social upheaval are much higher than they were a decade ago.

Projections for 2030 indicate that nearly 670 million people will still be facing hunger. These worrying trends dispel any lingering doubts that the world is moving backwards in its efforts to end hunger.

WFP’s work

In emergencies, WFP is often first on the scene, providing food assistance to the victims of war, civil conflict, drought, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, crop failures and natural disasters. When the emergency subsides, WFP helps communities rebuild shattered lives and livelihoods.

WFP is now facing a triple jeopardy: the numbers of acutely hungry continue their unprecedented rise, while funding for humanitarian operations simply doesn’t keep up with the growing needs, widening our resourcing gap and posing a real risk that needs may soon outstrip our ability to respond.

Our plan for 2022 is focused on two key things: prioritizing emergency food assistance and nutrition support to prevent millions from dying of hunger, and stabilising national food systems and supply chains to boost longer-term resilience and insulate against future shocks worsening the situation still further.

WFP is also working to stabilize national food systems and related supply chains, but we need urgent support to continue. The price of not helping people to build resilience and livelihoods in their home countries is as predictable as evident: it increases the risk of poverty, leading to increased population movement and social unrest.

We have a plan for 2022 but need support to help deliver millions from disaster. With millions of people around the world teetering on the edge of famine, we urgently need emergency funding to pull them back from the brink and turn this global crisis around before it’s too late. We must work pre-emptively, including tackling root causes and key drivers of hunger.

Alongside humanitarian action, WFP is advocating for deeper political engagement to reach ‘zero hunger’. Conflict and instability put countries into a reverse gear where developmental gains are destroyed, and livelihoods shattered. Governments must forge political solutions to conflicts and commit to policies that maintain global temperatures to limit the impact of climate shocks.

We have a choice: act now to save lives and invest in solutions that secure stability and peace for all, or we will see people around the world slip into devastating famines with its destabilising impacts felt by us all. The cost of inaction will be counted in millions of lives lost.

“Projections for 2030 indicate that nearly 670 million people will still be facing hunger.”

Image by Joel Muniz from Unsplash.

Reconnecting food, culture and the environment

Professor Shonil

, Professor of Environment and Development and Head of School, Social Sciences and Global Studies, The Open

The newspaper headlines on food insecurity often seem to suggest that to feed nine billion people by 2050, the world needs to produce 50% more food than we currently do. However, global food security is about whether or not that food gets to the people who need it most, as opposed to how much of it is produced. Over the last 60 years of the socalled ‘Green Revolution’, intensification of farming has been touted as the main solution to producing more food. Although admittedly the intensification has increased food production dramatically, it has not only harmed the environment, but it has also failed to solve the problem of hunger and malnutrition in the world. Over two billion people in the world are still food insecure. The impacts of climate change and droughts, compounded by the war in Ukraine, are threatening the global food system as the supplies of grain are dwindling. There is a real danger that some of the poorest people in the world who are food insecure will become even more food insecure as a result of food shortages. Our globally-connected food system will experience the ripple effects of this ‘perfect storm’ of climate change and geopolitical conflicts, meaning that the food will fail to reach those who are most in need of it.

But how did we end up here? The Green Revolution of the 1960s promised to solve the problem of world hunger. Yet, hundreds of millions of people remain hungry today. The problem of global hunger is to do with the distribution of food rather than its production. The world already produces sufficient quantities of food to feed its entire population, but geopolitical conflicts can easily disrupt our food supplies. Should food remain more local? What trick are we missing in making food and agriculture more sustainable? How can we rethink agriculture and food security?

I suggest that the reason why we have failed those two billion food insecure people is because of a three-way disconnect between culture, food and the environment. Disconnect between culture and food because the commercial mass production of food has severed it from the cultural traditions of farming and agriculture; disconnect between food and the environment because we have overlooked the environmental harms from the intensification of agriculture; and disconnect between the environment and culture because we have favoured technological solutions to ‘fix’ the problem of food insecurity rather than approaching this in a culturally-sensitive manner.

This disconnect unfolds at three different spatial scales: landscapes (macro), species (meso) and genes (micro). These three levels at which the disconnect unfolds lead us to what I suggest are three paradoxes of food insecurity. Paradox is ‘a situation that seems impossible to understand because it contains two opposite facts’.

First, the landscape paradox. The industrial agriculture claims

vast landscapes and uses advanced technology to increase food production primarily of cereal grains. On the other hand, 80% of the world’s farmers are smallholders and they make more efficient use of land to produce a wider variety of food that is also nutritious.

Second, the species paradox. A large proportion of calories consumed in the world comes from only a dozen or so plant and animal species. On the other hand, there are hundreds of thousands of species that are suitable for human consumption.

Third, the genes paradox. Genetically modified organisms are seen as a cure for ‘fixing’ the problem of providing food that is nutritious. On the other hand, there are vast numbers of local cultivars of crops and breeds of animals – known as ‘agrobiodiversity’ – that protect genetic variation from thousands of years in some cases of selection and breeding of plants and animals.

I suggest that resolving these three paradoxes will require us to connect culture, food and the environment in ways that we have not done before. I will visit each paradox in turn and discuss it with some examples from my own work. I will conclude by suggesting that connecting culture, food and the environment is important for achieving global food security.

Resolving the landscape paradox

This is about looking at agricultural landscapes as multifunctional. As opposed to intensification of landscapes for food production alone, we need to look at how they provide other benefits to people. Culturally protected forests are common across the world and are found on every single continent. These forests are typically embedded in agricultural landscapes and they provide much-needed habitat heterogeneity as well as a range of different ecosystem services such as groundwater storage, carbon sequestration or pollination of crops. Such benefits are evident in the case of church forests in Ethiopia. Based on the modelling of pollination services provided by church forests in South Gondar region of Ethiopia carried out by one of my PhD students, we suggest that church forests provide pollination services to nearly all of the cropland. In other words, without these pollination services, Ethiopian farming communities in this region will be far more food insecure than they currently are. The church forests exist today because of cultural norms, and if these norms are removed then a collapse of agriculture is not inconceivable. If the cultural norms are recognised, they will continue to provide vital ecosystem services. We need to recognise that all landscapes are ultimately ‘cultural landscapes’ shaped jointly by humans living with their environment. Landscapes where cultural norms are upheld can produce food more sustainably.

Bhagwat

“The problem of global hunger is to do with the distribution of food rather than its production.”

Image by Shalitha Dissanayaka from Unsplash.

Open University

Resolving the species paradox

This is about diversifying the pool of species from where our food comes. Out of over 390,000 plant species, over 5,500 have been used by humans throughout history, but today only three crops – rice, maize and wheat – provide 50% of the world’s calories that come from plants. Only 12 species (seven plants and five animals) provide 75% of food in the world. However, nine out of ten farms are family farms and they produce over 80% of food in the world. These family farms are very important for protecting the varieties of plants and animals that provide unique ingredients in the world’s cuisines, making food rich and diverse. One of my interests is non-native invasive species, which are dreaded by environmental managers because once they take hold they are difficult to get rid of. However, invasive species are not all bad. Many celebrated chefs are experimenting with new cuisines consisting of invasive species. Making use of invasive species in this way not only solves species invasions, perceived as one of the major environmental problems today, but it also helps make our food diverse and possibly even nutritious. This socalled ‘frontier food’ holds a lot of promise in global food security. The point here is that we need to ensure that the global food system does not depend on a small number of species. Only then can we make our food system more sustainable.

