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FROM SAN CARLOS WATER TO CLEANER AIR FOR SCOTLAND

INTERVIEW: PROFESSOR CAMPBELL GEMMELL

By John Bynorth

Pictures courtesy of Professor Gemmell/ Ministry of Defence (HMS Antelope/South Georgia images)

As a young glaciologist, Professor Campbell Gemmell was stranded by the Argentinian invasion of South Georgia in 1982 and then saw his ice and rock samples destroyed on board a Royal Navy frigate that was blown up during the Falklands War. In his native Scotland, the environmental scientist has had a gun pointed at him by a farmer as he tried to improve the environmental landscape.

The Chair of the Cleaner Air For Scotland (CAFS) review also ran SEPA for nearly nine years, before holding the same role at the South Australian Environment Protection Authority for two-and-a- half years. It’s no wonder that he can claim to have forged a level of resilience that originated during his spell in the South Antarctic.

But just how did Professor Gemmell, pictured left briefing a field team on the Midtdalsbreen glacier in Norway, arrive at this point from his birthplace of Stirling, via the University of Aberdeen, the South Antarctic Peninsula, Norway, Switzerland, Oxford University, Alaska and Brussels enjoying a career as a policy consultant, running two environmental regulators and latterly a successful private consultancy?

Professor Gemmell recently dropped into the EPS offices to talk about his career and give his views on a range of topics from the environmental impact of Brexit, to Underground Coal Gasification and on the CAFS Review.

BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY AND FALKLANDS WAR

Born and brought up in Stirling, Campbell won a place at the University of Aberdeen in 1977. There, he thrived in its liberal environment and gained encouragement from his tutors to advance his studies in the fields of geomorphology and glaciology.

Campbell said environment and glaciated landscapes were “in his DNA” from an early age as he grew up in a town nestling between the volcanically formed and glaciated Ochil hills and the Campsies.

Achieving a first-class degree in geography (which included glacial geomorphology) in 1981, he continued at Aberdeen with a PhD in glaciology. He joined the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) for the 1981-1982 field season as part of his PhD on a project to assess and model ice shelf stability in the West Antarctic Peninsula as part of his studies.

But his timing could not have been worse. As Campbell and his colleagues collected ice samples on the sparsely populated island of South Georgia, a British overseas territory, Argentinian marines under the leadership of the country’s military junta were preparing for a clandestine invasion of the islands on April 2nd 1982, but the bigger target was the Falkland Islands.

The invasion came a few months after two of the BAS’s Twin Otter aircraft, pictured below, used to ferry BAS field staff around the West Antarctic had been destroyed in a devastating storm.

This had already put Campbell behind schedule with his field studies and the loss of the aircraft meant he had to readjust his thesis topic and itinerary and travel to South Georgia, getting there at the end of February 1982. Time was running out before the Sub- Antarctic winter closed in over the landscape.

But he and his colleagues had no idea of what was about to happen across the mountains from their small, inaccessible hut.

Argentinian marines, posing as scientists on board a supply vessel arrived at an old whaling station, at Leith adjacent to the main port of Grytviken and the BAS base of King Edward Point. Upon arrival they found their only ‘opposition’ to be members of a BAS field team and immediately claimed the territory for Argentina.

The BAS base commander alerted the then Governor of the Falklands, Rex Hunt, and the British protection vessel HMS Endurance was dispatched to the island. In the ensuing battle, supported by other vessels, British marines retook South Georgia, (pictured left in 2017). Meanwhile, Argentina invaded the Falklands and it took three months for the British to win it back with the loss of more than 900 military lives.

Professor Gemmell said: “We were in a hut for four weeks of field work, which I had squeezed in at the end of the Antarctic season before the snow and sea ice were due to lock down the fjord-like landscape and the tidewater glacier I was now studying. We had been due to be picked up on April 4th (two days after the invasion of South Georgia). Environmental Protection Scotland working for a cleaner, quieter, healthier and sustainable Scotland 2

“I and my field assistant were stuck on the other side of the mountain from where the bombardment took place following the Argentine landing. We could hear and feel the bangs going off on the other side of the island.

