By Deborah Long (Chief Executive – Scottish Environment LINK)
Deadlines are often a good thing. When there is so much to do, when the timeline is measured in months not days and when urgent priorities trump important priorities, that’s when targets, measuring progress and deadlines really help.
We’ve seen that the climate and child poverty targets have concentrated minds. Without them, we would not have seen the levels of investment brought through the Scottish Child Payment scheme. Although more clearly needs to be done, the level of progress so far towards Net Zero has also been achieved on the back of targets.
Targets need to strike that awkward and very public balance between being realistic and ambitious. Ambition is needed to stretch action towards the level of change needed, usually uncomfortably so. Targets make that public commitment to act. Current Scottish Government targets on climate have evolved – not because they were impossible in the first place but because they were stretching and insufficient action has been taken, so far, to move Scotland along the projected course.
The important thing is that we, as voters, can actually see where Scotland is in our journey towards net zero and ministers must report on that to Parliament. The fact that we now face some uncomfortable truths about how much we are willing to do, remains the issue.
Nature doesn’t yet have the same commitment but it is urgently needed. Restoring nature is tricky: nature is not easily tackled or measured. Results are not quick or necessarily predictable. However, nature is fundamental because it reaches into every part of human lives. It is the environment we live in – everything we do impacts on nature one way or another.
Since prehistory, humans have had an impact on their environment at an ever-increasing scale from the local in Mesolithic times, to the regional in Neolithic, to national during the Industrial Revolution and to global since the 1970s. While that impact has increased in scale and reach, our actions to mitigate that impact and to repair the damage haven’t grown beyond the local. Scotland is now just starting to reach into regional initiatives through large scale restoration projects, but they are limited in scale and impact. What nature needs is a strategic, large scale, resourced and effective approach to nature restoration, and it needs it to be in place by 2030.
Scotland has had a Scottish Biodiversity Strategy since 2004. In 2013, the 2020 Challenge for Scotland’s Biodiversity was published, in response to the UN Aichi Biodiversity Targets, to be met by 2020 and which Scotland supported. In 2015, Scotland’s biodiversity: a route map to 2020 was published, with a series of agreed actions to be delivered by 2020. This was an inclusive route map, supported and delivered by Scottish Environment LINK members, the coalition of environmental charities, in partnership with government. Although it resulted in some key progress towards UN Aichii targets, by 2020 the final report from Naturescot acknowledged that we had not done enough. Peatland and native woodland restoration were both below target. Nature finance was in its infancy. Protected Area condition had declined and there were mixed results to the conservation of priority species. Limited Sustainable Land Management was funded by agri environment funding and 37% Scotland’s seas were protected on paper by MPAs, but not at sea. More positively, freshwater quality had improved though implementation of the third river basin management plan and more people were able to access green space through targeted funded projects. But the results for nature were clearly too limited.
But since then we have left the EU, and lost the funding mechanisms that had previously supported green infrastructure projects, and farming subsidies for nature and climate have largely disappeared. The pandemic shifted focus onto other priorities. Although nature was widely embraced as an antidote to the huge pressures the pandemic brought, Scotland’s focus, resources and investment declined and many biodiversity measures have gone into reverse. Were we all just overcome by our lack of progress and overwhelmed by the emerging ‘shock and awe’ tactics approach to unstable global issues?
Despite all this, there have been some positive changes for nature where energy and resources have been focused: increasing numbers of red kites and the return of otters to many of our rivers. We know that nature can recover given space and targeted investment. But we have missed our own targets on habitat restoration. This is because it is difficult, expensive and requires a wide range of people to be involved and committed. Without the drive of legally binding targets, we did our best but we failed to focus enough and invest and support change. The commitment of legal targets would move us from short term fixes to long term planning and strategic approaches. They move us from just looking at the symptoms and instead addressing the causes.
If, by 2030, we have continued to set up piecemeal, large-scale projects, designed one by one and unconnected by strategic land and sea use planning, we will not meet the Global Biodiversity Framework Targets, supported by the Scottish Government in 2022. It is still going to be hard. We are all going to have to make some changes but the biggest change for all must be a change in the direction of travel at Government level and the need for decisive, nature proofed leadership and decision making.
The Natural Environment Bill, currently going through Scottish Parliament, and the commitment to nature targets is part of the decisive leadership Scottish Government is showing. These targets must address species abundance, distribution and extinction risk, habitat quality and extent and address the drivers of biodiversity decline, the overall integrity, connectivity and resilience of ecosystems. Such targets do drive change. They do this by setting out in clear, objective ways what is happening: we can all see the direction of travel. This means we can keep Government accountable and with Ministers reporting on progress, we can all be involved in driving further improvements.
Members of LINK and supporters of the Scotland Loves Nature campaign are very clear that without legally binding targets for nature, and the action and investment that those will bring, we all lose. We need leadership from whichever Government is in power in Scotland: we need them to champion nature throughout policy development and implementation. Targets give us, the public, a window into how Scotland is doing, where we need to do more and where we can show others what can be achieved.
We know nature restoration works and we know how to do it. We just need to do more of it and everywhere.