In collaboration with Lyth Arts Centre and Environmental Research Institute (University of Highlands & Islands), we’ve been selected as a Creative Carbon Scotland Climate Beacon for a collaborative engagement programme around COP26 looking at issues of land justice, developmental policies and initiatives for our region, and climate colonialism. From September, we will be launching a podcast of discussions and artist radio broadcast commissions and starting our travelling community cinema across Caithness and Sutherland. 

Timespan is assembling a working group of community organisers, historians and lawyers to commission an actionable immigration policy for the Highlands based on social justice, the Highland’s role in Empire, reparations, the asymmetric violence of climate change and land redistribution. 

Lyth Arts Centre has commissioned The People’s Palace of Possibility in collaboration with The Bare Project and the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (University of Glasgow). The People’s Palace of Possibility will recruit Palace Citizens, made up of young people and local groups, to challenge the prevailing consensus on land and climate justice through radical acts of imagination. 

Timespan and Lyth Arts Centre are based in Caithness and Sutherland, North East Highlands. Our region suffers from the typical steep challenges of remote rural economies, namely out-migration of young people which has caused depopulation (forecasts of further depopulation of 21% by 2041) and an ageing population, fuel poverty, access to health and other services, unemployment and precarious low-income seasonal work. 

We are located in the region of world-leading renewable wind, wave and tidal energy schemes. This provides Scotland with 26% of its total renewable electricity and produces the highest percentage of onshore wind, tidal and hydro energy generation in the UK. However, the Highland region has the most expensive electricity in Scotland and has some of the highest rates of fuel poverty in Scotland, with 56% of residents experiencing fuel poverty including 74% of the elderly population.

Climate change is already here and will increasingly influence every political and social question, having a huge impact on near-future lifestyles. Agriculture and fishing, heritage tourism and energy production, the primary industries which keep Caithness and Sutherland sustainable and functioning, are both subject to threats and contribute significant studies in the field of climate science.