“While we were in the hut, the BAS field commander at the base sent some of the guys who were on the base (in King Edward Point) off to field locations. He stayed behind and was captured, along with 12 of his colleagues. They were taken prisoner of war by the Argentinians and eventually flown to Montevideo in Uruguay and handed over.

Campbell, picture left on Lyell Glacier on South Georgia with his ice drill shortly before the invasion, in March1982, his field assistant and two new colleagues, now in the hut, anxiously kept in touch with the crew of HMS Endurance (it used the codename ‘Red Plum’), via the infrequent BAS scheduled short wave radio slots (or ‘SKEDS’).

These had originally been set up to keep field stations in touch across the entire Antarctic peninsula and Sub- Antarctic Islands, including the South Sandwich, South Shetland, South Orkney islands and Elephant Island, but was a lifeline for the stranded men.

He added: “Red Plum’ would come up for evening ‘SKEDS’ and whilst we could, we stayed in contact with the Royal Navy ship and our colleagues scattered across South Georgia.

“We were running out of food and batteries; our mental state was not good and we lost radio contact after a few days which left us isolated. We were eventually taken off the islands when a British Signals officer jumped out of a military helicopter and told us that the base in South Georgia had been recaptured.”

With South Georgia reclaimed, the only way off South Georgia was by the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Antrim. The BAS field team of men (there were no women allowed in those days) gratefully boarded, along with two female TV documentary film-makers, with the aim of reaching the safety of Ascension Island. Campbell was even given an ‘HMS Antrim’ t-shirt to wear on board – as this picture shows.

But those plans were thrown into turmoil by the sinking of HMS Coventry and HMS Sheffield destroyers by Argentinian fighter jets on May 5th 1982. HMS Antrim, the third biggest destroyer in the Royal Navy fleet, was called up for frontline duties in South Atlantic as part of the Falklands conflict task force.

Professor Gemmell and his 12 colleagues were deemed surplus to requirements - aka needed to be outside the exclusion zone as civilians! - and helicoptered off HMS Antrim onto the smaller Navy frigate, HMS Antelope. Campbell and the team endured several tense nights in which they were kept below deck in case of an Argentinian attack before being offloaded at Ascension Island.

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However, Campbell’s ice samples from South Georgia were being safely stored in HMS Antelope’s vegetable freezer. Ascension Island’s main port lacked a harbour which meant that they could not be transferred to the island.

Professor Gemmell, pictured second from the right at the back of this picture, aboard the Antelope, added: “My ice samples were the centre-piece of my work, a key part of my research. We couldn’t transfer them so they stayed in the vegetable freezer of HMS Antelope.”

On May 22nd 1982, with Campbell and the rest of the BAS team safely off, HMS Antelope, also pictured below, and her precious cargo of Professor Gemmell’s ice and rock samples were in the thick of an aerial bombardment by Argentinian fighter jets in the sheltered bay of San Carlos Water, between east and west Falkland.

One of the planes dropped a 1,000 pound bomb into the hold, killing Royal Navy steward Mark Stephens on impact. The device, however, failed to explode but went off during efforts to deactivate the device, killing staff Sergeant James Prescott and seriously injuring a warrant officer.

Although of no importance compared to the loss of human life, Professor Gemmell’s ice samples were vaporised by the explosion. “They literally went down with the ship,” he said.

The loss of the samples meant that Campbell had to start his research from scratch. He said: “It was effectively my third model, for my PhD, as the first field season had been terminated by the hurricane force winds that destroyed the BAS aircraft.”

Campbell never forgot HMS Antelope and her crew. He included the enduring image of the night she was destroyed on the cover of his final Ph.D thesis, pictured right, which was submitted to Aberdeen University. It was dedicated to his mother and father “and Antelope.”

“It’s a very unusual set of credits in my PhD,” he added.

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Professor Gemmell, pictured below on Adelaide Island, said his experiences in the Antarctic and South Atlantic had made him better equipped for life, adding: “I was very close to where things were happening (in the conflict) and I developed a fair bit of resilience over the whole period.”

NORWAY’S GLACIERS

Professor Gemmell’s third model during his Ph.D field work was on Nigardsbreen, the Nigards glacier, one of the arms within the Jostedal ice cap, the largest glacier mass in continental Europe, which is located within the Jostedalsbreen National Park in Western Norway.

