Nature’s abundance in Scotland is vast. But it is dissolving. The most recent State of Nature assessment published in 2023 found that Scottish wildlife has decreased on average by 15% since 1994. This is happening in a country renowned across the world for our natural landscapes, our vibrant seas and our amazing wildlife. These messages haven’t changed since the 2019 State of Nature report. Species are still at risk of extinction, habitats are diminished and fragmented. This reflects the ongoing and relentless erosion of diversity across Scotland. With that erosion of diversity, we lose our resilience to change.
And change is monumental at the moment. This summer of 2023 we have witnessed catastrophic wildfires across the world, including in Scotland. We are witnessing heatwaves that are hotter and more intense than ever recorded; much more frequent and damaging storms; falling ice volumes in Antarctica and widescale species migration further north or further uphill both on land and at sea. The planet is sending us a clear signal: we need to get our act together and turn around our way of living. We need to consume as if our lives depend on it. Which, of course, they do.
This means emitting less carbon, storing more carbon, using fewer raw natural resources and embedding resource use into a circular economy. But we also need to do more for nature: if we continue to lose our species, simplifying our ecosystems, then at some point, and we do not know where that point is, they will cease functioning. They will stop providing us with food, clean water, and fertile soils.
While there are many things we could do here in Scotland, there are a few that would have significant, widescale and impactful results. Of these, halting carbon emissions and halting species and habitat loss is key. But also key is building in resilience across natural landscapes, across seascapes and across urban landscapes. This is where deliberative design comes in. There is little point joining up random pieces of semi-natural habitats or protecting tiny populations of species that cannot breed and survive into the long term. They will eventually die or fade away. We are at a stage now where we need a designed approach that rebuilds resilience by reconnecting nature, recharging its abundance and ensuring ecological processes can work across the artificial barriers we’ve put in their way.
An example: Scotland, and the UK, has one of the most nature depleted and fragmented landscapes in the world. Our Biodiversity Intactness Index, which measures biodiversity loss, is in the bottom 15% in EU countries and in the bottom 12% worldwide. Despite our international reputation for landscapes and wildlife, it’s not doing well.
Scotland’s deer forests are without a tree, grasslands survive in pockets and can come and go with the vagaries of agricultural support schemes, hedgerows are gappy and discontinuous. One of the simplest concepts and most impactful thing we could do is design and implement nature networks. This isn’t about planting more hedgerows or trees (although that would be good too), it’s about mapping what we still have, understanding the ecological processes those habitats and species need to survive and then rebuilding and reconnecting those ecological processes. It could mean removing deer and herbivore pressure to enable the natural regeneration of native trees and shrubs. Mar Lodge and Glen Feshie provide fantastic examples of this approach. It could be encouraging and even planting trees along rivers, especially in the uplands, to shade water so fish can reproduce and survive to adulthood. In urban areas, it could be linking gardens and green spaces together with hedgehog highways, contiguous tree cover and sequential planting to provide year-round food sources for birds and invertebrates.
That all requires a design approach. For woodlands for example, the work of James Hutton Institute on native woodland potential enables us to see what a designed future looks like, where we know what still survives, where to encourage regeneration, where to plant trees and where to protect open habitats.
We then need to know how to connect what we still have. Not necessarily in a physical sense but in an ecological sense. For example, twinflower, an iconic plant of Scotland’s pinewoods, is pollinated by small flies and hoverflies, which can only fly short distances. Twinflower patches that are too far apart become genetically impoverished, their seed productivity declines and their resilience to future change is diminished. But as long as twinflower or other pollinator food plants are within flying distance, resilience is rebuilt, the genetic basis of each population is strengthened and their chance of survival into the future is increased. That means we need to make sure different twinflower patches are within the flying capability of its pollinators. You can read an example of this type of work here in the Cairngorms National Park.
This principle of design is badly needed across our rural and marine environments to rebuild nature’s resilience. We need to embed effective ecologically coherent design and require it through planning regulation and guidance as well as remove barriers to nature restoration by funding coordinated restoration across large areas. Without it, we will fail to protect what we have and future generations will inherit an even more impoverished landscape, sea and wildlife.
This blog was first published as a contribution in Scottish Ecological Design Association – SEDA magazine, Autumn 2023.
Valuing Wild Plants 