Today, the Scottish Parliament will pass its 2025/26 budget, which sets its spending priorities for the year ahead.

Nature is our life-support system. We rely on it for our access to breathable air, drinkable water and nourishing food as well as human health and wellbeing. However, in Scotland, intensive management, over-exploitation, neglect and pollution have stripped our landscapes and seas of their richness of life. The most recent Biodiversity Intactness Index, published by RSPB and the Natural History Museum in 2021, ranked Scotland 28th from the bottom of 240 countries and territories across the world. 

We therefore welcome additional commitments from the Scottish Government to increasing the Nature Restoration Fund, boosting peatland restoration spending and supporting local government, which has a critical role to play in climate mitigation and nature restoration efforts. 

But the government must start to match its ambition on nature targets with its spending commitments. Valuing and enhancing our environment is a primary ‘National Outcome’ for the Scottish Government. The Scottish Biodiversity Delivery Plan recently published by the Scottish Government outlines actions to halt biodiversity loss by 2030 - and to have regenerated biodiversity by 2045. The state of nature in Scotland is currently so damaged that repairing our broken ecosystems requires a significant investment of time, effort and money. 

Rewilding – large-scale restoration of nature to the point where it can look after itself again – offers hope for addressing the connected biodiversity and climate emergencies. Importantly too, it offers a wide range of social and economic benefits. These benefits include nature-based jobs and community wealth-building, improved health and wellbeing, mitigating the impacts of extreme weather from flooding to droughts, ensuring sustainable food production, clean air and water, and re-peopling of depopulated areas.Rewilding must be a national mission: as Dr Alasdair Allan MSP, Minister for Climate Action, said at the launch of our ‘Pathway to a Rewilding Nation’ in

Rewilding offers documented economic benefits and serves as a valuable investment in society. Notably, a sample study of major projects in Scotland revealed a more than 400% increase in job opportunities. Additionally, rewilding interventions can prove to be highly cost-effective. 

As the Scottish Rewilding Alliance launched our Pathway to a Rewilding Nation, we called on the Scottish Government to help create a wilder future for Scotland by expanding funding for nature. We know budgets are under pressure. We acknowledge that the Scottish Government has made some hard decisions while trying to deliver a budget that helps us make progress in the fight against both the causes and impacts of climate breakdown and the nature emergency. 

But without political commitment and a budget that prioritises ecological restoration, it’s a fight Scotland will lose.

To set Scotland on the path to ecological recovery, we need:

• An increase in funding for farmers, crofters and land managers for options that deliver the most positive ecological impact
• Funding for collaborative ecological restoration efforts, like farmer clusters and catchment restoration initiatives
• Funding that enables the natural regeneration of more of Scotland’s woodlands
• Dedicated funding for ancient pinewood restoration - not money diverted from vital rainforest restoration efforts
• Funding for coexistence with wildlife programmes to better enable species translocations and reintroductions

Photo by Mark Hamblin / scotlandbigpicture.com