Campbell found the perfect environment in which to examine more closely the movement and sliding motion of glaciers in a warmer, and more accessible, northern European environment.

He stayed with a prominent member of the local community, Gudmund Nigard, in the village of Nigard at the base of the valley which lies in front of – and which was once covered by the glacier.

Campbell said the close connections between the names of some inhabitants of the local communities and the geography of the area, including the glacier showed the remarkable close links between the community and the environment. Climate and environmental change, as well as social change risk sundering these connections.

He said: “Nigardsbreen (pictured right) has now retreated so far back up the valley that it has virtually disappeared. I’ve been back a few times and it’s quite sad to see this because it used to run all the way down the valley to Nigard. I camped in Gudmund Nigard’s back garden beside his farm during my research and we developed a really good relationship.

“The families and geography are inextricably linked. For me, this all links to climate change and the environment.”

He pointed out how in 1745, Sweden’s king required all agricultural land to be mapped to ensure tithes, rents and incomes from the areas were paid. This has left a legacy of maps which detailed the size of the glaciers and how far they had retreated.

As the glaciers retreated, surveys were carried out to identify whether the newly available land could be used for grazing or other productive uses and the rents were adjusted to local land managers depending on how close the glacier was to their properties.

Professor Gemmell also discovered a goldmine of archived material about the Nigardselva River which runs into Norway’s largest fjord, the Sognefjord, and was first used for hydro-electric power in the 1870s to provide clean drinking water for the local population.

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He added: “As a glaciologist trying to find out more, this was brilliant. I had local people who knew all about the glacier, royal and official land records relating to the granting of incomes, water supply and electricity generation. It was everything I ever needed to know about the area. Apart from that, it’s a beautiful area.”

OXFORD AND ALASKA

After gaining his doctorate in glaciology, Professor Gemmell was offered a post-doctorate position at Christ Church (College), Oxford.

It allowed him to undertake an Oxford/US National Science Foundation co-funded programme that furthered his glaciology studies in Washington State and Alaska and his work made media headlines after it was picked up by New Scientist magazine and made a major story in 1986.

Collaborating with the University of Washington in Seattle, Professor Gemmell worked on the North and South Cascades glaciers before he headed for Alaska’ St Elias Range where he said he became “hooked” on making new discoveries about high glacial areas of the Panhandle area.

In a seemingly insurmountable and inhospitable terrain, one piece of Professor Gemmell’s research caught the media’s imagination after his New Scientist article about a glacial surge was published under the headline “Alaska’s galloping glacier.”

He described how the glacial surge happened on the Hubbard Glacier, closing off a sea inlet, cutting off marine wildlife and causing the water to leap over the barrier, flooding downstream in Alaska.

He said: “The New Scientist and the UK news media got excited about it. The glacier was moving at tens of metres a day. Most people are used to glaciers moving at a centimetre a day.”

You can read Professor Gemmell’s full article by clicking the following link to that edition of New Scientist (turn to pages 22-23) https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OthdH0JQGiYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

THE SCOTTISH DEVELOPMENT AGENCY

Professor Gemmell returned to Scotland after being offered a place on the Scottish Development Agency’s (SDA) management development programme.

He joked that the Government tried to ‘reprogramme’ him as an economist, but he found himself involved in attempts to revive Scotland’s industrial heartlands that had been severely damaged by the closure of steel making facilities and collieries in the 1980s.

British Leyland’s truck assembly plant Bathgate also shut in 1985, fuelling the concern about the impact of Scotland’s declining industrial heartland which had left behind large areas of derelict land that faced contamination issues.

Professor Gemmell’s role was to help stimulate economic development in Scotland on physical regeneration projects and an environmental scoring system was developed for major projects, which took into account land contamination from disused sites.

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He worked with Alistair Gilchrist, the SDA’s director of environmental development, who was tasked with revitalising old coal and shale bings other major sites and projects like the former Clydesdale steelworks (part of Ravenscraig, right) in Lanarkshire which scarred the landscape of the central belt.

Professor Gemmell added: “The old logic and economic geography of coal, steel, labour and transport all being co-located suddenly became irrelevant. People lost their jobs and a lot of companies walked away from their liabilities and responsibilities. It reinforced my view about the need for environmental regulation.”

