Working in schools and communities in Oban, Tiree and Barra, Genesis facilitated conversations and learnings about how climate change and different aspects of marine conservation is affecting areas of Scotland’s coast. As a listening project, Genesis strived to learn more about how attitudes and cultures towards these key issues have changes over generations in these communities, to better understand connections between marine science, industry and local people.
In a combination of school workshops, community events and online seminars, Genesis engaged with different audiences in different coastal communities, to gain a better understanding of the differences in relation to marine and maritime culture and engagement with local scientific projects and conservation initiatives, including barriers to this engagement. This was driven by the controversy of the Highly Protected Marine Areas proposal, with aim to start repairing the relationship between some of the different local stakeholders of the marine environment. To make this aspect of the project more successful, local community champions were appointed to assist in promoting the opportunities from the project to local people and add local insights into previous and current projects running that were relevant to our project aims.
School workshops focused on cetacean research from SAMS, with a particular focus on acoustics and conservation, and on using technology and robotics for climate and environmental monitoring, combining other educational projects by SAMS from the Whaletalk campaign and Our World From Space.
This also involved creating a platform for the young people in these communities to learn more about different marine charities operating in their local area, including the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust, the British Divers Marine Life Rescue, Young Sea Changers Scotland and Whale and Dolphin Conservation, and meet SAMS researchers working in different aspects of marine science as examples of different role models and careers. This was both online throughout the project and in person during the final event where participating schools attended a final event to celebrate the project in Oban. At this final event, participating pupils were able to share their communities stories and learnings throughout the project to the funder in person, and experience the importance and empowerment of advocacy in the context of their own local marine environment and maritime cultures.