Resolving the genes paradox

This is about recognising the genetic variability and diversity that already exists, rather than applying ‘technofixes’ to the challenge of increasing global food production and/or fortifying food with nutrients. The hundreds of cultivars of plants and breeds of animals that we see today are a direct product of thousands of years of their selection and breeding by people. This rich agrobiodiversity is important for food and nutrition security of a large proportion of the world’s farming population. Yet, technological solutions such as genetically modifying crops for high-yielding traits pays very little attention to this already existing diversity and what it might offer. Some of my work has looked at genetically modified cotton which has been held responsible for tragic suicides of farmers in Central India. Cotton is a very water-thirsty crop. Genetically modified shallow-rooted cotton does well where farmers have access to irrigation, but it does not do so well where artificial irrigation is unavailable. A traditional variety of deep-rooted ‘tree cotton’ on the other hand does very well in environments where water is scarce. It is these kinds of traits that will help farmers, as opposed to high-yielding traits that genetic modification technology is often obsessed with. So, biotechnology per se is not a problem, but it needs to take notice of agrobiodiversity. Biotechnology, like any technology, needs to be approached in a socially sustainable way. In conclusion, I have showed the connections between culture, food and the environment that are not always obvious, and suggested that fostering these connections will go a long way in making food more sustainable. Food is an important part of our society and if we get it right, then we would have made good progress towards global food security.

“We need to ensure that the global food system does not depend on a small number of species.”

Image by Megan Thomas from Unsplash.

National Parks campaign

Scotland’s landscapes rank among the best in the world in their richness, diversity and interest, but while the world has over 3,500 National Parks protecting prized landscapes, Scotland has only two. For comparison, there are 47 in Norway, 13 in New Zealand and 16 in Spain. As part of promoting better protection for valued landscapes, the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland (APRS) and the Scottish Campaign for National Parks (SCNP) have been campaigning for National Parks in Scotland for nearly seven decades, but with no success until after devolution. The very first Act of the Scottish Parliament was the National Parks (Scotland) Act 2000, and the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park and Cairngorms National Park were created in 2002 and 2003 respectively, after which it was widely anticipated that further designations would follow. However, successive SNP governments seemed indifferent to the prospect, until a welcome breakthrough in autumn 2021 when the Bute House Agreement between the Scottish Greens and the SNP Scottish Government contained a commitment to designate at least one new National Park before the end of this parliament, that is by May 2026.

Designating each new National Park requires a statutory process to be undertaken, initiated by the Minister responsible formally proposing an area. This will be followed by a public consultation, reporting process, publication of advice, and then the preparation of a draft Designation Order, which must be further consulted on before the final Designation Order is laid in the Scottish Parliament for approval. The formal process may take two years, but before that starts the Scottish Government has set up a process to consider what the Scottish public expect Scotland’s National Parks to achieve in the future and how bids from local areas that wish to nominate themselves for National Park status will be evaluated. This process is underway and will run through the summer and autumn of 2022 with online consultation and face-toface engagement all managed by NatureScot, which will then report to Government. It is expected that the Scottish Government will finalise an evaluation framework with criteria for selecting new National Parks and set out the nomination process by March 2023.

The bidding and evaluation process is quite different from the procedure used when Scotland’s first two National Parks were set up, as both Parks’ core areas had long been identified as potentially suitable for the accolade. Studies, including the SCNP and APRS report Unfinished Business published in 2013, have suggested

Project

other areas worthy of National Park status, but the 2022 consultation is considering new National Parks in the context of the climate crisis and the nature-depleted state of the country. The Minister responsible, Lorna Slater MSP, has made it clear that any area of Scotland could be considered if there is local support and the nomination meets the criteria set out. This potentially includes coastal and marine areas as the Scottish legislation allows for that possibility. While nominations may appear from across the country, there are two established local campaigns for National Park status, in Galloway and in the Borders, which have been influential in convincing politicians that there is appetite in some parts of Scotland for more National Parks and that they could bring a variety of benefits, including socio-economic, environmental and, in terms of wellbeing, recreation and improved countryside visitor management. Whilst the current consultation is not a review of the existing National Parks, it is asking questions about what they are for and whether the context has moved on from the original purposes of natural and cultural heritage protection and enjoyment, to not just economic development but also nature restoration and climate change mitigation and adaption. Do we need National Parks to have a key role as agents of change or exemplars in integrated land use rather than as guardians of what we have inherited? Answers to these questions might inform decisions not only about where new Parks are located but about what powers and duties any new Park Authority might need. Campaigners are increasingly hopeful that Scotland will have not only one (or more) new National Park by 2026 but also a wider strategy for protected areas. This might identify areas where further National Parks could be created and alternative positive measures for other areas with merit which could benefit from rejuvenated Regional and Country Parks or the strengthening of other designations.

Nikki Sinclair, Project Manager, Scottish National Parks Strategy

“There are two established local campaigns for National Park status, in Galloway and in the Borders.”

The Scottish National Parks Strategy Project is a joint project between the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland and APRS (www.aprs.scot) and the Scottish Campaign for National Parks (scnp.org.uk).

Glen Affric. © Mike Robinson

Glen Affric and wind farm developments

Professor Roger Crofts CBE FRSGS

The never-ending debate and conflict between protecting our priceless scenery and renewable energy projects continues. This time it is Glen Affric. So many others have preceded it and I am sure on the present basis many others will follow, given the necessity of decarbonising our electricity generation in the face of rapid human-induced climate change. But why do we never learn from past mistakes in making decisions? Why don’t we have international recognition and verification to protect our finest landscapes? The answer is clear. We are unable as a society and government to set out strategic plans, rather preferring in the words of government ‘to let market forces operate’. This has been the approach for over two decades now. Yes, there are indicative maps drawn up by local councils, such as Highland relevant to the Glen Affric case. Yes, there are safeguards for nature and wildland. But decisions are all stacked towards developers and land owners’ preferences, with local communities, as consultees, heard and then ignored. Scotland needs to do better… much better. Some areas have been recognised for decades as being outstanding because of their natural beauty. Glen Affric is one of them, in the eyes of landscape experts, visitors and local people. Glen Affric was identified by W H Murray in his classic Highland Landscape, published by the National Trust for Scotland in 1962. Since then, it has been designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and a Special Protection Area for its native pinewoods, lichens, birds and dragonflies. And its natural and human qualities are recognised by its designation as a National Nature Reserve and a National Scenic Area. Murray said that, despite forest operations and hydroelectric development, Glen Affric was still one of Scotland’s three most beautiful glens. Adam Watson described the area as “a unique combination of mountains, lochs, rivers and ancient forest.” The NatureScot description of the area uses phrases such “a journey into the beautiful Loch Affric”, “wildness”, “venerable pine forest”. It is now well known from many studies of high-quality landscapes and scenic areas that intrusive development over the boundary but visible from the area destroys the natural values and substantially lessens people’s aesthetic and emotional experience and appreciation of the area. The wind farm development proposals mean that the landscape and scenic beauty of this outstanding area will be further reduced, as there are apparently no safeguards in place to give the area the perpetual protection it deserves from this type of intrusive development.