BRUSSELS

Dr Gemmell joined Ecotec as a senior consultant in 1990. The policy consultancy had offices in Birmingham, Edinburgh and Brussels where he worked with the influential Scots MEP Ken Collins, who chaired the European Union’s Parliamentary Environment Committee.

Mr, later Sir Ken, Collins was a hugely significant figure both in Brussels and internationally and working with him in the heart of Brussels gained Campbell a better understanding of how Scotland could be heard and influence in a European context.

He said: “Ken led and I worked on aspects of the EU’s Water Framework directive (WFD), the second Waste Directive and the initial stages of its Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control directive which we both ended up trying to implement here in Scotland. From this last as well as the Auto Oils directive emerged the standards for euro diesel engines which are an integral part of the policy for low emission and clean air zones.

“Ken had a massive impact on environment policy at EU level, and arguably in significant international ways because he had the heft to command the bosses of major car and oil companies to appear in front of his committee. He created an international framework for legislation which subsequently became very significant.”

CENTRAL SCOTLAND COUNTRYSIDE TRUST

Professor Gemmell spent two years as policy manager covering environment and industry at Scottish Enterprise from 1991 to 1993, where he championed Scotland’s need to be closely engaged with the policies coming out of Brussels.

In 1994, he became Chief Executive of the Central Scotland Countryside Trust which aimed to create new woodland and help breathe new life into communities by rejuvenating poor quality farmland and former coal and industrial sites in the central belt.

Motorists using the M8 between Edinburgh and Glasgow today find swathes of forests growing either side of the road. This is largely thanks to the efforts of Professor Gemmell and his team at the trust, which aimed to create the UK’s largest community forest 20 years ago.

Professor Gemmell described it as a ‘gift of a job’ and moved with his wife Avril Gold to West Lothian in order to be in the heart of the area and close to the main office in Shotts. He said: “We had fabulous support from the enterprise networks and others. We had local enterprise companies and they had a local presence and a desire, particularly, the Lanarkshire Development Agency, to change a deprived, challenging area.

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He said it was gratifying to see that many of the woodlands planted in the early and mid-1990s are now almost ready to be harvested and replanted.

Professor Gemmell, pictured visiting EPS’s offices, added: “The M8 corridor has been transformed compared to the way it looked in the early to mid- 1990s. People are driving past woodland plantations and woodland barriers pretty much because of the work of the trust and its partners.

He said the designated woodland and trials of Easter Breich, West Lothian, the redevelopment of the former Clydesdale steel works and the Armadale Circular Walk and redevelopment of bings, such as Oakbank, near Livingston, by West Lothian Council, and various land restructuring work, owed their existence to the trust and leadership of people like the council’s David Jarman.

He said: “There were 27 different bodies or agencies and we aligned, together with private enterprises, to fund a vision for transforming the area. There are now several country parks and routes across the area and although Sustrans picked up and created the cycle routes it was the trust and its partners that put a lot of those sites and key links in.”

Professor Gemmell admitted not all of the negotiations with farmers to encourage them to give up sections of their land to the trust in return for ‘sweeteners’ went smoothly. He said: “We were offering some of the farmers money in return for planting trees on their land. It wouldn’t give them a vast amount of money, but a manageable income and was better than the ‘scrub-farming’ that existed.

“Some of the farmers bought into the package of benefits, but there were some serious negotiations. I was shown off farms with a shotgun and harsh words on a couple of occasions. As in later SEPA days, we needed police support a few times!”

Professor Gemmell said the work two decades ago stacked up well against the current initiatives surrounding active travel. He added: “We were doing this in the 1990s. We were ahead of the time.”

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF SEPA

Dr Gemmell, as he was then, often came into contact with SEPA, largely through his efforts to persuade businesses with industrial premises to stop them contaminating rivers and burns and burning waste in the central belt.

He was appointed SEPA’s Director of Strategic Planning in 2001, dealing with all UK and EU environmental policy. It marked a return to his home city of Stirling for the first time since he had left in the 1970s for Aberdeen.

