The Future Speaks will be on Fridays in the months leading up to the Holyrood Elections

The next 'The Future Speaks' event is on Fri 5 Feb at 5pm. Participants will be from South Scotland - which includes East Lothian .

Registration and more details for that are on Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-future-speaks-south-scotland-tickets-137176601909.

You can find details of the other 6 events on the same link

Link to the first event’s recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXBu397g5gE worth a watch

One of CAEL’s members, Karen Buist, attended the first ‘The Future Speaks’ and here are her notes and thoughts:

I went along to 'The Future Speaks’ event (Lothian) last Friday - the first in a series of online panel discussions around Scotland on the climate and ecological emergency between high school students, MPs and MSPs.

I would really recommend going to at least one of these events to be held over the next couple of months.

For anyone interested, my experience of the Lothian event on 22nd was:

It was a real privilege to be in the company of with clever, articulate, passionate young people posing good questions to politicians and holding them to account

Each took their turn to sum up at the end . All said they were more impressed than they had expected to be by the interest and apparent commitment of the politicians, but with some reservations :

- it should not be the job of young people to provide the hope for the future … 'the future is bleak for young people’ .. awful to be thinking 50 years ahead and imagine how grim their future could be if action isn’t take now

- not young people’s job to inform / educate teachers (which had been suggested in one response). ‘ You need to make changes for us as you are in power’

- Can we actually trust politicians ?

- Hope isn’t enough . Targets and policies aren’t enough. Action needed.

- Politicians need to remember global picture …. i.e. those who suffer most from climate change globally are leat responsible for it

- Covid crisis is reported on daily, scientific response considered urgent, information disseminated constantly , so why not same for Climate Crisis

- There’s no vaccine for Climate Change

- The pandemic had been predicted but ignored .. don’t let same happen with climate change