Climate FORTH is an Inner Forth Futures partnership project, led by RPSB Scotland. Glic was appointed as community development consultants to facilitate the co-creation of Local Resilience Plans with four communities in the Inner Forth.

The four communities of Hawkhill (Clackmannanshire), Fallin (Stirling), Bainsford and Langlees (Falkirk) and Kincardine (Fife) had been selected at a previous stage.

Learning with communities

Glic designed a series of three workshops that would take each community through the co-development process, with sessions that focused on:

1.  Increasing knowledge and value of local heritage
2. Climate change and local impacts of climate change
3. Protecting local heritage from climate change.

We worked with all four communities simultaneously over the course of three months, tailoring each workshop to the needs and response of each group.

Between workshops, we consolidated the response from previous sessions to shape and build into the next one.

By the end of the third workshop, members of each community had agreed on heritage assets that are widely valued in the community and the risks they face due to climate change. The groups had also come up with solutions to support their future resilience.

Prioritised heritage assets ranged from community spaces to local path networks to historic buildings. We undertook desk research for each prioritised asset to create first-step actions to support their physical resilience, with rough costing to support subsequent decision-making.

Local Resilience Plans

From this, we created Local Resilience Plans bespoke to the sentiment of each community. These plans enable the distribution of £180K in funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and UK Government.

A Local Resilience Plan helps the community to make their own local heritage more resilient to climate change, while strengthening the value placed on heritage within the area. It is a step towards a Local Place Plan.

Participatory budgeting

All four Local Resilience Plans were agreed by the corresponding local authorities. With final Plans completed, each community was then invited and encouraged to participate in a participatory budgeting session to vote for the heritage assets and projects they would like to see funded.

This was achieved through an interactive, democratic voting system which allowed people to spend as much or little time in the process as preferred. Attendees were given a symbolic £45K and asked to split the total fund between the agreed priority assets in £5K increments.

The completed voting session resulted directly in how the actual £45K will be spent in each community. An online voting system was created to support wider voting in the community and offer alternative routes to participate.

Funds are now in the process of being distributed in all four communities across agreed heritage resilience projects, driven by popular community consensus.

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The initiative is supported by funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, with additional contributions from the UK Government’s UK Shared Prosperity Fund via Fife Council, Stirling Council, Falkirk Council and Clackmannanshire Council.

Learn more and read the Local Resilience Plans here.