Scotland and Cuba are both small nations that have staked their futures on achieving breakthroughs in renewable energy. At this event, researchers with expertise in each country will examine the motivations, achievements and challenges associated with the energy transition in each context. The panel will be challenged to assess the parallels and distinctions between Scotland's strategy of carbon mitigation and Cuba's shift to renewables which is in no small part driven by adaptation climate change and shifts in the global energy economy. Discussion will be drawn towards wider implications for what small nations can achieve and the threats they face in the context of an urgent worldwide change in forms of energy generation.

Our speakers include:

Blanca Garcés Fernández, who is a Specialist at the Department of International Relations within the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment (CITMA).

Helen Yaffe, senior lecturer in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow and author of We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World (Yale University Press, 2020).

Matt Hannon, senior lecturer at the University of Strathclyde's Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship who is a leading researcher on community energy projects in Scotland.

Andrew Judge, lecturer in International Relations at the University of Glasgow, who is an expert on European regulation and the politics of energy security.

Ewan Gibbs, lecturer in Global Inequalities at the University of Glasgow, who is a historian of Scotland's energy transitions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.