Take action: Support cycling as a solution to climate change

The Scottish Parliament has a live online engagement tool collecting ideas for reducing climate change, and you can have your say. Cycling UK’s campaigns and policy manager for Scotland, Jim Densham, asks you to vote for the positive cycling measures suggested by people and vote down some of the nonsense anti-cycling suggestions

Update: Voting has now closed on the Scottish Parliament website, although the ideas and responses can still be viewed.

The Scottish Parliament is using its website to collect people’s ideas on everyday activities which can reduce climate emissions and will use these to help shape its scrutiny of the Government’s revised Climate Change Plan (CCP) in future.

Last week Government announced a delay to the Climate Change Plan due to the priority it is placing on tackling Covid-19 but the online engagement process can still go ahead.

On the webpage Parliament is asking the following questions about climate change and how we can all change our behaviours:

  1. What changes would you make now to reduce emissions?
  2. What should the Government do to support these changes?

There are many ideas already posted on the page and, at the time of writing, a dozen suggestions for promoting cycling in addition to a few very unhelpful anti-cycling suggestions and comments.

You have the chance to have your say and vote FOR or AGAINST each idea and write a comment if you wish.

As it stands many of the cycling measures have more votes AGAINST than FOR so we are asking you to help redress the balance.

Whatever you think about this format, it’s already gone live and anti-cycling suggestions are being made, so it’s important we have our say too.

Please use the secure online engagement tool to vote for all the positive cycling measures and show Parliament how important cycling is to tackling climate change in everyday life.

You can filter by category to make it easier to find the Travel ideas.

At this time of lockdown many people have benefited from riding a bike for their daily exercise. With less cars on the roads carbon emissions have reduced in our cities and riding is much more enjoyable. We want these benefits to remain once the coronavirus restrictions are lifted and for people to continue cycling.

The Climate Change Plan will be vital in shaping how Scotland rebuilds and flourishes in a sustainable way – we can all help shape it and champion cycling.