Scotland's national nature agency, NatureScot, is urging action to preserve and restore our woodlands for the benefit of communities and to tackle climate change. By Andrew Collier.
Scotland’s woodlands are a critically important resource. They perform vital functions including capturing carbon, providing timber and supporting a wealth of plants and animals. They are also a real asset when it comes to health and wellbeing.
Unfortunately, they are also in poor shape and need care and attention to return to health. Scotland’s national nature agency, NatureScot, is urging renewed action to improve, manage and extend our natural woodlands so that they play a stronger role in addressing the climate and nature crises, as well as bringing increased benefits to people.
“The state of our natural woodlands reflects the wider problem that is facing us around climate and nature”, says Claudia Rowse, the organisation’s Deputy Director of Sustainable Growth.
“We have a twin crises with declines in biodiversity and a climate emergency, and our natural woodlands reflect that same trend. However, they are also a great resource and restoring our native woodlands could play a strong role as a nature-based solution to the enormous challenges facing us.”
There is much work to do, however. More than half of Scotland’s protected woodlands are in a condition described as unfavourable, with the problem likely to be worse in wider countryside.
There is no single reason for this decline, though one of the most significant is grazing by deer: this leads to natural regeneration being well below the level required to sustain natural tree regeneration and support a rich understorey of plants.
Other factors include the proliferation of invasive and non-native species (INNS) particularly of rhododendron which affects some 20% of natural woodlands.
New pests and pathogens which are increasing as a result of a changing climate have also become a problem in recent years.
Yet another issue is habitat fragmentation. These woodlands are now smaller and more spread out than they would naturally be, leading to diminished biodiversity potential, lack of resilience to threats and a poorer ability to regenerate and recover.
There is however, some good news which suggests progress can be made. “There have actually been some great gains over the last 100 years in that we have increased our woodland cover in Scotland from 4% to 18%, although only four per cent of that is natural woodland with the rest being mainly conifer plantations.”
However, there is a caveat.
“While we have made a lot of progress, it’s nowhere near good enough. Including conifers and commercial forestry, the European average is more than 40%. So we could do a lot better.”
Few people are aware that Scotland is home to its own Atlantic rainforest which is one of our most precious habitats. Claudia Rowse added that “despite being globally significant, it is little known about and even rarer than tropical rainforest. With Scotland having some of the best remaining rainforest sites in Europe.”
The high levels of rainfall and relatively mild climate in the west of Scotland, particularly around Argyll provide just the right conditions for some of the world’s rarest bryophytes and lichens.
It is this rich diversity of species that makes Scotland’s rainforest internationally important. However, with as little as 30,000 hectares – just 2% per cent of Scotland’s woodland cover – now remaining, further work is needed to restore and expand our Atlantic Rainforest. Healthy woodlands are important when it comes to the environment and sustainability, but they also have other important benefits: they are attractive, calming and uplifting in their own right, so bringing human health benefits.
In recognition of this, NatureScot is championing projects to bring natural woodlands closer to people. This includes introducing micro woodlands in urban areas – a concept known as Wee Forests – as well as supporting forest schools and nurseries and community zones.
“It is the large projects across the landscape that will help us solve the climate and nature crises”, says Ms Rowse, “but we also need those small bits of woodland we can put back in our towns and cities to help communities and individuals reconnect with nature.”
Some of these woods are only the size of small tennis courts, she adds, but they can provide outdoor classrooms and allow people to be engaged in activities such as planting and managing them.
“There are places for long term citizen science and monitoring what is happening, and of course they allow us to enjoy nature on our doorsteps. That’s good for our mental and physical health.
“We are supporting the rollout of Wee Forests from Ayrshire to Aberdeen. We also support the Lost Woods project which has provided 135 primary schools in Glasgow with almost 50,000 acorns to grow oak trees and create new native woodland to benefit the local community.”
The simple fact remains, however, that it is challenging to quickly create a natural woodland at scale. High grazing impacts are a particular problem, with deer the main grazing species found in woodlands.
Proactive deer management can help with this, as is happening at the Creag Meagaidh natural nature reserve outside Fort William, as it allows the native natural woodland to regenerate naturally. Huge progress has been made in managing the deer more sustainably.
“However, deer numbers are still too high in many places. To allow natural regeneration you need very low numbers.”
Deer are iconic in terms of Scottish tourism, and culling them will not adversely affect this, Claudia Rowse says. “They thrive in Scotland, and are a great attraction for tourists and locals alike, with sporting interest also acting as an important contribution to the local economy.
“We would never want, nor be able, to reduce them to the point where they will become rare creatures. They will always be widespread – this is about managing a population in a sustainable way that reduces impacts on our natural woodlands at the same time as supporting tourism and the rural economy.”
Despite the overall challenges of restoring our woodlands, Claudia is an optimist. “The causes for my optimism are grounded in evidence, we have international efforts at the highest level at COP, some fantastic and inspiring examples of what people are doing right now in Scotland, and a huge opportunity to restore and expand our natural woodlands so that we can achieve a nature-rich future.”
NATURE AND CLIMATE CHANGE – ADDRESSING THE TWIN CRISES…
By Biodiversity Minister and co-leader of the Scottish Green Party Lorna Slater.
NATURE – the complex web of species and ecosystems in our environment – is what sustains all life on planet earth. It helps to remove carbon dioxide emissions from the atmosphere at a level we are not close to being able to match through technology.
But across the world, nature’s ability to do this is in decline due to a range of factors – in particular, the way we use the land and sea, but also over-exploitation, pollution and invasive species, to name a few.
And climate change makes all the causes of nature loss worse, affecting the weather, habitats and the food chain, with devastating impacts for many species.
Scotland is no exception to this – if anything, the situation here is worse than many other places due to our long history of human occupation and industrial innovation, and because we are an island. We have seen a worrying decline in biodiversity over the last decade, with half of species decreasing in abundance.
The Scottish Government was one of the first to recognise the twin crises of nature and climate – and we are calling for global transformative action, as well as acting here, at home.
Through our leadership of the ‘Edinburgh Process’ we have mobilised a global network of sub-state governments, cities and local authorities committing to take action for nature.
The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is developing a new global biodiversity framework for the next decade, which will be agreed at the CBD Conference of Parties (COP15) meeting in Kunming, China next April.
We are working to build commitment among devolved bodies and administrations around the world to raise the ambition at COP15, in line with our own goal to halt the ongoing loss of nature by 2030, and restoring nature by 2045.
Our ambition will not be limited to the goals and targets set out in the new global framework. Within a year of COP15 we will publish a new biodiversity strategy followed by a regularly reviewed delivery plan, which will help guide the way we use and manage land and our approach to protecting habitats and ecosystems.
This is supported by £500 million investment in our natural economy to help tackle the biodiversity crisis and the introduction of far-reaching targets for nature restoration and recovery through a new Natural Environment Bill, which will be introduced in year 3 of this parliament.
We will also increase annual woodland creation targets to 18,000 hectares annually by 2024-25, and provide £250 million over ten years to restore over 250,000 hectares of degraded peatland.
As we approach COP26, we will continue to take a leadership role in international discussions when the opportunity arises, and to contribute to the development of the UK’s COP15 negotiating position.
We are a part of nature, not apart from it - if we can’t support nature then we can’t support humanity. COP26 and COP15 will be crucial turning points in our history – and Scotland is at the heart of both.
We must see urgent and transformational action to address biodiversity loss, safeguard our planetary safety net and ensure positive outcomes for nature, climate and sustainable development.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article