It is hoped that government agencies will help to safeguard this area. NatureScot, as the government’s statutory adviser on landscape and scenery, as well as nature, and Forest and Land Scotland, as the owner and manager, will argue the case for the area to be safeguarded from further intrusive activity (within its boundaries and beyond) which would have a detrimental effect on the outstanding natural and cultural qualities of Glen Affric.

There is also more that needs to be done to ensure that this is not a recurring problem in areas like this. The Regional Land Use Strategies, now supported by the Scottish Government, should form the basis of identifying areas of conflict and determine resolutions which will provide the basis for the future. To ensure this occurs, much clearer guidance is needed on priorities for safeguarding Scotland’s

finest landscapes and their scenic beauty. Too often in recent years it seems that the Scottish Government has been reluctant to recognise these important attributes of Scotland loved by locals and visitors alike. This will not be sufficient, however. Now is the time to move forward on an unambiguous government commitment to safeguarding our scenery and landscapes. The Scottish Landscape Alliance argued for this in its report Landscape and Place for Success, published in autumn 2020. The critical point in this context was the recommendation to “develop and implement an internationally recognised national statute for landscape protection which safeguards the benefits offered by wellmanaged landscapes.”

This is a much more fundamental and necessary step than the current preoccupation with a third national park. Those involved in the latter seem not to understand that Scottish national parks are not primarily for rural economic development. Rather, as the founding legislation states unambiguously, where there is conflict between the park’s aims, priority must be given to conserve and enhance the natural and cultural heritage of the area.

A stunning, fabulous and quite unforgettable place.”

Neil Cresswell

“Now is the time to move forward on an unambiguous government commitment to safeguarding our scenery and landscapes.”

“It is the lochs, tantalising pine-laden, fresh-water islands, trees, rivers, hills, mountains, waterfalls, tracks and abundance of superlative wildlife, that makes this glen, irresistible.

Glen Affric.

© Mike Robinson

Health in times of hunger

Dr Egmond Evers, Health Emergency Officer, and Dr Sophie Maes, Incident Manager, World Health Organization

Countries in the greater Horn of Africa are facing one of the worst episodes of food insecurity in the past 70 years. Over 37 million people in Djibouti, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda face ‘Crisis’ levels of food insecurity, that is, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) Phase 3 or above, in the coming months. IPC3 means the population will at best only be able to barely meet minimum food needs: people may deplete essential livelihood assets or be forced to resort to criminality or survival sex work not to go hungry, and even then, they may still not have enough to eat.

The drivers of the food insecurity are interlinked and mutually reinforcing: climate change, conflict, and the disruptions due to Covid-19. The past four rainy seasons have seen belowaverage rainfalls, with a fifth season this year also expected to be below average. The current drought is comparable to the 1984 and 2011 seasons, years in which there was widespread famine in several countries. At the same time, vast areas of South Sudan have been flooded in recent years. Conflicts in Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, among others, both contribute to a scarcity of resources and result from that scarcity. Millions are displaced by conflicts and climate. The Covid-19 pandemic has caused serious disruptions to economies and global supply chains, and the war in Ukraine has had a major impact on the availability and price of food and energy commodities.

In a food insecurity crisis, the first priority is to provide sufficient and equitable access to food and clean water to the people affected by the crisis. But it is equally important to ensure a strong health response to avert disease and death. Indeed, between malnutrition and death there is always disease: a malnourished child is much more likely to succumb to disease, and sick persons become more easily malnourished. Historic European examples remind us of this: during the Great Famine in Ireland in the mid-1800s,

the vast majority of the one million casualties perished from the effects of fever, typhus, dysentery, cholera, diarrhoea, tuberculosis, smallpox, scurvy, and measles in children, rather than starvation.

Many countries of the greater Horn of Africa have pre-existing weak health systems and are already vulnerable to disease outbreaks. In Somalia, immunization coverage for all essential vaccinations is currently less than 50%, far below the thresholds needed to prevent outbreaks of vaccine-preventable disease. In many areas, there is poor coverage of essential health services, such as in Tigray in Ethiopia, where the latest data indicate that only 9% of health facilities are currently functional. For maternal mortality, an indicator closely associated with the capacity of health systems to provide effective health care to communities, South Sudan has regularly topped rankings in recent years, even before a 2022 budget cut of 30% to the main funding source for health facilities in the country. Currently outbreaks of communicable diseases, including cholera, measles, yellow fever, malaria and meningococcal meningitis, are taking place in multiple countries in the region. The over-stretched, at times exhausted, health systems of the region are ill-equipped to deal with the anticipated additional caseloads resulting from outbreaks, displacement and malnutrition.

Governments and civil society need to act now to avert a catastrophe. Smart, coordinated investments are needed to provide life-saving medical services, enhance surveillance for both communicable disease and malnutrition, respond to outbreaks before they get out of hand, and adapt health systems to changing circumstances to ensure equitable access to essential services over time, including preventive health care.

“Between malnutrition and death there is always disease.”

Too hot to handle: a review of the recent global heatwaves

In recent years there has been an increase in the number of extreme heat events around the world and high temperature records being broken. But heatwave events in 2022 seem to be more prevalent and extreme. What does the science tell us, and is this a trend that we can expect to see in future?

When temperature records in the Antarctic were broken by more than 15°C in March this year (−17.7°C at Vostok on 18th March 2022), scientists said that this event turned their assumptions about the Antarctic climate system ‘on its head’. Average maximum temperatures for this region in March are around −53°C.

Also, in March 2022, the Arctic region was experiencing unusually high temperatures, 30°C higher than normal. Were these two events linked, and can they be attributed to climate change? It is too early to tell, but with increased global temperatures and the polar regions warming more rapidly than the global average, we are creating conditions for these kind of events to be more likely than ever before.

But heatwaves have not just been confined to the poles. So far in 2022, heatwaves have occurred in the Indian subcontinent, Australia, the Americas, China and across Europe.

In January, Onslow in Australia recorded a temperature of 50.7°C. If verified, this would equal the highest temperature in the Southern Hemisphere. From late March, Pakistan and India saw temperatures soar, making it the hottest MarchApril period on record for that region. And records again were being broken by significant margins. For example, Delhi, India’s capital, recorded 49°C in May compared to the previous record of 45.6°C in 1941.

Multiple heatwave events have also affected large areas of the United States and Europe. In June and July 2022, persistent heatwaves swept across Europe, causing wildfires and heatrelated deaths. Many local and national temperature records were broken, including Portugal which recorded its highest temperature of 47.0°C on 14th July, and Scotland and the UK recorded 34.8°C and 40.3°C respectively on 19th July, again breaking the national records.

Scientists working in climate attribution published studies in June and July that show that the 2022 heatwave in the Indian subcontinent was made 30 times more likely to happen because of human influence. They also concluded that the UK heatwave was made at least ten times more likely because of climate change, and this extreme event would have been at least 2°C cooler without human-caused climate change.

