Located in the southern-most inhabited islands of the Outer Hebrides, Barra and Vatersay are landmasses where wind whips in from the Atlantic, trees struggle to take hold and people are resourceful and welcoming.

Community tour of Novara

One of the first people we met was Shona MacLeod, Community Development Officer for Barra and Vatersay, as part of the Carbon Neutral Islands initiative. In this role Shona works to ‘… get the community’s concerns, find out what people really want and get some physical projects off the ground’. She prepared the ‘Barra and Vatersay Community Climate Action Plan’, for the two islands, which outlines three key actions the community has prioritised:

1. Better manage household and business energy usage and efficiency.
2. Feasibility into meeting island’s food needs locally.
3. Encourage improved access to public, electric and active transport.

We had the honour of facilitating a workshop at the Barra and Vatersay Science Festival on considering the next steps for adaptation, based on the above action plan.

Just getting to Barra was a tight-run thing; we had been checking the weather forecasts every few hours for a week, trying to find a weather window long enough to allow us to go west, before another storm made us seek a sheltered harbour. As it was, we arrived nearly a week

before the science festival, weighed anchor and hunkered down while 40+ knot gusts of wind whizzed past our masts.  We then moved to the pontoon in Castlebay a few days before the festival. As a side note, when we tie up to a pontoon, we’re often one of the larger boats, but here we were little; many of the boats coming through Castlebay are built for adventure, sailing out into the Atlantic or wherever the wind takes them.

Like other islands one of the main concerns on Barra and Vatersay was the state of housing and especially heating during winter. Shona’s surveys found 51% of households were experiencing fuel poverty and 20% were in extreme fuel poverty.

‘The Scottish Government publishes a map of fuel poverty and the Western Isles is one of the darkest areas. It is a big issue and will be much the same for people in Orkney and Shetland; because they’re at the end of the grid, they’ve got really high fuel bills and the cost is disproportionate to income.

The Novara workshop at the Science Festival

‘It opened my eyes that this is not a wee bit of fuel poverty; literally almost everybody is in fuel poverty up here. 30% of people that filled in my survey said they felt unable to adequately heat their home to a point where they felt safe and comfortable’.

Although wind energy seems the obvious solution, Shona says the relatively low grid capacity constrains how much energy can be produced and exported.

One of the implications of this fuel poverty is that people go to warm community hubs in winter, and the first CNI project is to get renewable energy and insulation into more community spaces. ‘They are places for people to go which, with the fuel poverty, if people can’t heat their own homes adequately, there is maybe some central place for them. It is also company to reduce loneliness’, says Shona.

In the north of Barra there is already a community wind turbine that powers a café as well as polytunnels for growing vegetables; Shona hopes this is a model that could be expanded to other places on the islands.

Meeting another Bestevaer sailing boat

‘They’ve got a wind turbine, and on their roof, a whole strip of solar panels. They’ve been very helpful showing me their setup and the kind of energy monitoring they have so they can see their energy use’.

Shona says expanding this example will demonstrate to individuals the advantages of knowing their energy usage and promote innovative solutions in the future.

‘Once we have the community buildings established, it will hopefully get the community involved and raise awareness of the Carbon Neutral Island project and more people will want to be involved and see how it could benefit them’.

Leaving Barra was hard for the Novara crew. But we knew that that was not the end of our engagement. We have linked up Shona with on-going coaching to help her thread her way through the challenges of achieving her Carbon Neutral Island goals.

Our last evening in Castle Bay