The Place of Extractive Landscapes in a Just Transition: Assessing and Co-Designing Transdisciplinary Networks for Action

In 2019, the Scottish Government passed an amended Climate Change Act that mapped out
environmental targets for 2050 while responding to a structural shift to deindustrialization. As
Scotland moves towards a 'green' future of alternative energy sources, low greenhouse gas emissions
and remediated landscapes, how do we ensure that this transition is a 'just' one for workforces and
communities that have depended on the extraction of fossil fuels?
This project focuses on the formidable social and environmental challenges of former opencast mining
landscapes, extensively problematised as ruined sites that are exhausted and abandoned, and hence
of no current or future 'value' in such a transition. Certainly, as sites of toxification, former coalfields
have been met by an explicitly cross-sector response that emphasises remediation, using the expertise
of a range of environmental and geoscience fields. Such efforts have, however, been situated in land
management strategies, such as a return to pasture/grouse moor and housebuilding. While erasing
signs of past industrial activity, these approaches concentrate the resulting value of such sites within
the hands of a small number of already wealthy individuals and organisations, and do little to provide
sustainable employment for local communities. As coalfield communities in Scotland continue to
experience significantly detrimental socio-economic impacts from the decline of the industry, and
employment in low carbon/renewable energy has declined in recent years, these landscape
remediation and management strategies need to be critically appraised in terms of their social
impacts; and new possibilities for socially 'just' environmental/geoscience research to impact
governance need to be explored.
The project allies with efforts in the Scottish Government to design a 'just transition' evident in the
establishment of a Just Transition Commission in 2018. It will provide a new line of policy-orientated
research that picks up on the scattered research projects of environmental and geoscientists working
on extractive landscapes. It builds on the concerns of the labour movement in Scotland to ensure that
environmentally sustainable transitions are designed with the central input of workers and their
representatives, and can ensure well-paid, secure employment