Climate change is making heatwave events more frequent, prolonged and intense worldwide. The science shows that heatwaves are now more likely, often linked with recordbreaking temperatures, and this is because of the greenhouse gas emissions that we, as humans, put in the atmosphere.

Extreme heat events are directly linked to an increase in mortality rates, crop damage, an increase in the extent and number of wildfires, and a breakdown in our infrastructure as roads melt and train tracks buckle. Recent reports examined the impact of climate change on hospital admissions (doi.org/10.1002/met.2084) and on temperature-related mortality rates in England and Wales (iopscience.iop.org/ article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac50d5), focusing on the heat risk. The latter found that as the global mean temperature increases, temperature-related mortality increases at a much faster, non-linear rate. The rate of increase notably speeds up at 2°C of global warming, and at 3°C warming could lead to a 75% increase in mortality risk during heatwaves.

The current heatwaves are happening in a world that has warmed by about 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels. The Paris Agreement aims to limit warming to 1.5°C but, based on the current pledges and targets (as of July 2022) made by countries around the world, we are moving towards a world that could be 2.1°C warmer than pre-industrial times. Urgent action is needed to limit any additional warming. But our climate is already changing, and we will need to adapt to extreme heat events. We need to become more resilient when they happen, which they will in future –becoming more frequent and even more intense.

FURTHER READING

World Weather Attribution, heatwave analyses (www.worldweatherattribution.org/ analysis/heatwave)

Climate Action Tracker website (climateactiontracker.org

Professor Liz Bentley, Chief Executive, Royal Meteorological Society

“Climate change is making heatwave events more frequent, prolonged and intense worldwide.”

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Image by Yves Bernardi from Pixabay.

Applying geospatial information to climate challenges

David Jones, Ordnance Survey (OS)

Following the OS Cambridge Conference in April 2022, where geospatial leaders from across the globe explored the key role geospatial data can play in the climate challenge, OS and the global community published a report called the ‘How’ Guide – Applying Geospatial Information to Climate Challenges The guide pinpoints four practical steps the global geospatial community must take to influence governments and decision makers to help the planet mitigate climate damage and achieve adaptation goals.

OS’s Chief Geospatial Officer David Henderson FRSGS said, “As a community of National Mapping and Geospatial Agencies (NMGAs), we took the opportunity to step back from our day jobs and build on the shared commitment to address climate action that we made. It was clear from our conversations that decision makers need pragmatic solutions to the problems they are facing. This ‘How’ Guide should help us move past the ‘why’ of needing to act, to the practical steps that we can take to help achieve climate mitigation and adaption goals. We’re delighted to share an overview of the guide’s main points. Whether you’re an NMGA or not, there is much here that demonstrates how we need to collaborate, so please read the ‘How’ Guide in full and reach out to discuss how we can build solutions together.”

Lead and inspire with practical solutions

In each of our countries, as geospatial experts and as senior leaders, we must take ownership of the problem and provide active direction – both for our organisations and for our governments. As well as supplying our data and services, we need to support our users and work together to effectively solve problems.

As a global community, we must continue to work together to propose solutions, and inspire others to apply geospatial capabilities in direct response to climate challenges.

Show why trusted location data matters

To be trusted and authoritative, we need to:

• work relentlessly to understand what senior government officials are trying to achieve in the developing a climate response policy;

• champion and demonstrate how to use our geospatial data to effectively answer their questions.

We know that often our foundational geospatial data is not enough on its own to detect and mitigate against the impacts of climate change. We recognise the need to develop richer, analysis-ready data and identify where any gaps may be.

Increased levels of collaboration between the public and private sectors are required. Improved communication between industry leaders and partners will unlock the greatest potential. Working together, we can achieve greater data harmonisation, interoperability, usability, and accessibility, streamlining the development and implementation of new solutions. And we can create a network of supportive voices, help expedite problem solving, and start bringing end-user stories to the forefront. Together, we can tell the story of how our data makes that possible.

Connect data back to the real world

Our role as NMGAs is to reflect the changes and impacts of climate change in the real world to better inform our governments’ responses to climate challenges.

By building capability from within, collaborating with partners and focusing on outcomes, we must ensure that the data ecosystem around net zero reflects the tangible changes we are seeing in our societies and our environment every day. This will make planning our response more targeted and effective. It’s all about the people

Our focus should not only be on the technical process and data capture, but also the real-world impacts of our work. We must understand the ways in which different aspects of the climate response are interconnected in the real world. So, we are committed to ensuring that the data and analysis we provide directly unlocks economic, social, and environmental value to government stakeholders and our citizens, conveying the impact of that value to real world outcomes involving real people.

Getting this story right will help drive great levels of geospatial teaching in the school curriculum, increase focus on attracting passionate people who want to make a difference, and encourage diversity of thought. It helps make the case for geospatial information to act as a fundamental data set. One which other industries, partners, and public sector users can rely on, to provide global consistency in our climate response.

The ‘How’ Guide is available at www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ documents/cambridge-conference/how-guide-cambridgeconference-22.pdf

“‘There is much here that demonstrates how we need to collaborate.’”

An opportunity to deliver a circular economy

My son is about to turn 18 and leave home for university. I vividly remember him being born, and it honestly seems like yesterday. It is therefore sobering for me to reflect that in 18 years’ time, Scotland will have just one parliamentary term left to hit our 2045 net zero target. Regarding our progress to net zero, there is some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that we are unlikely to achieve our net zero ambitions without first tackling the hot topic of overconsumption. Zero Waste Scotland estimates that 82% of our carbon footprint comes from the products and services we consume. Our current linear economy, where we take virgin materials, manufacture new products, consume them and then discard them, is in every sense of the word wasteful.

Throughout a product’s lifecycle (resource extraction, manufacture, transport, use and disposal) carbon is expended which fuels climate change. Simultaneously we are consuming more resources than the planet can accommodate, driving habitat loss and species extinction. SEPA estimates that, if the whole world lived like we do in Scotland, we would need three planets to accommodate our current resource use.

The good news is that we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver the strong circular economy that we need. On 22 August 2022, the Scottish Government concluded its consultation on the Circular Economy Bill. A circular economy keeps resources and products in use for as long as possible through reuse, repair and recycling. This means that the embedded carbon is not wasted after one use, and we reduce or eliminate the need for further resource extraction.

In our recent policy paper (available at www. circularcommunities.scot/resources) we called for a strong Circular Economy Bill, and I would like to highlight three key areas where we are calling for stronger ambition beyond the Bill into implementation of circular economy policy.

First, we need to move beyond recycling and fully embrace reuse and repair. To support this, we would like to see national and local reuse targets, embracing right-to-repair principles and financial investment in local reuse and repair projects through the provision of reuse credits, based on the carbon savings associated with associated reuse activity.

