transport, environment and rural affairs

Convener: Gillian Slider MSYP - Ross, Skye and Inverness West

The Transport, Environment and Rural Affairs committee has worked extremely well over the past few years with great members and conveners with a clear vision and it just keeps on getting better. There is now a good grounding of knowledge through the membership on the issues surrounding our three main remits and a growing excitement to solve the problems within them. With a new convener and some new members to the committee the enthusiasm to improve Scotland for the better just keeps growing.

So far this year we have held a Sitting in Orkney where the theme was a sustainable future which was not only extremely relevant but also very useful to the committee and the rest of the membership.

As a committee we have made great progress. We decided upon our 3 campaigns for the coming year and we have a clear plan of action. Our top priority is to educate young people throughout Scotland about the environmental issue. When we have finished our campaign we hope to have young people that have an awareness of themselves within the environment and what they can do to impact positively to the solution. We want young people to have a greater understanding about the environmental issue. We want young people to feel empowered to make a change and to be passionate about the issues that face them. Finally we want to improve the curriculum to increase environmental education throughout Scotland.

So how are we going to do this? Well each member in the committee is going to research environmental issues in their area to find out about:

• Knowledge among young people already
• Projects in their area
• Environmental companies
• Plans within their local authority and local schools

We are going to campaign locally possible nationally to raise awareness of the environmental issue and to persuade the Scottish parliament to improve the curriculum in schools to teach more about the environment. We are going to promote environmental education and eco-schools projects. As a committee we are going to meetings with Fiona Hislop MSP and Mike Russell MSP as well as work with local authority Directors of Education and Directors of Environment. Finally we are also planning to do Questionnaires and Petitions so that we have solid evidence to bring to decision makers.

As a committee, we chose this campaign after finding from a consultation that was completed by two members of the committee in their school, namely Carron and Scott that 41% of the young people did not know what renewable energy was. We found this alarming and thought that educating young people on the environmental issues should be our top priority!

Once we have achieved these aims, as a committee, we are planning to go on to focus on excessive packaging in our environment remit.

Now it’s not going to be easy, but I along with my committee are determined to succeed and I believe that our rewards will be directly related to the amount of work and effort put in and we are all more than capable of both.

A Rough Guide to Remit ...

The Environment
Sustainable Development
National Parks & Natural Heritage
Transport, including cost, availability and concessionary travel
Rural Issues
Wildlife
Farming & Fishing

 

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