Maybe it’s because just over a year ago COP26 was on our doorstep, the world’s biggest climate conference in our backyard, that it feels disappointing that COP27 in Sharm El Sheik seemed to pass without the public and media focus that such a threat deserves.
The coverage and analysis was there of course, but I’d argue that you had to be keen to find it, whereas Glasgow’s conference coverage seemed omnipresent, urgent and essential.
That could of course be from living in the local (and by that I mean UK) bubble that hosting brings, and certainly Glasgow was always planned to be one of the “big” iterations, the next of those after the historic Paris agreement. In addition, if distractions sometimes feel like excuses, the events of 2022 might be exempted for being on the valid list, given the impact to business, people and their families.
Both are solid explanations for the lower-than-expected impact, but honestly that jars against the evidence of climate change in the last year. Record-high summer temperatures, scorched grass and wildfires followed by record-high winter temperatures across Europe and ski resorts without the white slippy stuff that they could usually take for granted.
There have been years without snow before, and hot summers too, but you would have to have your head a long way down in the sand to not watch our weather and wonder where we are headed and how quickly.
Its public importance is a key topic for our engineering sector, given their responsibilities for reducing the impact of the existing systems they build and maintain to support everything we currently do, whilst at the same time designing, developing and delivering fundamentally different systems to eliminate impact as far as reasonably practicable. They also have customers to support in their own commitments to reduction and elimination, and, in a labour market where skills are at a premium, their actions have to align with intentions if they want to attract and retain the resource essential to their operation.
For some – but not all – 2022 was a difficult year to match ambition with progress in that respect, perhaps a parallel with the slightly flat COP27 that I perceived. Any business will understandably react to the crisis that risks their very existence, so it’s understandable that energy costs threatening to rise by many multiples will be the recipient of most of the available oxygen.
The companies which have managed to advance their net zero journey despite the year’s challenges have generally followed a path of collaboration with their customers, suppliers and their colleagues, with a few brave enough to present their successes and challenges to their peers, so that others might make more rapid progress through their learnings.
Babcock & Wilcox (B&W) was an early volunteer to share, and is the manufacturer of Diamond Power boiler cleaning equipment in Dumbarton that has improved boiler efficiencies and lowered emissions for decades. B&W is now charting its path and actions to provide decarbonisation and other clean power production technologies to support the world’s energy transition.
To Aberdeen next and Texo, a multi-disciplinary industrial services company delivering a wide range of projects for renewables, energy, marine sectors and others. With a stated intention to reach net zero by 2032, its goal is among the most ambitious in our sector.
And finally, staying in the north-east, RWG (Repair and Overhauls) Ltd provides maintenance solutions for industrial aero-derivative gas generators and marine gas turbines, using highly skilled remanufacturing techniques that have made it a circular economy champion before the phrase reached common usage. Extending that approach to planning its roadmap to decarbonise operations, it has already achieved significant reductions in carbon emissions and continues to work for more.
Credit where credit is due to these organisations for advancing these ambitions in tricky times, and especially for freely sharing their journey for others’ benefit as part of our programme to support our sector and plan our transition to net zero.
The urgency – and space – to concentrate on planning for decarbonisation we expect will return broader and deeper in 2023, likely with more pressure from supply chains as expectation evolves into compliance for customers setting their own roadmap. For us, facilitating an engineering community led support programme is we believe the way to ensure that effort and resource are pointed at tackling the challenge, keeping that affordable and therefore open to all.
Paul Sheerin is chief executive of Scottish Engineering
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel