Fairmilehead Parish Church is one of a growing number of churches in Edinburgh that have registered as Eco-Congregations. This demonstrates our commitment to the churches’ environmental programme and to wider endeavours to promote sustainable development at local and national levels.

At the local level we have links with our nearest environmental group ‘Transition Edinburgh Pentlands’. They arranged an Energy Fair in our church halls earlier this year opened by Robin Harpur MSP. This provided information for the nearly 100 people who attended on energy saving, water treatment and insulation with talks on climate change and the peak oil issue.

In national terms the question of climate change relates largely to the matter of carbon emissions resulting from energy use. To deal with this issue we calculated our ‘carbon footprint’ based on the energy we use seen in our church fuel bills. Of course, it was higher then we had imagined, so we hope soon to take part in the Church of Scotland scheme to reduce our carbon footprint by 5% a year.

Our building is enclosed by a large, well-maintained garden and here there are many opportunities to develop composting and recycling initiatives.

Within the congregation we are conscious of our obligation to spread the sustainable development message. To get these ideas across we showed Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth and, more recently, the film In Transition. These centred on the climate change and the peak oil crisis and how local communities were responding to the overall challenge.

At Fairmilehead we are alive to the enormous scale of the sustainable development question and are determined to do all we can to respond to the encounter it presents.

More information at www.ecocongregation.org.uk/scotland .