Category: #CILIPSGoGreen, Blog

Throughout Scotland’s Climate Week 2022, we’ll be sharing ideas and inspiration from our ongoing #CILIPSGoGreen library sustainability campaign, drawing on the wonderful work taking place across Scotland’s libraries to grow environmental understanding and action. Today’s theme is:

Transport

Travel and the Climate Crisis

Did you know that transport accounts for 36% of Scotland’s carbon emissions (Exploring the Climate Crisis at the National Library of Scotland) and 38% of those emissions come from cars (Transport Scotland)? As the beating hearts of their communities and the literal embodiments of accessible local life and culture, Scotland’s libraries are uniquely placed to inspire sustainable travel, which is in turn playing a vital part in the nation’s journey towards Net Zero.

The CILIPS Journey So Far

In both the original CILIP Scotland Carbon Neutrality Plan 2022 and our mid-year progress update, we made sustainable travel one of our three key action plan aims and took several steps to encourage this at our June 2022 Annual Conference. After all, if 150 conference delegates per day had all attended by car, the carbon impact would have been at least 13.5tCO2e, but if those 150 delegates each purchased a train ticket instead, the impact would equate to just 0.26tCO2e, only 2% of the car carbon cost!

Based on our estimates from speaker expenses, and our own decision to transport conference materials ourselves rather than use a courier, we calculated at least a 1/3 reduction in our overall conference travel carbon footprint. Delegates also shared some fantastic suggestions for how to enhance this step in subsequent years, including post-pandemic conference car shares and providing details about electric car charging points in our delegate information.

Of course, no mode of transport can truly be considered sustainable if it does not also meet accessibility requirements, and with the voices of disabled people all-too-often silenced in traditionally ableist environmental debates (a theme we’ll be exploring in greater detail later this week), we needed to ensure that our delegate information also made this clear. Indeed, highlighting the fact that not everyone has the luxury of choosing between equally comfortable and accessible types of travel showed that the CILIPS community’s moves towards carbon neutrality require a collective and not just individual member effort: all doing what we personally can, informed by the knowledge that when we come together physically or virtually it is always from unique perspectives and circumstances.

How can libraries inspire sustainable travel?

Three starting points:

• Incentives – Wordsworth Grasmere, along with several other museums and cultural spaces around the country, incentive sustainable travel by offering discounts to visitors who arrive via public transport. While one of the many, many wonderful things about libraries is that so much of what we offer is already free, could your service do something similar for chargeable event bookings? Even better, be like The Walking Library and build free sustainable travel – on foot, in this case – right into your events programme! Find out more on incentivising sustainable travel in this fantastic guide by CILIP Green Libraries partner Julie’s Bicycle.
• Information – from bookmarking bus and train timetables onto public PCs to building library collections that evidence the significant impact, positive or negative, that different forms of transport have on the nation’s carbon footprint, could you use library resources to inform users and further their learning?
• Inspiration – Librarians are leaders in their communities and you can inspire people to travel sustainably by walking the walk (literally) yourselves. From making the change to electric vehicles like Orkney Library & Archive’s iconic Baby McBookface van to making lightweight deliveries by bicycle like our friends at Glasgow Seed Library, there are large and small steps every library service can take to incorporate sustainable transport into its operations.

Stay tuned for more #CILIPSGoGreen x #ScotClimateWeek blog posts coming soon. 

Please also consider joining the CILIP Green Libraries Network to be part of a collaborative online platform for Green Champions across LIS where we are creating ideas, supporting each other and shaping the future of the Green Libraries Partnership.

by Kirsten MacQuarrie, CILIPS Membership Officer