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

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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