Climate Ready Coastal Communities

Who we are
We are three charities that support communities in Scotland and who are working together to bid for funding to help communities like yours take action on climate change.
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Sniffer is a sustainability charity that fosters collaboration across sectors and places to ensure transformation towards a flourishing and fairer future for all in a changing climate. We have a particular focus on climate resilience and deliver the Adaptation Scotland programme and a number of climate ready initiatives
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Planning Aid Scotland is an award-winning educational charity and social enterprise. We help people to shape the future of their place and community by engaging with the planning system, in an open and inclusive way.
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Scottish Community Development Centre SCDC works to support communities to become stronger, more equitable and sustainable. We do this directly with community groups and volunteers, with community development practitioners and with Government and other policy makers. Our work is designed to help communities have more influence over the issues which affect their wellbeing and quality of life now and for the future

What the National Lottery Climate Action Fund is for
If you want to read the invitation from the lottery to bid for the funding details are here. But in a nutshell the funding opportunity covers:
(i) Linking climate action to the everyday lives and interests of local communities and inspiring them to take action.
(ii) Influencing communities at a regional or national level. This can include linking up groups across locations or a campaign that inspires change.
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The Climate Action Fund encourages involving people, places and communities experiencing poverty, discrimination and disadvantage. It requires formal partnerships working across sectors, led by community and voluntary organisations or public sector organisations. Successful projects will receive funding over 3-5 years, excluding capital costs. We envisage working in up to five coastal locations in Scotland and if successful the funding would be allocated across these locations.

Proposed project
We want to accelerate the scale of community action and are developing a proposal for funding to do this. We will can bring our organisations’ experience, knowledge and skills to work directly with communities affected to raise awareness of the situation, take local action and to learn from the process in ways that will benefit communities across Scotland.
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We know that climate impacts are likely to have the greatest impact on people in communities where there are already existing inequalities. That’s why we want to make sure that we also work with those communities that are already experiencing economic hardship. We want to hear  the voices  of those easily ignored in conversations about climate and ensure that they are heard in the places making decisions about how we adapt to changes in climate. We think this project will help by supporting community engagement with as many local people and community groups as possible, overcoming barriers they sometimes face to getting involved.
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This is why we are inviting a number of coastal communities across Scotland to let us know if you would like to be involved in working on the design  of our proposal if we get through the first stage.
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Although we are open to ideas from community partners, we do have some thoughts already about how it could work. We envisage a three year project with two key elements.
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(A) In depth work in local place based projects
We envisage working in depth in a minimum of three and up to five locations in Scotland where climate change is already having a significant impact now  or will in the future. For each location we would allocate funding  to  a local community organisation so that work on the ground is resourced with money and a local job working on the issues.
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We would work with you to design a process to really benefit those who live, work and play there. That may mean things like supporting your area   to make sense of the future predictions about climate impact as it affects  your community. This would help you create a vision for your place that is able to withstand the threats and recognise opportunities from changes in the climate.
This might include things like:
(i) Helping you raise local awareness about climate issues and widen understanding of the predictions of what is likely to happen and how it could affect your area.
(ii) Identifying practical actions that can be taken by the community such as location of paths, use of greenspaces;
(iii) Making adjustments to community assets such as community centres, so that they are more able to withstand changes in climate;
(iv) Looking at what might need to be done protect people’s homes;
(v) Developing extreme weather emergency training sessions so that you and the public agencies have a plan.  Or improve an existing plan  to better work together if you are affected by serious climate issues like flooding, setting up other responses like community food networks;
(vi) Linking consideration of these issues to existing community led action plans.  To ensure that  climate resilience and establishing or improving mechanisms to  implement these with public agencies like councils are in place.
(vii) Making sure that climate related concerns are properly taken account of in local planning processes such as Local Place Plans so that decisions about how land and locals shared spaces are more climate resilient
(viii) Strengthening community voices on these issues by seeking constructive opportunities to put local views to  relevant local and national governmental departments and agencies.
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(B) A wider network of communities who want to be better informed and prepared
We envisage creating a network of interested communities who would like to be part of a broader knowledge exchange. This will be an opportunity to share concerns and insights about how our coast is being affected and what we can do about it.
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As well those involved in the local development sites we would open this process to other communities affected by the same issues.  We would link with other established networks that are active on the issues who can learn from your experience and bring specialist knowledge to our overall learning.
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We would explore face to face and online learning exchanges where people can work together to share experience, and support communities in the programme begin to develop wider calls to action to support and protect communities as the climate emergency develops.

The National Lottery process requires us to submit our application in two stages. At the first stage we will identify where we might work and who we would work with. We aim to submit our idea in October/November 2024. We will hear if successful within 10 weeks and we then submit a full proposal within 6 weeks. It may be a further 4 months before we know if we are successful. So that means it may be mid summer 2025 before we kick off the project.