He said that he encountered an agency that was ‘still gelling’ after being formed in 1996 and one which lacked a ‘single narrative’ as to what it should aim to achieve.

He said: “We created a single entity and a better narrative of ‘why we are all here, what we are going to achieve and how we are going to do that.”

Professor Gemmell continued: “I like to create a vision, that is owned, and then create a strategy to deliver that vision. I don’t like to lose interest. I like to ensure a piece of work gets followed through to the end.”

He was appointed to the top job in January 2003, with a goal to make SEPA more cohesive, effective and efficient and added that the regulator was still bearing ‘scars’ from its formation.

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Professor Gemmell said: “It was obvious that the 64 predecessor bodies that had contributed to SEPA had left a lot of baggage, gaps and issues. We had a lot of work to do. There were 47 pay grades, three different finance and IT systems. Not enough attention had been paid to the people and the support systems to make the organisation work efficiently.”

However, Campbell said he found a strong environmental strategy and praised the work of another former Chief Executive, Professor James Curran, at one point Campbell’s Science Director, and others at SEPA to achieve that.

He added: “There were changes right across the organisation, something that particularly in the public sector is not always easy, quick or painless.”

SEPA also took on more staff and the number of people on the payroll rose from 870 to more than 1,400 people as a wave of new environmental legislation and standards ranging from the Water Framework Directive to the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control directive came into force. This required great planning and preparation.

He said the environment minister, Ross Finnie, in the then LibDem-Labour Scottish Executive was also keen to push beyond the basic requirements in some areas, such as the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) Directive.

The extra duties provided Professor Gemmell with an opportunity to address what he perceived as a skills shortage in key areas.

He said: “We started moving into hydrology duties to prepare for implementing WFD and the flood directive. We had a lot of flood risk mapping to do and there was a lot of exciting work going on around this time.

“In 2003, we had four planners in SEPA and suddenly we had to do a lot more planning work and deal with the principles and shaping of SEA. Where were the people to do this going to come from?

“With hydrology in particular, we had insufficient skill available at the time. We had applicants from Germany, Argentina and Portugal for vacant posts.

“But the number of UK applicants was very low so I wrote to every Scottish university principal calling for new staff, training and skills in ecology, hydrology and geo-technical areas including hydro-geology.

“I received a very poor response, but St Andrews, Dundee, and Stirling universities created dedicated two year masters courses, which included one year’s ‘on the job’ training with SEPA backed by government funding. We had 20 people on the intake, and 19 of them got jobs with SEPA. Sometimes you need to grow new talent.”

His friend and mentor from Brussels, Ken Collins was by now the Chair of SEPA, a position he held until 2007.

Working with Sir Ken and the then Chair of the European Environment Agency, Campbell helped create a heads of European EPAs organisation that allowed knowledge-sharing and back channels to open up between EU countries’ environment agency chiefs and the senior leaderships in Brussels.

He said: “Initially, the UK Government was not very keen on Scotland being so visible in Brussels. But Ken knew people in Brussels better than anybody in London did, so it was going to happen!

“We had good, positive access and if Scotland had a story to tell, good or bad, it was heard by commissioners and directors general in Brussels. In those days the Dutch, Irish and the Scots were also incredibly influential on environmental matters. Scotland misses that somewhat now, although we are still well regarded, not least for our practical implementation.

“We all had really positive cultures around the environment and set a relatively high benchmark. By comparison, with Greece, Spain or Italy, say, we were in a good position (to influence the EU) on pollution issues.

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Scotland House, which is run by Scotland Europa, and is based just a stone’s throw from the European Commission and other Union hubs in Brussels, became a centre for building up a network of contacts and bridge building.

He said: “If you are in Brussels, legislators and policy-makers can get to you easily so we were in a fabulous position,” he added. “Ken was also of course instrumental in setting up the European Environment Agency in the first place as well as driving through a number of key directives.”

“We were streets ahead of most of our European counterparts in terms of environmental data and our water environment. We could help set benchmarks and offer expertise.”

He said there were 37 jurisdictions represented at one point in the network of heads of European environment agencies. (NHEEPA, now aka EPANet)

He said: “Members could talk to the Director General of DG Environment in the EC, about what was working and what was not. Although we tried to keep our governments on side, we didn’t need permission to talk to them and give a view about a particular environmental directive.

