Climate campaigners plan UK’s longest march

from Sunday Herald, 04 March 2007

Britain's longest-ever protest march is being planned this summer to demand cuts in the pollution that is creating climate chaos.

The leading charity, Christian Aid, is organising a 1,000-mile 11-week trek via all the UK's capitals. Marchers will be calling on the government to reduce emissions of carbon by five per cent a year to help protect the world from the storms, floods and droughts threatened by global warming.

"Climate change is the most serious threat to the future of all of us, but the shocking truth is that it's poor people in the developing world who are already on the frontline," said Paul Brannen, head of campaigns at Christian Aid. "We have a moral duty to stop this now and where better to start than at home?"

Embarrassingly for the charity, the unveiling of its new campaign plans coincided with an admission that it has taken more flights within Britain than other non-governmental organisations. Travelling by air is three times more polluting than travelling by rail.

Christian Aid's 15 staff in Scotland made a total of 30 flights to and from London in 2005-06. At a rate of two per member of staff, that makes it one of the most frequent fliers of the campaign groups recently surveyed by the Sunday Herald.

The charity, however, accepted that this much flying was no longer environmentally acceptable, and is aiming to eliminate "most" flights within Britain. A detailed assessment of its "carbon footprint" has shown that 32% was due to staff air travel in this country and abroad.

"Christian Aid realises that it has flown too much in the past," said Dominic Brain, co-ordinator of the carbon footprint work. "It was often the cheapest way to travel and we look after our money carefully."

But now managers are insisting that all travel planning is undertaken from an environmental perspective. "We are installing video conference facilities in our Glasgow office to reduce the need for staff to travel to London for meetings," Brain said.

Christian Aid hopes that the 'Cut the Carbon' march will have an impact similar to the 'Make Poverty History' demonstration in Edinburgh in 2005. The march for justice is in the tradition of the Jarrow March for jobs in 1936 and the Nelson Mandela freedom march in 1988, it said.

The protest is due to start in Belfast on 14 July and end in London on 2 October. In between it will visit Edinburgh on 21 July, as well as taking in Newcastle, Leeds, Birmingham, Cardiff and the Labour Party conference at Bournemouth.

Twenty marchers are expected to walk the whole way, ten from the UK and ten from the developing world. One will be Risolat Saidmuradova from Tajikistan, who said she wanted to know how other countries were going to combat global warming.

She will be joined by Rosalía Soley from El Salvador and Rachel Tavenor from Newcastle. Christian Aid is looking for a volunteer from Scotland, and is planning to announce celebrity backing soon.

The march will spend two weeks moving through Scotland, via Troon, Kilmarnock, Glasgow, Falkirk, Dunfermline, Edinburgh, Dunbar and Berwick-upon-Tweed. On 21 July, in association with the Stop Climate Chaos 'iCount' campaign, Christian Aid will stage a major event in Edinburgh.

As a run-up to the march, the charity has been running a major advertising campaign in more than 20 newspapers and magazines nation wide. One, showing a woman and children struggling through a flood in Mali, is captioned: "Be a love and switch your computers off at the end of the day."

Christian Aid was congratulated on its "ambitious" plans by Dr Richard Dixon, the director of the environmental group, WWF Scotland. "These events around the country will help to raise climate change protest to the levels that 'Make Poverty History' achieved for development issues," he said.

"Christian Aid's recent record on using internal UK flights is not the best but they are clearly working hard to reduce their own emissions in the future."