The Scottish Episcopal Church’s Net Zero strategy was given backing by the First Minister, John Swinney, during a roadshow event held in Perth on Saturday.

Mr Swinney told delegates who gathered at St Ninian’s Cathedral that the Church has a significant part to play in ongoing public debate about climate change, and welcomed the General Synod’s commitment to achieving net zero by 2030.

Mr Swinney described the Church as an important voice in Scottish society “who must speak out on the importance of climate action … to make progress on tackling the consequences of our own actions which have resulted in there being this climate damage that we wrestle with.”

During a ‘Sharing Stories’ session hosted by the Diocese of St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane, the First Minister gave examples of how climate change affects Scotland – illustrating the striking contrast of water shortages and wildfires last summer followed just a few months later by severe flooding in the same part of the country.

He also gave insight into a “life-changing experience” during a visit to Africa last year, where he saw first-hand the impact of international development funds in areas where water had become so scarce that life could no longer be sustained without direct intervention.

“It’s an enormous privilege to be part of the conversation and let me express my thanks to the Diocese for the leadership that it is expressing on these issues,” said Mr Swinney, who also commended the leadership of the General Synod on developing a pathway to net zero by 2030.

“The necessity of climate action is all around us,” said the constituency MSP for Perthshire North. “I started getting alerts about concerns about the availability of water in the east of Scotland in April 2025, and those warnings continued uninterrupted until October 2025 in Scotland. In some of our finest agricultural land in Aberdeenshire, in Fife, in Angus, farmers [were] told ‘you cannot abstract water from the river system because there is just not enough water’.

“[This] has been followed in January 2026 by a most extreme incident of snowfall in the Aberdeenshire area with acute interruptions to domestic and public life, closely followed by an incredibly sharp rise in the temperature and flooding in the self-same areas.

“These issues are very much alive in our communities and in our society.”

The First Minister then said that while the domestic situation was of clear significance, it is what he has experienced internationally that has convinced him of the necessity for climate action.

Last October, he travelled to Malawi and Zambia to mark the 20th anniversary of the Scottish Government’s International Development Programme, and it is a visit he will never forget.

“The Programme is focused on trying to create the implements of sustainability in communities that are affected by poverty and climate change,” said Mr Swinney. “I had one literally life-changing experience of going to a small village near Blantyre. The groups supporting me took me to a vantage point where I was able to look over the landscape. As I looked at the right, there was this lush green landscape in the mountains. Then as I moved my eye to the left, it became more arid, more harsh, and more desert. You could see where watercourses used to be, and they were no longer there. You could see how the land was difficult to cultivate.”

He then was taken to a village which has benefited from the International Development Programme, and saw how the drilling of boreholes and the installation of a solar-powered pump system had given the people of a water source which supplied the people and the land, with irrigation schemes allowing crops to grow, providing a food supply and making livelihoods possible.

“This experience encapsulated for me the importance of our outreach work, our mission as people who live in a very comfortable place compared to people facing real hardship in Malawi and in Zambia … enabling those people to survive in that area into which they had been born.”

He continued: “The rise in temperature on the planet is not because of what Malawian farmers are doing. It’s what we’ve been doing for the last couple of hundred years. They’ve had it inflicted upon them. And I feel it’s part of our moral duty to support that effort to address those issues.”

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Image: Paul Williams, Net Zero Delivery Director, the Rt Rev Ian Paton, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane, First Minister John Swinney MSP, the Rev Lewis Shand-Smith, member of the Provincial Environment Group