Winding down the outreach activity of Data 4 Climate Action Edinburgh

I am somewhat reluctantly, but mainly with a sense of great relief, announcing that I’m no longer going to be seeking new volunteers or doing outreach.

I’m very grateful to all the collaborators, all the volunteers and all the friends with whom I’ve discussed, gathered, analysed and done storytelling with data over the past four years since the summer of 2022. I’ve found it all very worthwhile, had a lot of fun and I’m really glad we were able to deliver data visualisations for EBRIC, a carbon footprint for FCCT, membership and activity data support to ECCAN, and created a beautiful, working dashboard, all of which you can read about in our blog. And our code and data files are mostly available under an open licence on GitHub.

Climate action is more important now than ever. But I have come to the realisation that the running of the group is not sustainable for me. My professional situation changed after I established the group - I left Edinburgh University data management and was very fortunate to find a very fulfilling and demanding data analysis post in the public sector. So I no longer have the same amount of free time. Furthermore, the organisational side of D4CAE occasionally involves some work that I have found more stressful and more draining than I had expected. And I have other commitments that require my energy now. I have learned a lot about myself this year, and I want to just shift my time to things that fit my strengths and allow me to manage my energy levels.

The good news however, is that I feel in a sense my work here is done - and the baton is or has passed to others. The group has not taken off the way I’d pictured. But originally I hoped the university would run this project as a climate hub, to collaborate with ECCAN’s predecessor organisation. And I believe I see evidence that the functions I was trying to carry out with the group are happening elsewhwere, or there is potential for that to happen. For example: Edinburgh University had a stall at the Edinburgh Climate Festival last year; ECCAN has a data expert on the staff; City of Edinburgh Council publishes detailed carbon footprints every year as required under public sector reporting requirements. And our report did identify tools that are easy to use to produce nice visualisations of climate data relevant to Edinburgh - we published examples of those in our ABCD report:

And there is a growing team of experts at Public Health Scotland identifying health impacts across Scotland resulting from climate change. And a shift in the media towards mainstreaming of climate action - I always love to hear good news stories of people in Scotland working together on climate action.

There remain areas where things could improve though. When I addressed the Edinburgh chapter of the Royal Statistical Society recently, I heard that there still are educators at Edinburgh University looking for projects for their students who want to collaborate with climate volunteers in the city. I never got to create a bulletin board for that purpose - it would have been much easier to do from inside the university. So I want to suggest in a constructive way, (because I’m hoping others may be able to succeed in this respect where I failed)… I hope people in the university such as ECCI and the university community engagement team will work with ECCAN, and perhaps the City of Edinburgh Council, to set up some kind of clearing house for student projects and potentially staff and student volunteering more widely. Rather than different teams in the university competing with each other to identify projects.

So the upshot in practical terms is we won’t be producing a D4CAE report any more. I won’t run drop-ins or seek new projects. I’m not going to take down the dashboard, but I’m also not promising to update that. And I don’t plan to do regular emails out to my volunteers. If I receive requests for support, I’ll probably try to steer them to ECCAN or elsewhere. So it’s a form of indefinite hibernation for D4CAE if you will, like a wee hedgehog.

Thank you again to everyone who has engaged with us in any way, it has been a fabulous journey and I have enjoyed it all tremendously.

P

Pauline Ward
Founder, Data 4 Climate Action Edinburgh

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