COP26 Special: Coastal communities and the environmental agenda
Posted: 27 September 2021, in News
In the lead up to the COP26 event in Glasgow and Climate Fringe we’re featuring green social enterprises to promote their inspiring work in tackling the climate emergency. This week we hear from Cullen Sea School – take part in the conversation on social media with the hashtags #GreenSocEnt and #COP26.
Cullen Sea School is owned and managed by the Three Harbours Association, a registered Scottish charity. With funding secured from the Adapt and Thrive Fund we’re in a position over the next 18 months to develop the sea school. This will allow us to focus on two of our main objectives that feed into discussions about the environment, climate change and COP26.
Firstly the advancement and improvement of environmental protection by increasing public awareness of the environment surrounding the 3 Harbours and environs, including flora and fauna, and by increasing awareness of our unique coastal walks and coastline.
Our second objective is the education of the young people in our local communities by the provision of talks at schools relating to local issues, including safety.
The charities objectives are for the benefit of the three harbour villages of Cullen, Findochty and Portknockie on the Moray Firth.
Kickstarting our work from August 2021, we’ve been organising monthly beach cleans/coast path litter picks. These events are open to all and will tackle a different part of the coast between and at the three harbour villages each month.
We’re working with our local primary schools on a joint programme for the year ahead, including these beach clean events and in September we’re taking part in the Great British Beach Clean event by the Marine Conversation Society. The MSC have kindly donated to us a beach cleaning kit which will be permanently stored at the sea school.
We’re working with children and young people to raise awareness of marine litter and waste and are excited that we have some Duke of Edinburgh students doing each session with us as part of their award.
Over the winter months when there are less water sports activities on offer we’ll be partnering up with agencies to deliver talks both to the public, school and youth groups about key issues. These will focus on subject areas including climate change, COP26, nature, wildlife and marine litter. We’lll be partnering up with relevant organisations on the delivery of this programme including HM Coastguard, RNLI, Macduff Marine Aquarium, Marine Conservation Society and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.
Our key objective is to provide access to this information and raise awareness of the importance of it to the communities in which we operate plus to operate our charity in an environmental manner. It’s our goal, having completed an initial Green Tourism Green Check quiz, to get graded as part of the Green Tourism scheme.
David McCubbin, Cullen Sea School
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