Perthshire can continue to drive forward rural Scotland’s low energy future as another community carbon-cutting project gets off the ground, according to backers.
Crieff residents have been urged to sign up to the project, which could initially see community allotments created and eventually car sharing and home energy efficiency surveys.
Nearby Comrie, Braco and Muthill have all undergone energy-use transformations in recent years, thanks to the efforts of villagers.
Further afield, Alyth won a national cash prize for its efficiency achievements and parts of Perth have also striven to reduce their carbon footprints.
SNP election candidate Roseanna Cunningham said the burgeoning Crieff initiative is typical of the local attitude.
“Perthshire communities have been at the vanguard of the low-carbon culture, with some excellent examples of how communities working together really can act locally for a global impact,” she said.
“Projects such as the Muthill Low-Carbon Community Project, Comrie Carbon Challenge and the Letham Climate Challenge have been successful in securing funding and developing very interesting schemes to reduce their communities’ carbon footprints and help to tackle climate change.”
The Crieff effort is being driven by local not-for-profit firm New Caledonian Woodlands.Long-termDirector Andy Ross said, “We’re looking at this being a long-term project and we need to get the community of Crieff to reduce its impact on the environment in line with the Scottish Climate Change Act.
“We’d initially be looking at starting up things like a food-growing community allotment project, which a lot of people were talking about.
“The idea is we would then draw people into other schemes like car sharing, because there are a lot of people going to work in the same place but taking their own cars at the moment.
“We could also look at how people heat their homes and use electricity, and a wood fuel project has also been suggested.
“We noticed how well schemes had gone in places like Comrie, Braco and Muthill and thought it was strange that nothing had been done in Crieff. A lot of the issues are the same here, although Crieff is a bit bigger.”
Andy said he and colleagues from New Caledonian Woodlands are happy to voluntarily “steward” the project through its initial phase, but it will be up to participants to keep it going.
“We’ve had a second meeting and it’s slow beginnings, so it may take quite a while to get that community buy-in, but people have been supportive and interested and we’re gathering lots of names.
“The next thing will be to take the idea to as many people as possible and then we will start to think about looking for money.”
Ms Cunningham added that such schemes could see at least 22,000 jobs created by 2015 in Scotland’s low-carbon industries, backed by the £70 million National Renewables Infrastructure Fund.
“Indeed, Scotland’s low-carbon industries are expected to account for 130,000 jobs by 2020,” she said. “I am sure that Crieff will want to be part of that success story.”
Photo used under Creative Commons licence courtesy of Flickr user CarbonNYC.