Dialogues: from a Green Recovery to Bridging the Gap to Net Zero
The Sustainable Glasgow Dialogues take place during Glasgow City's Climate Week, 11th-16th May 2026. The Dialogues build on the Green Recovery Dialogues of 2020 and the University’s ongoing partnership with Glasgow City Council. They were co-developed by Sustainable Futures and the Sustainable Glasgow Partnership to address the most pressing climate/sustainability issues facing Glasgow City Council.
The solution-focused Dialogues bring researchers practitioners, and decision-makers together to co-produce ways to turn knowledge into action, ensure actions are aligned across the city, and share collective learning through examples of successes and challenges.
The Dialogues provide space for everyone to explore challenges together, putting aside their assumptions and agendas. Open inquiry allows the Dialogue stakeholders to explore and understand the challenges from multiple vantage points and reveal the complexity and barriers that will help move us toward meaningful solutions.
The outcomes of the process initially include early-stage creation of new informal networks, helping those working on the problems align efforts, share learning of ‘what works’, identify research gaps and help bridge the knowledge-to-action gap. The outputs are not pre-determined, and the focus is on co-production and grasping emerging opportunities.
The Dialogues help create a continued legacy from Glasgow hosting COP26 and highlight the importance of collaboration, partnership and systems leadership in addressing climate change impacts.
Green Recovery Dialogues
The Centre for Sustainable Solutions launched just ahead of the city hosting COP26 and developed a partnership with Glasgow City Council and Policy Scotland to explore and implement a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to the climate emergency.
In 2021, they collaborated to run a series of Green Recovery Dialogues that brought together researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to determine where urgent action was needed to go from COVID-19 to COP26 and beyond.
With a primary aim to ensure a just and sustainable recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Dialogues provided an opportunity to increase awareness of the relationship between human and planetary wellbeing and keep these relationships in mind over this period of transition.
The Green Recovery Dialogues focused on three areas where the Centre’s research expertise aligned with city priorities.
- Implementing Green Futures
- Low Carbon Energy and Housing
- Rethinking Consumption
What emerged from the Dialogues can be clustered into overarching themes:
- Environmental sustainability and social justice need to go hand-in-hand to achieve appropriate solutions
- Understanding and working with communities with diverse needs and perspectives is required. Solutions should be community-driven with an aim to make ‘spaces’ into ‘places’ where citizens are enabled to act as stewards.
- Alignment is needed across levels of policy, planning, and decision-making, and these need to be driven by data and evidence that is seamless to access.
The process of the dialogues and establishing a key collaboration with Glasgow City Council resulted in securing a £10.2M NERC funding for a strategic programme grant called GALLANT (Glasgow as a Living Lab Accelerating Novel Transformation). The project uses Glasgow as a living lab to trial new sustainable solutions throughout the city. GALLANT takes a whole-systems approach.
Sustainable Glasgow Dialogues
In 2026, the pandemic is no longer a defining challenge; however, climate change risks are being overshadowed by the more imminent global conflicts and economic challenges of the current times. While these pressures are real, they underscore the importance of sustaining momentum and continuing structured dialogue on how current actions shape a positive legacy for future generations.
This moment presents a timely opportunity to re-engage partnerships and inspire engagement and action across Glasgow with the city’s core values and ambitions.
The four dialogues that will take place during Glasgow Climate Week will focus on the following areas:
- Building purposeful partnerships for an equitable & scalable energy transition
- Holistic place-based and nature positive solutions for climate resilience
- Bridging the gap to net zero: opportunities for sequestration in Scotland
- Normalising the Circular Economy - what's stopping us?
Following the Dialogues, GCF Sustainable Futures and its partner network will follow up on ideas and gaps emerging from the Dialogues.
Interdisciplinary researchers from the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, Glasgow Caledonian University and the Glasgow School of Art who participate in the Dialogues will help match gaps in research to funding opportunities and bring together the right teams to deliver. Emerging ideas will be linked to funding propositions (i.e., Horizon Pillar 2 opportunities) using a design-led catalyst process that inspires creative ways of thinking in the design of fundable projects.
Sustainable Futures will continue to collaborate with University of Glasgow Research Centres (Public Policy, Sustainable Solutions, Sustainable Energy, Urban Big Data Centre, National Centre for Resilience, Data Science and AI) to tackle other global challenges using a solution-focused approach.
Background
The University of Glasgow has played a leading role in tackling the climate emergency. In 2014 we became the first European university to commit to fully divesting from fossil fuel industry companies. In 2017 we endorsed the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in 2019 we became the first Scottish university to declare a climate emergency; and in 2020 we published Glasgow Green, our strategy to become net zero in carbon emissions by 2030.
As an institution, the University of Glasgow is pushing the sustainability agenda through its strategic partnerships with other academic institutions and participating in key consortia like Universitas 21, the Guild of Research-Intensive Universities, and CIVIS (Europe’s Civic University Alliance).
This case study sets the context for the Sustainable Glasgow Dialogues and their evolution from the Green Recovery Dialogues. Subsequent case studies in this series will explore the outcomes of the 2026 Dialogues in more detail, including key insights, emerging collaborations, and the actions and pathways they enable across Glasgow.