Second, we need to move to a standard, best-of-class, recycling and reuse provision consistently across Scotland. Currently, local authorities have widely varying recycling and reuse service provision. For example, local authority household recycling rates vary significantly, from 18% to 58%

in 2020. The national rate of 42% is well behind our target of 70% by 2025, as well as behind other parts of the UK, most notably Wales. We want to see a statutory requirement for reuse facilities across all local authorities, co-design of new standards for reuse and recycling services across Scotland, and investment to deliver the required systems. Third, we need to see mainstream behaviour change if Scotland is to become a circular economy. This means we need to make it easier to take the more sustainable actions and harder or more expensive to take the environmentally damaging actions. Companies should be banned from destroying surplus stock, and a timetable should be set for phasing out single-use products. We also need to make it cheaper and more convenient for people to reuse, repair and recycle than leave material to be collected through their residual waste. Once a standard system is in place (second point above) we can move on to implement clear recycling labelling on packaging and public communication campaigns to further drive up recycling rates. In conclusion, I remain hopeful that current policy developments provide a genuine opportunity to deliver the circular economy that Scotland and our planet so urgently need. Personally, I want my son to thrive in a world where we avert the worst impacts of climate change. So, I hope we embrace this opportunity, deliver a circular economy, and achieve net zero.

Michael Cook, CEO, Circular Communities Scotland

“We need to move beyond recycling and fully embrace reuse and repair.”

Image by Ravin Rau from Unsplash.

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

We all dream about becoming fabulously rich, right? I know I do. I turned my dream into a thought experiment, which became a book, How to Spend a Trillion Dollars. The aim is not to make me fabulously rich, but to show that the problems the world faces can be solved; it is to speed us into the future, a future where the great problems of the world are being tackled and where the biggest questions in science are being answered.

When I talk about what I would do if I had a trillion dollars to spend, I am often asked, “But where are you going to get this money?” Well, the world’s richest 1% control $162 trillion in assets. Quantitative easing, the creation of money, accounted for $6 trillion in 2020 alone.

In 2021 in the US, President Biden asked Congress to pass a $6 trillion budget. There’s a lot of money out there.

Here’s another source. According to the International Energy Agency, oil and gas producers are set to make $4 trillion in income in 2022. That’s twice what they usually make. Even though I’ve spent the last couple of years thinking about the flow of money in the world economy, and what we might be able to do if we could tap into some of it, the sheer amount of money being made by fossil fuel producers is stunning. So let’s think about how to spend it.

Some quick rules up front. First, like Richard Pryor’s character in Brewster’s Millions, I’m not allowed to spend the money on asset-building for myself. Also, I banned myself from military, political or media spending. And the things I spend the money on have to be projects that are achievable now or soon, with current technology. As much as I’d like to build an interstellar spacecraft, or to build a Dyson sphere around the Sun so as to control its energy, these things are currently science fiction so are banned.

Even with these restrictions, there’s a vast amount that we could do; I chose ten megaprojects and go into each in detail in my book. Say you want to eradicate global poverty. A trillion dollars could lift hundreds of millions of people off the lowest rung on the poverty ladder. I looked at research around cash donations, with the idea of dividing the trillion dollars between everyone classed as living in extreme poverty, subsisting on under $1.50 a day. The World Bank and charities such as Give Directly have experimented with cash transfer schemes around the world, and found that one-off lump-sum payments can sustainably lift people out of extreme poverty.

A problem closely related to poverty is health. The more diseases we cure, the better the lives of millions of people, and the lighter the burden on healthcare systems around the world. The stated aim of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), set up by Priscilla Chan and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is to cure all disease, and extend human life to 100, by the end of the century. It’s an incredibly ambitious – I might even say ludicrously ambitious – target. The CZI will spend tens of billions of dollars, but to sustainably improve global health outcomes you need one thing above all: introduce high quality universal health care. To do this would cost far more than the CZI has, far more than my fictional trillion dollars. When I asked Jeremy Farrar about this, as the boss of the Wellcome

Trust with an endowment of £30 billion, he suggested I could demonstrate the benefits of universal health care in a large country and use it as a flagship to encourage others. I also looked at tackling specific diseases.

Malaria, for example, kills 400,000 people every year, mostly young children. We could develop gene-editing technology to wipe out the mosquitoes that carry the disease. There is also now finally a malaria vaccine for children; its rollout in ten high-risk African countries will cost $325 million a year.

The defining problem of our time, of course, is climate change, but the problem of the collapse of biodiversity is equally threatening, and is linked to global warming. Climate change has been called a hyperobject, a problem so vast in time and space that our minds have trouble grasping it and action on the problem is stymied. In my book I’ve addressed this by breaking the problem up into more manageable chunks. In one chapter, for example, I look at what we could do to speed the transition away from fossil fuels, to an economy based on renewable energy. (Spoiler: it will cost rather more than $1 trillion to do this on a global scale, but the investment pays for itself.)

What we could do, with just some of the money being made by oil and gas in 2022, is accelerate the take-up of solar and wind. With more investment, Scotland, with 25% of Europe’s off-shore wind power potential, could become a world leader in renewable energy, in hydrogen power and in low-carbon heating. What I found time and again in my book is that, with investment, many of these projects, from poverty reduction to carbon drawdown, pay for themselves through job creation and future cost-avoidance. The money is not wasted.

As well as being asked where I think I’d get the money, I’m often asked which of my projects I would choose. The answer is difficult; I am emotionally invested in all of them. But if push came to shove I would spend money to tackle both the climate and the biodiversity crises. I’d want to invest in projects that would regenerate natural ecosystems and at the same time draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. To do this we need to protect and restore areas of land that have been degraded.

The big one is the Amazon rainforest, which is in real danger of reaching a tipping point where it is so degraded that the entire system turns to savannah. The implications are, frankly, terrifying. The Amazon is globally vital for biodiversity with one in ten species on the planet living there. It regulates the climate around the world and is vital as a carbon sink. A few years ago, the environment minister of Brazil suggested that rich nations should pay Brazil not to destroy the rainforest: it has got to the point where that option should be considered. There are many other key areas of both biodiversity and carbon storage that we should protect, including some quite close to home.

Scotland has vast areas of glen and moor that are, biologically speaking, ghosts of their former selves. Restoring them to their former glory, conserving peatlands and reversing the drainage in peat bogs, could provide jobs, increase biodiversity and draw down carbon. A study from the University of Edinburgh found that restored peatlands could

Rowan Hooper

“One-off lumpsum payments can sustainably lift people out of extreme poverty.”

capture and store up to ten tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare, per year. That’s an incredible amount: the average emitted each year by each of us in the UK. The potential for ecosystem restoration to get us to our net zero targets is huge, with great benefits for nature, for the economy, and for wellbeing too.

In my chapter on removing carbon from the atmosphere, I suggest that a way to stimulate the development of carboncapture technology is to fund a lucrative competition. Offer $100 million to the first group able to fix and bury 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide. After reading my book, Elon Musk announced the launch of just such a competition.

The world’s problems are big and hard to solve. But the solutions are out there, waiting. Never let anyone tell you that we’re doomed. Saving the world will require state and government action on a big scale, but every little helps. My hope is that the book spurs action and even might help nudge philanthropists and billionaires into inspiring, effective and lucrative ways to spend some money.

Rowan Hooper’s book, How to Spend a Trillion Dollars, is our Reader Offer. See back page for details.

“I would spend money to tackle both the climate and the biodiversity crises.”

