The one-day Orkney Climate COP is a response to the gradual global broadening of focus of climate action to include practical adaptation to the realities of a changing climate as well as efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Practical adaptation brings in the whole community to identify problems and come up with ways to tackle them. The COP has four sessions – on Energy, Food from the Land, Housing, and Transport. In each sessions, speakers will list actions that can be taken at a countrywide level, or by communities, and sometimes by individuals as well, and the audience will assess, with a panel to assist. In addition there are several talks and workshops on other days of the Festival.

Prof. Timothy Lang, who opens the COP, produced a report earlier this year on the UK’s food security, based on discussion with key people in the food sector. and investigate. His conclusion was that the UK is not well prepared, and urgent action is needed now to plan for coping with shocks to the food system. Part of a national plan, he says, has to be to bring in communities across the UK, so that each can make its own audits of local assets and needs and expand local resources. A fuller talk by him, Filling the Food Gap, is on Saturday 6 September at 10 am.

Tim Lang is Professor of Food Policy at City University of London’s Centre for Food Policy, which he founded in 1994 and directed until 2016. For four decades he has researched, written, advised and lectured on the food system at international, national and local levels, particularly in relation to health, environment, social justice, the political economy and consumer culture. He previously spent seven years as a hill farmer, an experience which shaped his work ever since.

This opening of the Orkney Climate COP is included in the ticket for the Energy session which follows immediately at 10 am.

The visit of Prof. Tim Lang has been made possible by funding from EventScotland.

The Orkney Climate COP is supported by the Highlands & Islands Climate Hub.