“Having those conversations, requires some skill and care. Using the current Brexit language, you don’t have to be rule-takers, rather we sought to be rule-makers, based on what we knew could and would work. For a long period, we were in quite a strong position to be the shapers of European policy and legislation.”

AUSTRALIA

Professor Gemmell was sitting in his office at SEPA on a summer’s day in 2011 when his PA took a phone call from Australia.

Despite some concern that he was about to become the victim of a practical joke, he took the call. It turned out to be from a recruitment agent sounding him out about the possibility of becoming the Chief Executive of the State of South Australia’s Environment Protection Authority (SA EPA), based in Adelaide.

Within a month, Professor Gemmell and his wife, Avril were on a whirlwind trip to Adelaide, where he had a meeting with the State’s environment minister. The politician wanted to put the SA EPA on a more active European-style footing and Professor Gemmell was offered the top job ‘even before I had sat down in his office’.

With 200 staff, the organisation was far smaller than SEPA. But Campbell felt that he had taken the Scottish environmental regulator as far he could within the constraints and the time was ripe for him to move on.

He added: “It was a fantastic experience and I enjoyed it very much. We were able to live a lifestyle in Australia that we wouldn’t have been able to have here.”

In another difference from SEPA, the State EPA was subject to the brutal nature of Australian politics.

Professor Gemmell said: “Politics in Australia is really crazy. In a Scottish or UK context, a minister and senior official may be undermined without knowing it, but there they are poking you in the chest or punching them on the chin all the time. More seriously it highlights that we are often lucky here to have cross-party support for big environmental issues. There the partisanship means that the pendulum swings back and forth between parties and their administrations.

He said the EPA and the state government had “real challenges as they were up against a really strong resources industry (mining, gas etc.) dominated economy.”

He added: “The SA EPA had been kicked in a highly aggressive political environment and the minister wanted to know if the body was fit for purpose.”

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Professor Gemmell said public concerns about environmental issues in Australia are similar to those held by people in Europe. However, he was impressed by the speed with which technological innovations, in particular battery technology, was being deployed to make improvements.

Although executives and officials had worked hard to clean up its steel industry, and some aspects of mining and other pollution sources, there were issues with inheritance as well as the water supply and the Murray River especially, caused by drought and hundreds of private, unregulated bore holes and compromised aquifers. Plumes of contamination exist in the groundwater environment and plumes of black smoke from industrial premises and fires often billowed over the city affecting air quality in stark contrast to the tourism brochure images of the region.

He added: “The Hunter Valley area of Victoria also looks gorgeous in photographs with equestrian activity and vineyards. They don’t show you the open cast and deep coal mines and spoil cast onto the Barrier Reef nor the impacts of pollutants running into the main rivers. Ultimately a lot of issues culminate in the Murray.”

Professor Gemmell said that “Australia has many environmental problems. 30% of the Great Barrier Reef has been wiped out” thanks largely to global warming of the oceans and pollution from coal mines flowing offshore.

He added: “Australians, like us, take their quality of life so much for granted that they don’t always realise that their personal behaviour or what they vote for is putting that at risk.”

Professor Gemmell said that before he arrived, the State had not charged anyone or any organisations for alleged environmental breaches in four years, despite having the powers to do so.

He said it was immediately obvious to him that “lots of people should have been going to court.” Prosecutions were re-started and Professor Gemmell said the EPA began laying down consistent environmental standards despite opposition from some in the private sector, and surprisingly, from within some in the state government.

By mid-2014, family illness led Campbell and Avril to return to Scotland. He said the SA EPA achieved ‘some great things’ but could have done more. He added: “Most Australian jurisdictions have the ability to do really well, but if they want an agency with teeth – then they have to give it teeth, and support it.”

“If they want, as we do here, in the air quality context, behavioural change; cultural development that will enable real environmental outcomes to be delivered, you have to be serious and put appropriate effort consistently into it. You can’t want it for five minutes and then change your mind.”

He said the great strength of SEPA and, at least for much of its life, the Environment Agency was that they were supported in their work by the will of whatever political party was in government and across Parliament. A free and open, well-informed media not controlled by a single individual, a contrast with much of Australia, also makes them more likely to be scrutinised fairly, he added. “Public support also really matters.”

