I moved to Scotland in 2018, in the hope that Scotland would find a way of keeping us in the European Union…

I am a retired agricultural scientist and spent more than 30 years working with smallholder, subsistence farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. I’ve seen at first hand the devastation that climate change is wreaking on farmers in tropical and sub-tropical parts of the world.

In 2016 I was living happily in Marlborough in the South-West of England, until the EU referendum. Although I was a member of the Green Party of England and Wales, I campaigned alongside the local Tory candidate to remain in the EU. I was devastated at the outcome of the referendum and decided to move to the beautiful ‘remain’ city of Edinburgh. On the evening of the 31st January – the day that the UK left the EU, I joined the crowds outside Holyrood protesting at being “dragged out of the EU against our will.”

I spent two years campaigning for a ‘peoples’ vote’ with Edinburgh4Europe in the hope that a second EU referendum would offer the possibility of staying in the EU. The people of Scotland voted overwhelmingly for pro-EU candidates in the last General Election, but despite this we are all now heading for a hard Brexit. It is clear to me that the only way that Scotland can retain the benefits of EU membership, including the ability to join with other European countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is as an independent country.