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Unconventional oil and gas extraction (UOGE) including fracking for shale gas is underway in North America on a large scale, and in Australia and some other countries. It is viewed as a major source of global energy needs by proponents. Critics consider fracking and UOGE an immediate and long-term threat to global, national, and regional public health and climate. Rarely have governments brought together relatively detailed assessments of direct and indirect public health risks associated with fracking and weighed these against potential benefits to inform a national debate on whether to pursue this energy route. The Scottish government has now done so in a wide-ranging consultation underpinned by a variety of reports on unconventional gas extraction including fracking. This paper analyses the Scottish government approach from inception to conclusion, and from procedures to outcomes. The reports commissioned by the Scottish government include a comprehensive review dedicated specifically to public health as well as reports on climate change, economic impacts, transport, geology, and decommissioning. All these reports are relevant to public health, and taken together offer a comprehensive review of existing evidence. The approach is unique globally when compared with UOGE assessments conducted in the USA, Australia, Canada, and England. The review process builds a useful evidence base although it is not without flaws. The process approach, if not the content, offers a framework that may have merits globally.

Phases of rapid climate change throughout the early to mid Holocene coincide with regional human population expansion in Scotland and North-West Europe. Palaeoenvironmental signals of climate and anthropogenically driven vegetation changes can therefore be difficult to separate. To identify whether it is possible to distinguish potential signatures of anthropogenic clearance and agricultural activities from climatic drivers of landscape change in the early to mid Holocene in the region, two topographically contrasting sites on the Isle of Skye and the Isle of Bute were investigated. A multiproxy approach including pollen, spore, microcharcoal, loss on ignition and particle size analyses was adopted to investigate changes in vegetation and climate. There are subtle indications that the 8200 cal BP climate event had an effect on the vegetation composition at both sites. Signals of anthropogenic woodland clearance are apparent early in the sequence at Peat Hill (Bute), indicated by a peak in Poaceae (grass) cereal-type (7–14%) at 8592–8793 cal BP, alongside a decrease in arboreal pollen, which could not be associated with a regional episode of climate change. Early to mid Holocene vegetation changes at Lyndale House (Skye) occur alongside regional changes in precipitation and sea level and therefore cannot be readily separated. Continuous declines in arboreal pollen from ca. 5000 cal BP at Lyndale House indicates the onset of widespread clearance on Skye via felling and sustained grazing pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With evidence suggesting that climate change is resulting in changes within the hydrologic cycle, the ability to robustly model hydroclimatic response is critical. This paper assesses how extreme runoff—1:2- and 1:30-year return period (RP) events—may change at a regional level across the UK by the 2080s (2069–2098). Capturing uncertainty in the hydroclimatic modelling chain, flow projections were extracted from the EDgE (End-to-end Demonstrator for improved decision-making in the water sector in Europe) multi-model ensemble: five Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) General Circulation Models and four hydrological models forced under emissions scenarios Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 2.6 and RCP 8.5 (5 × 4 × 2 chains). Uncertainty in extreme value parameterisation was captured through consideration of two methods: generalised extreme value (GEV) and generalised logistic (GL). The method was applied across 192 catchments and aggregated to eight regions. The results suggest that, by the 2080s, many regions could experience large increases in extreme runoff, with a maximum mean change signal of +34% exhibited in East Scotland (1:2-year RP). Combined with increasing urbanisation, these estimates paint a concerning picture for the future UK flood landscape. Model chain uncertainty was found to increase by the 2080s, though extreme value (EV) parameter uncertainty becomes dominant at the 1:30-year RP (exceeding 60% in some regions), highlighting the importance of capturing both the associated EV parameter and ensemble uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adaptation to climate change has often been discussed from the perspectives of social vulnerability and community vulnerability, recognising that characteristics at local level will influence the particular adaptations undertaken. However, the extent to which national-level systemic factors influence and shape measures defined as adaptations has seldom been recognised. Focusing on adaptation to climate change in forestry, this study uses the example of two countries in the northern hemisphere with different forest ownership structures, forestry industry and traditions: Sweden, with strong private, non-industrial ownership, dominant forest industry and long forestry traditions; and Scotland, with forest ownership dominated by large estates and investment forestry based on plantations of exotic conifer species. The study shows how adaptation to climate change is structurally embedded and conditioned, which has resulted in specific challenges and constraints for different groups of forest owners within these two different contexts. This produces a specific set of political spaces and policy tools by rendering climate change in relation to forestry manageable, negotiable and practical/logical in specific ways. It is recommended that the focus of future work on climate-related issues and development of adaptation measures and policy should not be primarily on climate-related factors, but on institutional analysis of structural factors and logics in target sectors, in order to critically explore concepts of agency and power within these processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches the issue of climate change and the response to it in Scotland from the perspective of genres of expectation and normality, focusing in particular on the relationship between genre, the political imagination, and calls for 'climate realism'. Functioning partly as provocation and partly as a piece of critical theory on the problematic aspects of contemporary genres of expectation in Scotland, it discusses the push for normality as a driving force in the construction of imagined futures in the context of climate change, problematising how this fits with established expectations of the Scottish political imaginary and its futurity. Using the work of the scholar of genre and affect Lauren Berlant and her identification of genre as a means of 'moving on', it considers the idea of materially contingent narratives as an exit strategy from the present moment. To illustrate this, it briefly discusses Jenni Fagan's contemporary climate change novel The Sunlight Pilgrims as an example of 'irrealist' confrontation of climate change and how this relates to the concept of the Anthropocene as an everyday experience. Ultimately, it concludes that contemporary attempts at climate realism require engagement with the irreal material circumstances of climate change and the fundamentally 'super-wicked' nature of climate processes in order to escape the constraints of progress, restoration, and normalisation as genre structures in discussion of climate futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]