Image by Antonios Ntoumas from Pixabay.

Meet the RSGS Board

Robinson, Chief Executive, RSGS

Like all charities, RSGS is governed by a Board of Trustees: volunteers responsible for supervising the Society’s activities and financial position. We currently have 11 Trustees, some directly elected by RSGS members, some appointed by the RSGS Committees on which they serve. We asked our Trustees to tell us a little about themselves by answering two questions:

• What is it about Geography that inspires you?

• What is your favourite place and why?

Meredith Adams (Elected)

To me, Geography is an inspirational key, that across my whole life has helped me answer the simple but forever relevant question of “why is that like that?” Geography has answered my enduring ‘why’ question time and time again, whether in a classroom setting, on travels, consuming media, visiting the supermarket… It helps me unpick the complexity of our world today and gives me permission to look deeper; asking ‘why’ multiple times to get to the root of ideas, facts and information.

In my career working in equality and inclusion fields, Geography inspires me every day to go a step beyond my ‘why’ question and ask ‘how’. How can inequality be reduced? How can society build the systems and tools to create a more equal tomorrow? And, importantly, how do we ensure people and communities who experience inequality in their environment, health and opportunities are involved in decision making? From understanding early environments and societies to envisioning a sustainable, just future, Geography helps me ask the big questions just as RSGS does. As a Board member, I take great joy in seeing the unique role the Society plays in using Geography as a tool for change and remaining relevant in an ever-changing world.

My favourite place is pretty much the side of any Munro and the feelings of adventure, creativity and nourishment it gives me. If challenged to be specific, I’d pick Kintail in the northwest Highlands. The magnificent ridges draw me back again and again!

John Briggs (Elected, Chair)

Now retired, I held posts at the University of Khartoum in Sudan, the (then) University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland, and the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, before joining the University of Glasgow in 1979. My research interests in Geography throughout my career revolved around humanenvironmental relationships, especially in Africa. I have been particularly interested in how rural people understand their natural resource environments, and how they use, sometimes abuse, and manage those resources. Along with African colleagues, I have tried to develop these ideas into alternative ways of imagining rural ‘development’ in Africa to bring about more sustainable ways of living.

It is quite difficult to say where my favourite place is, as so many places have left a deep impression on me. I love the rugged beauty of the coastline between Arisaig and Mallaig, with the views across to Rum, Eigg and Skye. The big skies of the high veldt in South Africa, the dramatic landscapes of South Island, New Zealand, and the Sierra Tramuntana in Mallorca are also up there. But there are also places and landscapes where the human imprint is writ large. Memories of the Bund waterfront in Shanghai will linger for a long time, as will those from the suqs of Egypt, in Aswan and Khan elKhalili in Cairo, and not least Fishawi’s coffee shop, allegedly continuously open since 1773 without a break. For some years, I was involved in a research programme with Egyptian colleagues in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, and I will forever treasure the times I spent in the grandeur and beauty of the desert, as well as the times I spent with the Bedouin in the desert. Priceless. So that is where my vote will go!

David Henry (Elected)

To use a well-worn cliché – ‘every day is a school day’ for me. I think this is because I have a deep-rooted, healthy and life-long curiosity. This galvanizes me to explore the interconnectedness of things. There is always something new to learn about our planet and how we inhabit it. The more completely we strive to understand our surroundings, the better we will be at appreciating our Earth’s beauty, diversity, and complexity. Such joined-up geographical thinking has, I believe, never been more important when contemplating our future.

As my favourite place, I’ll opt for sitting in my summerhouse in rural Upper Clydesdale, watching the sun go down, with a tumbler of finest malt whisky in my hand. What’s so special about it? Well, I can sit there and, in my mind’s eye, peel back the layers of physical, environmental and human geography that make up the landscape stretching out before me. Dominating the scene is a high hill, made of red Felsite volcanic rock, sculpted by ancient glaciers, and topped with a large Bronze-Age cairn. Below the heathery moorlands that gird its flanks lie enclosed pastures, stocked with upland sheep, farmed venison and hardy cattle. There is a modern windfarm just visible on the far horizon. Then, coming nearer to my vantage point, I know where to find the forlorn remains of a wartime POW camp which sit today surrounded by regimented forestry plantations. Finally, just in front of me, a now quiet old coach road passes my front gate, separating my garden from the barley field beyond. Which brings me back, neatly, to that glass of whisky. Who needs a book when you can read so much into a landscape? Slàinte Mhath

Mike

RSGS headquarters and visitor centre, Perth.

David Howe (Elected)

Like many people, I am an example of the impact a good teacher can have in someone’s early years. I was fortunate that my Geography teacher at school was the most engaging and enthusiastic of all of our teachers, and consequently nurtured an interest which ultimately turned into a passion for Geography and all things related. Some of my favourite memories from my school days were Geography field trips to local rivers to see the formation of ox-bow lakes, or to the Pennines exploring the watershed they form and the role they play.

In later life I’ve been fortunate to explore further afield, and my passion for Geography turned into a love for mountains. I’ve walked them, I’ve run them, I’ve lived and camped there, and I’ve studied them. Whilst I love the Alps and the magnificent vistas they offer, I think my favourite place is closer to home in the Cairngorms. Talking a trip to walk the Lairig Ghru and see the magnificent landscape which forms it is time well spent and an experience not to be forgotten.

Alastair McConnell (Education Committee)

Geography is about place; the where, what, why, who – and sometimes even when! It is a subject for inquisitive people who just want to understand about the world around them. A picture of anything can spark an entire discussion and the subject allows so many cross-curricular links with other subjects. It is one of the only subjects in the curriculum focused on understanding the future consequences of what we are doing now. It has never been more important to understand the interactions between humans and the natural environment; our very existence depends on it.

I grew up in Morayshire but have lived in Alloa for the last 20 years. I am very lucky to be able to cycle to work, following an old railway along the banks of the River Devon. The freedom of this river to migrate across the flood plain creating meanders, ox-bow lakes and river terraces never ceases to engage my attention, and over the years of commuting I have been able to gauge its progression. Cows grazing by the river and wandering down to drink directly from the flowing water provide a timeless element to the image. The steeply rising Ochil Fault provides a stark backdrop to the gently flowing river. I always arrive at work, as Head of Geography at Dollar Academy, relaxed and inspired for the day ahead.

Ken Muir (Elected, Vice-Chair)

As a P4 pupil in Dunoon, I clearly remember a series of colourful books in the class library that told stories about how children lived in different parts of the world. Most memorable were those in the South Pacific islands, the Sahara desert, Lapland and the Brazilian rainforest. I

avidly read these books with their maps, pictures of different landscapes and how people lived there. Although I didn’t realise it at the time, these books, with their descriptions of physical and human landscapes, probably began my lifelong love of Geography. In our increasingly complex world, it is thinking about and studying that integration between physical and human elements that helps us make sense of the world and, as the only ‘interdisciplinary subject’, it is why Geography continues to inspire today.

