Ready to respond – Shetland communities take climate action

Weather has always shaped life in Shetland. It determines whether boats sail, whether supermarket shelves are stocked, and whether plans need to change. Anyone living in the islands knows that you pay attention to the elements.

That is one reason conversations about climate change can feel different here. Changes are more noticeable, often prompting practical discussions about food, transport, energy, homes and how communities adapt when circumstances change.

The annual Shetland Climate Festival offers a window into that conversation. But the most interesting thing is not what the festival says about climate change. It is what it reveals about Shetland and its response to a changing reality.

Shetland’s strength is its community, and the way people come together to solve problems. In a place this size, you know who can fix things. You know whose field the tatties came out of. And, increasingly, you know what can be done to mitigate climate change.

That means communities having honest discussions and creating innovative solutions.

Anne Maver is Senior Climate Change Officer at Shetland Islands Council and one of the festival’s organisers. She says it’s not uncommon for people to think that climate change might bring some benefits like more sunny days and warmer summers. But there’s a different reality.

Anne explains that different parts of the world experience climate change in different ways. “Shetland is experiencing the effects of climate change. We are seeing more extreme, adverse weather, heavier rainfall in winter including more storms,” she says. “This means that boats are cancelled, supermarket shelves don’t fill, and it impacts people heading away for hospital appointments.”

Ayesha Huda runs Shetland’s Climate Cafe, where regulars range from 12-year-olds to folk in their 90s. The subjects discussed at the cafe have run from peatland restoration to kites in wind energy. She thinks the conversation lands differently here.

“We are affected by the weather all the time,” she says. “So, the changing climate, stronger winds and storms which can impact our travel and food supply, is not abstract. It has consequences which are felt directly and frequently.”

And the energy story runs through all of it. “Shetland’s relationship with oil and gas, renewable energy, electricity infrastructure and employment means conversations about climate can quickly become conversations about jobs, energy security and fairness.”

Then there are the creative solutions. Take the Polycrub story. Designed to withstand some of the harshest growing conditions in the UK, it is a local solution to a local challenge – and a successful community business.

They have been going up steadily, at schools, in communities, and increasingly in private gardens for over a decade. They take real work, and much of that work is done by volunteers.

What Anne hopes to see is greater access rather than ownership. Everybody in a community able to get at a growing bed, she says, not only those who can afford their own.

She is realistic about the limits of local produce. This is a hard climate to grow produce, and some things will never come out of Shetland soil. But with more extreme weather, she thinks the direction of travel is clear. “In years to come, we’re going to have to go back to growing our own,” she says. “And getting our own local produce in gear.”

If developing gardening skills is one part of the solution, the council’s climate change team also hopes people can learn to make and mend too.

A recent addition to the festival is a repair cafe, where people bring along something broken and learn to fix it themselves. Elsewhere in the council, the Kit for All scheme takes in sports clothing and boots so families are not endlessly buying new kit that gets outgrown in a season.

That is the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ principle working practically.

The festival brings together organisations, communities and residents to explore what climate action looks like in a Shetland context – and share these ideas.

In a place with long winters and high fuel bills, the council’s climate change team understands the challenges. The festival features home energy-saving tips and advice on improving insulation and accessing grants.

“We know it’s a really difficult time for people and we also understand that climate change may not be the highest priority for everyone,” Anne says. But by taking a Shetland-specific approach, the idea is to explore how climate action can help the environment, communities and individuals.

Anne and her colleagues are keen to have conversations about climate change in Shetland, as evidenced in the Climate Yarns series. The aim is to look at climate change through a Shetland lens with people who live and work here. “We really wanted to have real community conversations,” Anne says, “and make climate change as relatable as possible.”

The yarn has focused on schools, their dinner menus and their recycling. A day out at Noss reviewed the effects of climate change on the Shetland bird population. Each yarn is filmed and published. Anne reckons the approach works because people recognise the places and the folk involved.

In schools, the School Climate Roadshows programme goes further. The team develops it themselves and keeps it matter-of-fact rather than frightening. There is a video series called Jargon Busters, which takes the terminology apart and makes it easier to understand. There are activities, games and workshops included to reinforce learning and understanding. Then, at the end, they ask the children how they want to tackle climate change.

The aim, Anne says, is to leave them thinking “what can I do or influence as a young person wanting to help?”. Last year’s answer was tree and seed planting, and it happened. Recycling is the likely next one, so a schools’ challenge is on the cards. The children’s own request was for safe active travel paths, so they could cycle and walk to school.

Andrea Sanchez is Community Development Officer for Shetland with the Highlands and Islands Climate Hub and sees climate work across the whole region.

A lot of the action here, she says, is community-based and locally driven, whether that is food growing, energy projects or transport. “Folk are really keen to find ways of doing things that work for Shetland, rather than necessarily trying to replicate what has been done somewhere else.”

She points to Climate Action Ting, a green participatory budgeting project delivered across Shetland in 2025/26, as the thing she would most like to see picked up elsewhere.

Communities were given funding and the chance to decide for themselves what mattered. What came back was more varied than anyone predicted: growing food, creating outdoor spaces, repair and reuse, renewable energy. “I’d really like to see more places experimenting with this,” she says.

She rates the collaboration between organisations too, and notes that Shetland has a local authority with a dedicated climate team. Not everywhere does.

Scale is the constraint people on the mainland tend not to think about: you can have a good idea and then find there is nobody locally to deliver it, or the materials must be shipped north. Island communities have committed people, but often the same people, spread across several groups at once.

“It’s not that people aren’t willing to act; often it’s quite the opposite,” Andrea says. “It’s about making sure they have the infrastructure, funding, skills and support to turn that willingness into action.”

Action that helps mitigate the reality of climate change.

The water is getting warmer and more acidic, and along the coast it is getting higher. The projection is that sea level will rise by around a metre in Shetland by 2100, according to the Scottish Government’s Shetland Islands Regional Marine Plan. Add coastal erosion, more burn flooding, more surface flooding, and new pests and invasive species arriving with the changed conditions.

Anne’s climate change team are asking the practical questions. Is our infrastructure ready? Which low-lying areas, which harbours, which roads need attention? Where is the work needed first?

And then there is the threat to iconic Shetland landmarks.

St Ninian’s Isle. The tombolo, that shining ribbon of sand that everyone who has ever visited Shetland has a photograph of. According to projections from the Scottish Government-funded research project Dynamic Coast, the beach could be underwater within 50 to 75 years. Those projections run from 2050 to 2100 and will be refined further as new data comes in, funded by the Scottish Government’s coastal adaptation fund.

The threat to these special Shetland places is also where the story turns hopeful.

“Places like St Ninian’s Isle have a lot of sentimental value for people in the communities,” Anne says. “When places like that start becoming affected, the problem will become more real, and people will be able to relate to it a bit more. We need to look at these things now, rather than wait until it’s too late and they’re gone and never to be retrieved again.”

And Shetland’s communities are already coming together to solve these problems. In Shetland, the weather has never been somebody else’s problem, and neither, it turns out, is the climate.