INDEPENDENCE, COMMONWEALTH GAMES AND BREXIT

The political and cultural landscape of the Scotland Professor Gemmell and his wife returned to live permanently in was changing dramatically by 2014.

The independence referendum campaign and the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow were under way, giving the country a more ‘energetic, hopeful, upbeat’ atmosphere,’ he said.

Professor Gemmell said: “There was a public debate and dialogue going on about a range of issues, and some of the communication channels that opened up across the country are still working.

“Scotland has changed, inevitably, for good but it’s still not clear where its final destination lies…”

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The couple set up Canopus Consulting which works on economic and environmental issues and Professor Gemmell produced the 2016 review for the Scottish Government of the process of Underground Coal Gasification (UCG), which came out against it. The Scottish Government banned UCG.

He was also involved in the paper published last year for the government on environmental governance in Scotland after Brexit.

He sits on the UK Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (he was acting chair for eight months, and is deputy chair of the body currently), is an honorary professor at the University of Glasgow and a Visiting Professor at Strathclyde.

Professor Gemmell said the process of producing gas by burning coal underground had ‘gone badly’ in Queensland and some former Soviet republics, and data had suggested there could be potentially serious pollution and seismic impacts had it gone ahead in Scotland.

He said UCG failed environmental tests on the grounds of prevention, precautionary and remediation principles. “The companies that have been most actively involved in UCG have failed dismally to live up to their duties to remediate where harm has been caused. On those three counts alone, it seems entirely justified to take the approach we took (in the review).”

On Brexit, Professor Gemmell said the Scottish Government and Cabinet Secretary for the Environment’s view was that Scotland had at least to maintain the level of existing and potentially future environmental legislation and safeguards currently applied through EU mechanisms such as the European Court of Justice. (ECJ or CJEU properly)

He agreed that the ECJ was an effective mechanism for holding governments to account and the public will expect something of similar stature to replace it post-Brexit.

Professor Gemmell said: “Adherence to the safeguards is incredibly important. Look at Donald Trump. He has eviscerated the US EPA. The President is effectively living in a bubble of his own imaginings, where science can be ignored.”

“You need the ECJ or another oversight mechanism. There must be a definitive set of steps that holds the operators, regulator and the Government to account. I don’t care what the mechanism is, so long as it works and people know about it.

“If we lose the ECJ and the other mechanisms of the European infrastructure, we desperately need to be reassured that there is an oversight body and redress mechanism that is ideally wholly independent.”

THE CLEANER AIR FOR SCOTLAND REVIEW

Professor Gemmell has just participated in the first Cleaner Air For Scotland Review Workshop after being appointed Chair by the Cabinet Secretary for Environment Roseanna Cunningham of the independent process in October 2018.

He said the assessment that is under way of the overall strategy was an “update, a check or reassurance that it is going in the right direction.”

Professor Gemmell said that his personal view was that CAFS was a sound strategy, but returning to the theme of ‘ownership’ said it was important to establish who owned the process, and re-assess what was being done to achieve better air quality.

He said that while Scotland appeared to be on the right track with regard to atmospheric pollutants; he cited the closure of Scotland’s last coal-fired power station - at Longannet in Fife – in 2016 as an important development and improvements to vehicle technologies), the time was ripe to look again at the clean air strategy.

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He said research suggesting links between ammonia, particularly in the countryside, and particulate matter needed to be addressed as do impacts of very fine particles and NOx generally.

He said: “We need to take a measured approach to the review. I want to identify what has changed over the last three years (since CAFS was launched) and look at where we have been successful, or appear to be on the right track. The downward curve of pollutants, Longannet being out of the picture and the incremental effects of Euro 4, 5, 6 are all beneficial.

“It’s more complex than we might at first think, and in the agriculture context, we need to know why some pollution is rising whilst most has fallen or is levelling out at a lower level. We may need to reform some areas of practice in agriculture especially, but I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves.”

Professor Gemmell said a balanced approach to the review would be better than rushing into decisions, adding: “Where we are on the right curve, and it’s going well, we are going to see the flow through of the benefits of the last decade. I want that to be protected.”