For many years I was the sole HM Inspector of Geography in Scotland. This put me in the very privileged position of travelling to all parts of Scotland to inspect secondary Geography departments and Environmental Studies in primary schools. It really did feel like a ‘busman’s holiday’; seeing the geography of Scotland, talking about the subject with Geography specialists and getting paid to do it! My inspection travels took me to some beautiful areas: Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles; the Scottish Borders; the Highlands; and of course my homeland of Argyll and Bute. However, my favourite location from all these places is South Harris. Its rugged landscape, clear air and amazing beaches are intoxicatingly beautiful. On one inspection, I took some HMI colleagues for an after-dinner climb up the hill Ceapabhal above the village of Northton to see the sun set over St Kilda and the beaches of Scarista and Luskentyre. An incredible and truly memorable experience.

Lorna Ogilvie (Local Groups Committee)

As a physical geographer, with a pure science degree in Geography from Edinburgh University, and a Masters in Biogeography from the University of Calgary in Canada, it is no surprise that the landscape inspires me. Seeing Old Faithful erupt in Yellowstone National Park, skiing and hiking close to glaciers in the Alps and Rockies over many years, and standing astride the tectonic plate boundary in Iceland summarises how Geography has been ever-present in my travels. Fellow skiers and travellers have patiently accepted impromptu lessons on rock formations, glaciers or weather!

Accompanying young people on field trips to Dorset, the Lake District and Arran, whilst teaching Geography and Geology, was both fun and a privilege. Hearing, many years later, of careers in these fields reminds me that they were the lucky generation. As a Headmistress I ensured both subjects had their rightful place in my schools’ curricula, but this has become a very real challenge nowadays. I am pleased to be on the RSGS Board with the opportunity to promote the importance of Geography in understanding today’s rapidly changing world, with its many environmental challenges, not least climate change.

Naming one favourite place is impossible, after years of travelling. My top four are Monument Valley, Arizona, USA; Moraine Lake, Alberta, Canada; Zermatt, Switzerland; and Glen Muick, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Why? Unique, stunning mountain scenery I’ve enjoyed on foot or skis!

Helen Ord (Elected, Treasurer)

I have had a constantly questioning brain since I was a child – “But why……?” – and being brought up in an outdoorsy family meant that the Scottish landscape was the first thing that had to be explained! I still remember my father describing the volcanoes and glaciers that shaped Edinburgh, and the enthusiasm of my school Geography teacher explaining “the sheer FORCE of the water” as we dutifully drew diagrams of arches, stacks and stumps. A few decades later, as finance director of a major international charity, I would find myself exploring the landscapes and cultures of some fairly extraordinary countries. Now, as a Scottish tourist guide, I still unashamedly make sure that all of my guests understand the forces behind the Highland Line, the excitement (and importance) of Knockan Crag, and the science behind all of those sheep and all of that barley. If they’re lucky, every now and then I’ll throw in a bit of folklore everyone deserves a good Cailleach story every now and then.

My favourite place in Scotland is a quiet track overlooking the Spey valley with the Cairngorm mountains as a backdrop, for the peace, space, pine trees and childhood memories. And my favourite place outside Scotland is Utah, for the scale, the variety of landscapes, and because it is so very different from anything we have at home.

Jo Sharp (Geographer Royal for Scotland)

I am not one of those academics who can spend their lives developing expertise on one very specific topic, and so I am inspired by the diversity of Geography as a discipline. I am a feminist political geographer with varied research interests including postcolonialism, health, and critical geopolitics. My earlier work sought to extend the geopolitical beyond the formal spheres of statecraft to understand the role of other spaces on the international, and this has continued through my more recent postcolonial work. I have also worked on environment, gender and health projects in Africa. I collaborated with local researchers and Bedouin women on a gender and development project in Wadi Allaqi in south-eastern Egypt, and later with an interdisciplinary team of epidemiologists, vets, modellers and social scientists to evaluate the key drivers of zoonotic disease (those which are transmitted from animals to humans) in northern Tanzania, understand the impacts of these diseases, and develop interventions that will be appropriate for the various affected communities.

Asking a geographer to name just one favourite place isn’t fair! I loved to explore the streets of Cairo when I was in Egypt for the Allaqi project. I almost always got lost but would eventually hail a taxi and get back to where I’d started! I love walking around cities and spend much more time doing this than visiting museums or other attractions. But if I was pushed, I’d have to say that at the moment my favourite place is in my kayak off the coast at the East Neuk of Fife.

Please contact chair@rsgs.org if you are interested in standing for election to the RSGS Board at some point.

Margaret Wilkes (Collections Committee)

Geography inspires me through its universality; its meaningfulness in seeking to better interpret and understand natural, political and human situations. It has the unique ability to bind together or underpin myriad facts and research data to provide a more coherent whole and a greater appreciation of the challenges our planet has, and has yet, to face. No other subject has this all-embracing potential. It must become more key in education at all levels.

From the age of five I was a ‘natural Geographer’. Maps enthralled me and a savvy father, realising my interest, encouraged this, adding to it by taking me up every hill in sight to explain the landscapes below. This, plus being bequeathed a huge Times Atlas of the World when I was seven, led inexorably to a geographical career involved in helping with a wide variety of academic research projects. Later, I changed direction, becoming in charge of one of the largest public map collections in the world.

How can a Geographer have just one favourite place? I’ve a never-ending list! Here are 20 places I’ve visited which continue to haunt me: Tryfan peak, Nant Ffrancon valley, North Wales; Pflerscher Tribulaun peak, Stubai Alps, Tirol; Assynt; Forth Rail Bridge; Harlech Castle, North Wales; Montagne Sainte-Victoire, Southern France; Surprise View, Peak District; Malvern Hills summit views; Lichfield Cathedral and city; Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, North Wales; site of Hallaig, Raasay; Lofoten Islands, Norway; Union Bridge, Scottish Borders; Tindhólmur, Faroe Islands; Heath Chapel medieval village site, Shropshire; Þingvellir, Iceland; Durham Cathedral and Castle site; Broch of Gurness, Orkney; Fjærland and Fjærlandsfjorden, Norway; summit view south from Heabhal, Isle of Barra.

Alan Wilson (Elected)

Although I have not ended up in a geographical career, I realise that my Geography degree at Edinburgh University provided me with a strong foundation for life (and work) by connecting and bringing together elements of so many fields of knowledge. Geography as a discipline provides an integrated understanding of the relationships between people, places and the environment. For example, I have always had a fascination with water courses and rivers, in terms of the way they impact on the landscape; the creation of settlements; the development of industry, power generation and transport; and the extent to which they reflect climate change through flooding and droughts.

As a result, on my many travels across the globe, I have spent many happy hours walking the banks of everything from small Scottish burns to large rivers and estuaries. So, unsurprisingly, some of my favourite places are rivers, including those where I spent a lot of time in my childhood, such as the River South Esk in Glen Clova or the River Devon in Clackmannanshire, but also unusual rivers such as the Firehole River in the geothermal area of Yellowstone or the powerful economically important rivers such as the Thames, the Douro and the Rhine.

