Normally it is government and business who decide strategic visions like this. Of course, the content of the vision is also important. It is actually quite difficult to make visions like this stand out from the crowd.
It says that all of us — the Council, citizens, businesses, third sector, government and the public sector — need to:. These things risk sounding trite. But the truth is that they are fundamental. Passenger liners came right up the river to within a mile of the city centre from New York and Boston and imperial cities where Scottish influence was particularly marked: Calcutta, Rangoon, Halifax, Montreal.
As late as the s, a traveller could step ashore in Glasgow having embarked in Dublin, Belfast or Bombay, though by that time the bigger transatlantic ships were ferrying their passengers ashore in the deeper water off Greenock, 25 miles downstream. This trade contracted slowly in the last 50 years of the last century, and then suddenly it vanished. Other port cities have been similarly deserted, but perhaps in none of them, even New York, did the loss feel so confounding.
Glasgow, after all, had seen a steamship long before it saw a steam locomotive; the first commercially successful steamboat in Europe began operating on the Clyde in , beaten only to a global first so Glasgow patriots reckoned by the sharp practice of an American who had stolen the idea and put it to work on the Hudson.
Today, the last vessel to perpetuate this two-centuries-old tradition is the elegant paddle steamer Waverley , built in , which sails to and from Glasgow for two or three months every summer and whose near-miraculous survival is a testament to the love that Britain affords old machines.
A voyage upriver on a fine evening this week revealed that deindustrialisation has its compensations. After we left the beautiful firth behind — in the days of international sea travel it was considered the most majestic entrance to Europe — a pod of dolphins played around the ship at Greenock, while a few miles farther on hundreds and hundreds of swans gathered on the sandbanks near Dumbarton.
The shipping channel was narrow by now, the result of an ingenious but simple piece of 18th-century engineering which deepened the river by forcing its flow through a tighter space, scouring the bottom to allow ocean-going ships as far inland as the Glasgow warehouses. Sometimes there was a disused slipway, sometimes a wharf of rotting timber, sometimes a field of cows. When blocks of new flats rose on either bank, the beat of our paddles echoed from them.
Families came out on their balconies to wave. We passed a coaster loading scrap, the only ship in the river to be seen since Greenock, and then, close to our destination, the unlikely sight of a half-built frigate resting on the stocks.
The number of NGO-backed climate litigation cases against fossil fuel companies is increasing. Some global finance and insurance institutions have begun to decarbonise their portfolios. And seven countries have so far pledged to stop building coal power plants.
Global environment agreements have been vital to focus world attention on climate change. COP26 in Glasgow will test whether the international community is ready for the challenge that NGOs, climate activists, vulnerable island countries, and climate scientists have presented.
She also headed the Taskforce for International Environmental Policies at the German Foreign Office and has written a number of articles on geopolitical developments in Asia. This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution. Coordination between conservation societies, governments and industry is needed to prevent overfishing and fight climate change. It has been a busy few weeks in UK politics and there have been some interesting developments that finally aren't all about Brexit.
The rise of renewable energy has seen the world enter into a new era, however these technologies bring both risk and reward. Government and business need to learn the lessons from past errors and successes of extractive industries. In this section Go back to Australian Outlook About. Share Facebook. Science, summits, and island voices Over the past 50 years, new institutions, regional lobby groups, and global platforms have become influential.
Climate change and security The scholarly debate on the nexus between climate change and security has recently entered the political sphere.
0コメント