He said increasingly research suggested that fine particles crossed the boundaries into the lung, bloodstream and brain. Although much more research is required, Professor Gemmell said this was potentially a huge public health issue, across governments, that would need to be dealt with quickly once all evidence was available – or even more swiftly if required.

He added: “I would like to understand if there are going to be validated medical insights that would be available that would show the level of risk in a meaningful way.

“If we can work out who will be impacted (by fine particulate matter for example), particularly those with vulnerabilities, then we need to get onto that really quickly whilst continuing some of the good work that’s taken place.”

Public information was a priority for tackling the impacts of air pollution too and allowing citizens to make their own decisions to cut personal exposure, added Professor Gemmell. He added. “My first steps in that direction would be simple public information, as we did in Adelaide. Get real time information into shop windows at street level and via apps, potentially onto buses, trains and trams if we can; relevant information, so that people know what is happening and especially when the air quality will be poor.”

Professor Gemmell said use of technology could become more widespread to encourage people to find out more about air pollution.

He said: “There’s a duty on citizens to find out more. Quite often cyclists are the first to take an interest because they consider themselves to be a vulnerable group, which they are in both rural and urban environments.

“I can find out what the Shanghai Airport particulate count is, but I can’t find out what is happening in the centre of Stirling or Glasgow.

“We need to make that kind of material more publicly available. We need to give people that information and educate them about what their choices are, and what (levels of air quality) is safe and what is a risk to some people (with pre-existing conditions) and ideally of course what is happening to improve things.

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“You must give people every opportunity to know more. The hazards are clear; breathing dirty air is bad for you, but translating that into meaningful risk assessment is very hard, even for the professionals to articulate. That’s why this review is so important.”

Professor Gemmell’s advice for those involved in the CAFS strategy was never to stop looking for new and emerging environmental issues that could impact on air quality.

He said: “You need to keep looking. Something that appeared to be working well three years ago may not be doing so now.” He said that changes made as a consequence of the review may need to be reviewed again in three to five years.

He said the changing nature of fleets using the latest Euro 6 engines will become embedded in society, and other fuel sources for transport, such as hydrogen, and the rise of electric vehicles, are also likely to lead to real improvements in air quality. But we also need fewer vehicles and less congestion.

Professor Gemmell added: “We need to keep talking to our colleagues across Europe too, for example, to find out what the German LEZ’s (where diesel vehicles are being progressively banned from major cities) are achieving and look at the Netherlands where there is a very strong cycling culture. We need to look at Sweden and Norway, which have climates that are more like Scotland’s.

“There’s no place for complacency, but there is a strong case for continuing to investigate robust science.” He said the idea that the use of petrol and diesel cars in Scotland would be banned, as will be the case from 2032, would have been ‘unthinkable’ 20 years ago. He said that many of us lived in ‘modified medieval towns’ that had layouts requiring wholesale reworking to make them compatible with how people will live their lives and travel in the future.

He added: “There are changes embedded that are going to bring some significant improvements, but we need to be communicating and enabling those changes in ways that I don’t think are quite as effective at the moment as they could be.

“Good leadership is about setting out a vision of what better looks like and taking people with you. You need carrots and encouragement to get people to do the right things, but frankly there are times when it has to happen quickly or is so important, that you have to use the stick…”

He said the public have a right to good air quality, adding that “I think we are too frightened, sometimes, to use the stick (to encourage behaviour change),” but he accepted there were inequality issues that needed to be tackled if the public are to be asked to consider ditching their polluting cars.

He said “I do not want the healthiest people, those who use their legs by walking along the pavement or their bikes, to be the ones who suffer most (from poor air quality).

“Equally, someone who is disadvantaged or disabled and living in a rural community who relies on a vehicle to get into a city or town centre (for work or hospital visits) should be given every help to access facilities and lead a productive life.

“That’s why health and the environment are political issues and I don’t hear enough about that. We need, not just to be talking about it, but reaching agreement and getting on with it…”

FURTHER USEFUL LINKS:

The Cleaner Air For Scotland strategy https://www2.gov.scot/Resource/0048/00488493.pdfhttps://www2.gov.scot/Resource/0048/00488493.pdf

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