Conserving and protecting the Pentland Hills

Pentlands

The Pentland Hills – to poet Robert Louis Stevenson the “hills of home” – run generally southwest from Edinburgh for about 20 kilometres. The northernmost hills are the most dramatic and provide spectacular views over the Lothians, the Firth of Forth, and beyond. Edinburgh locals and visitors alike are extremely fortunate to have such magnificent and diverse open country on the doorstep of Scotland’s capital. In essence, the Pentlands consist of grass and heather-clad rounded hills, though the Pentland ridge, with its highest point of Scald Law (579m), is more rugged and steeply sloping. The physical geography of the hills is mainly the result of glacial erosion and sculpting by meltwater, with some impressive examples including Windy Gowl (NT156554). Several historical tracks and drove roads cross the ridge from west to east, and the Scottish National Trail traverses the hills from West Linton to Balerno.

The Friends of the Pentlands (FoP for convenience) is a Scottish charity whose purpose is to “conserve, protect, and enhance” the Pentland Hills for the benefit of all. The FoP was inaugurated in 2003 to provide support to the staff of the Pentland Hills Regional Park and the uplands to its south. The FoP works in several ways. Several times a month, teams of FoP volunteers work to maintain and repair paths, pick up litter, tend to tree plantings, including five arboreta of Scotland’s native trees, and conserve wildlife areas, including the wildlife garden around Harlaw Visitor Centre (NT182653). The Friends employ several traditional conservation techniques, including the use of liners of sheep fleece in path stabilisation and drainage, and the spiling of living willow rods to reinforce eroding river banks.

The FoP was instrumental in establishing the Pentland Way in 2014. The Pentland Way is a 31.6km waymarked trail running from the hamlet of Dunsyre in South Lanarkshire to the village of Swanston just south of Edinburgh’s city limits and the city bypass (A720). To the south, the route follows wellestablished bridleways, many of them of historical interest. Further north, the Way follows the Kips, Scald Law, Carnethy, Turnhouse and Allermuir Hill. Walking the Way presents the visitor with traces of former patterns of occupancy, invaders from Rome, stories of raiders and reivers, evidence of monastic settlement and Presbyterian activists, and much else besides. The Pentlands have provided inspiration to poets, philosophers, writers and artists. The scenery is stunning, the wildlife is remarkable, and the Pentlands’ tranquillity, especially to the south, is enormously beneficial to health and wellbeing.

The increased attraction of the Pentland Hills brings its own problems due to increased footfall, perhaps exacerbated by the effects of climate change, causing damage to the hill tracks and their fragile ecosystems, particularly in the exposed upland areas where access for path maintenance materials and equipment is challenging. As well as finding monies to support professional path reconstruction, the FoP helps to preserve biodiversity by tree planting and establishing wildflower corridors for wildlife including pollinating insects. The Pentlands’ natural history is wonderful, but requires careful management.

The FoP revisited the Pentland Way in 2020, simplifying and overhauling the waymarking, identifying alternative routes for access or escape, and providing several area-specific information panels along the route with details linked by QR code to updateable sources of information. A new expanded edition of the Guide to the Pentland Way, published in 2022, is available from the FoP website (www.pentlandfriends.org.uk) which also has detailed notes and maps for walking the Way.

As a voluntary society working with statutory agencies, the FoP is a citizen body working to the public good. It always welcomes new members, as well as grants to support its charitable work. We are concerned, as is the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, with making the best use of Scotland’s wonderful countryside.

Andrew K Marsden, Chair, Friends of the

“The Pentlands have provided inspiration to poets, philosophers, writers and artists.”

The duns and kaims of Windy Gowl. © Bob Douglas

Willow spiling to stabilise the riverbank at the Garvald Bridge. © Friends of the Pentlands

The Slow Road to Tehran A Revelatory Bike Ride through Europe and the Middle East

Rebecca

Lowe (September Publishing, March 2022)

In 2015, as the Syrian War raged and the refugee crisis reached its peak, Rebecca Lowe set off on her bicycle across the Middle East, driven by a desire to learn more about this troubled region and its relationship with the West. The 11,000km journey was an odyssey through landscapes and history that captured her heart, but also a deeply challenging cycle across mountains, deserts and repressive police states that nearly defeated her. This is her deeply researched and often very funny account of her travels, and the people, politics and culture she encountered. Rebecca will share the joys and challenges of this journey with RSGS audiences in late 2022.

1989

Val McDermid (Little, Brown, August 2022)

1989. The world is changing, and Allie Burns is still on the front line, covering the stories that count. Although she is no longer an investigative journalist, her instincts are sharper than ever. When she discovers a lead about the exploitation of society’s most vulnerable, Allie is determined to give a voice to those who have been silenced. As she edges closer to exposing the truth, she travels behind the Iron Curtain, to East Berlin on the brink of revolution. The dark heart of the story is more shocking than she ever imagined. And to tell it, Allie must risk her freedom and her life…

Reader Offer – 20% discount

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

The 10 Global Problems We Can Actually Fix

Rowan Hooper (Profile Books, January 2022)

Everest 1922

The Epic Story of the First Attempt on the World’s Highest Mountain

Mick Conefrey (Allen & Unwin, April 2022)

Everest’s reputation has changed radically in recent years, with long queues of climbers on the Lhotse Face, lurid tales of frozen corpses and piles of high-altitude trash. But once, Everest was remote and inaccessible, a mysterious place where only the most heroic dared to tread. The first attempt on Everest in 1922 is an extraordinary story full of controversy and drama, populated by larger-than-life characters, and ending in tragedy. Using diaries, letters, published and unpublished accounts, Conefrey creates a rich narrative, exploring the motivations of key individuals, and detailing the backroom politics and bitter rivalries.

Edinburgh the Walk

Roddy McDougall and Elizabeth May (Mica Publishing, May 2022)

This guidebook describes a ‘green chain walk’ of 69km around Edinburgh, divided into eight sections of between 8km and 11km. Linking the city’s green spaces, it guides the walker through glorious cityscape, coastline, river, parkland and over the city’s famous ‘seven hills’, with wonderful views along the way. The route is detailed on 45 fully-annotated Ordnance Survey Street View maps, and geological, historical, architectural and cultural highlights are included.

only £7.99 (RRP

£9.99)

Britain’s Birds

A Treasury of Fact, Fiction and Folklore

Jo Woolf (National Trust, March 2022)

Readers of The Geographer can buy How to Spend a Trillion Dollars from Waterstones online for only £7.99 (RRP £9.99). To order, please visit www.waterstones.com and quote code ‘TRILLION’ at the checkout.

Phone 01738 455050 or visit www.rsgs.org to join the RSGS.

Lord John Murray House, 15-19 North Port, Perth, PH1 5LU Charity SC015599

Written by RSGS’s Writer-in-Residence and packed with natural history facts, folklore and literary appearances for more than 70 of Britain’s birds, this is a fascinating and charming guide. Did you know that according to legend blackbirds were originally white? Or that the number of times you hear a cuckoo determines how many children you’ll have? Or that woodpeckers have special shock absorbers built into their beaks? Or that in 1958 a puffin was blown inland and knocked a man off his bicycle near Bromley? There are 40 beautiful custom illustrations in the book too, which will help beginners to identify the birds.

Printed by www.jtcp.co.uk on Claro Silk 115gsm paper. 100% FSC certified using vegetable-based inks in a 100% chemistry-free process.