Our natural beauty is worth preserving
Scotland’s rural beauty masks a deeper ecological and biodiversity crisis. Professor Pat Monaghan calls for urgent reform in land use, forestry, and environmental policy.
Scotland is a beautiful country, with almost 98% of land classified as rural. Dramatic mountains, maritime grasslands. heather-clad moorland, bogs, rivers tumbling through woody glens, and productive farmland. This might suggest an arcadian utopia, but it is a landscape shaped by human history, for which nature has paid a high price.
Scotland is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, retaining only ~half of its historic land-based biodiversity, with habitats such as blanket bogs, native pinewoods and Atlantic rainforests much reduced. More intensive farming has driven out other species perceived to reduce productivity.
Upland areas of Scotland contain internationally important biodiversity, but large areas of this habitat are heavily managed for monocultures of grouse, deer and non-native spruce; biodiversity is typically low and there is a legacy of species persecution. The montane scrub that should cloak upper slopes has almost gone, and the heather-clad moor we see today is partly maintained by environmentally unfriendly practices. Many native species are in perilous decline and non-native invasive species are spreading. Small farmers often struggle to make a living, and many who live and work in the countryside face chronic shortages of affordable housing.
Most governments around the world are trying to put policies in place to mitigate biodiversity loss. Scotland signed up to the ‘30 by 30’ target at the 2022 Biodiversity CoP 15 in Montreal, aiming to have 30% of land and seas conserved and managed for nature by 2030. But we are not on track to meet this target. The latest ‘State of Nature Scotland’ 2023 report shows continued declines in many species, including a staggering 50% decline in both seabirds and flowering plants over the last 50 years. Meanwhile the climate continues to warm, bringing more extreme and violent weather – storms, floods and drought.
We face two global crises – rapid climate change and biodiversity loss – both of which are caused by how we have exploited the Earth’s resources. Peatlands are our richest carbon stores in Scotland, with even a relatively shallow peat depth of 30cm holding more carbon, area for area, than a tropical rainforest. Much peatland was lost in historic burning, draining and ploughing. Three quarters of our remaining peatlands are damaged, now releasing rather than storing carbon. Yet we continue to allow planting of dense stands of non-native conifers, even in peat up to half a metre deep.
Nonetheless, some good things are happening. New legislation is being brought in to reform land ownership and management. NatureScot’s Peatland Action scheme, promotion of nature friendly farming and nature restoration should all have a positive effect if we can get the balance right. We still need a legislative framework to protect soils, as we have for air and water quality. We need better regulatory control of invasive non-native species and wider implementation of ‘polluter pays’ policies. We also need to ensure that our legislated environmental standards are actually complied with, to which end Environmental Standards Scotland is a welcome development.
Our efforts to mitigate one crisis must not exacerbate the other. We must scrutinise, and where necessary reform, our forestry grants and policies to get the right balance for carbon capture, biodiversity and timber production. We need more native woodlands created for the long term – in the right places and in the right way. We need frankness, honesty and clarity about the effect of our current rotational commercial forestry practices on rural communities, jobs, economies and biodiversity. Timber production can be done in more nature-friendly ways than at present.
We are a part of the ecosystems within which we live, and we damage and destabilise them at our peril. We do need our rural environments to be productive and provide livelihoods and housing for the people lucky enough to live there. But we need to act in a way that is fair and just internationally, intergenerationally and interspecifically. We need to stop creating monocultures in our farmland, forestry, and rural economies. More diversity provides more resilience and stability. Most people view nature as a source of joy and are glad to be part of it. Anthropogenically-driven loss of other species is a source of sadness, and we can do much more to help other species thrive alongside us.
Professor Pat Monaghan FRSE, Regius Professor of Zoology, University of Glasgow
This article originally appeared in ReSourcE spring/summer 2025.
The RSE’s blog series offers personal views on a variety of issues. These views are not those of the RSE and are intended to offer different perspectives on a range of current issues.
