The challenges facing Scotland’s nature are immense. Does the new Land Use Strategy hold the key to facing them down?
Scotland’s government has made bold promises for nature. By 2030, we will be a nature positive country. By 2045, we will have regenerated and restored our biodiversity. Does Scotland’s new Land Use Strategy, published this week, provide a path to making these promises a reality?
Its ambition, supported by stakeholders who fed into the consultation, is to provide clarity. The relationship between government strategies, plans, policies and actions, stakeholders said, is not always clear.
We agree.
For rewilders, how they fit into the government’s plans at all is decidedly unclear. On the one hand, rewilding’s ability to contribute to ecological recovery is badly needed. On the other hand, there is no dedicated funding, action plan, strategy or policy to encourage rewilding in Scotland.
As a country, how we use our nearly 8 million hectares of land is fundamental to meeting these challenges. From our land can come climate change mitigation and resilience, nature recovery, food, timber and fibre production, clean air and water, and energy provision. Land can be the lynchpin of our economy, and integral to our collective health and personal wellbeing. Scotland’s Fourth Land Use Strategy rightly recognises all of this.
But for Scotland’s land to serve these purposes in time to meet our targets, we must make choices about how we use our land. While we welcome the principle that integrating land uses is key, we need to recognise that each piece of land will have a primary use – and sometimes, wilder nature is the best and most productive use of land.
The illustrations in the Land Use Strategy show the missing piece of the puzzle: the closest thing to wilder nature shown is ‘semi-natural landscapes’.
Land where nature is the primary use isn’t in the picture – literally. This is despite the strategy recognising that biodiverse landscapes lead to more productive agricultural land (along with all their other many benefits).
A growing body of evidence, from Scotland and across the world, tells us that rewilding is a vital tool for recovering our lost nature and stabilising our climate. It’s boosting pollinator populations, vital for food production. It’s bringing birds back, essential for seed dispersal and nature recovery. It’s regenerating our seabeds, boosting biodiversity and sequestering carbon. It’s putting money into fragile rural economies.
Rewilding offers a pathway to the large-scale recovery of nature and communities across Scotland. It is inspiring. It is popular.
That’s why we responded to the consultation to call for 30% of Scotland to be managed for the restoration of natural processes. We would like to see these areas support a diversified, resilient and just economic transition alongside the large-scale restoration and rewilding of nature.
Being clear about where rewilding fits into the wider pattern of land use would help revitalise local communities and support the Scottish Government to meet existing nature and climate commitments.
Disengaging from difficult conversations will hold us back. But the Scottish Government’s Fourth Land Use Strategy is silent on rewilding. This strategy should influence the work of those implementing rewilding principles across Scotland alongside all others managing land. Ignoring its potential weakens the strategy.
The Fourth Land Use Strategy is a far-reaching document, laying out a vision, purpose and shared outcomes for land use across the country. It argues for acting “in an integrated, inclusive, and collaborative way”. We can look forward to a delivery plan following on its heels in the next 12 months. Perhaps, at last, here is a land use strategy that will be actively used by everyone who makes decisions about land use in Scotland.
But to really do that – it must include everyone.