Despite biodiversity being a top priority for Scotland’s environment, there is a lack of clarity around how to measure it, according to a new report from the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI).
The report highlights the need for better methods to measure levels of biodiversity, which will allow true assessments of success or failure, in what is a key strategy to address the climate and biodiversity crises.
This comes as the Scottish Government is actively developing an Ecosystem Restoration Code (ERC) as a new mechanism to encourage private investment in nature restoration and biodiversity projects.
Under the Nature Conservation (Scotland) Act 2004, all public bodies in Scotland are required to further the conservation of biodiversity when carrying out their responsibilities.
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However, the new report from UHI concludes that there is no universal standard to measure biodiversity. As a result, measuring success or failure of biodiversity initiatives is 'extremely challenging'.
The report, which focused on biodiversity assessments on community-owned land, suggests that ‘community landowners cannot know if or how they are achieving their biodiversity objectives despite the biggest community buyouts have a higher-than-average proportion of sites of ecological importance such as peatlands and Sites of Special Scientific Interest’.
The report also found that community ownership is inherently geared towards biodiversity, with 12 of the 18 largest community landowners directly constituted to ‘conserving, protecting or enhancing the environment or natural heritage, and with environmental sustainability central to community aspirations’.
As well as standardising the way in which biodiversity is measured, the report recommends local people – with their often-detailed understanding of the area – should become more involved in designing and carrying out biological monitoring.
The UHI report also found that making assessments of land use and management across Scotland is unnecessarily challenging due to the lack of land data and lack of transparency. To have robust climate and biodiversity projects there needs to be readily available data on land boundaries, ownership and land use so that successes, failures and differences can be assessed in our fight against climate change and biodiversity loss.
Dr Josh Doble, Director of Policy and Advocacy at Community Land Scotland, welcomed the research from UHI. He said: “It clearly demonstrates the issues inherent in Scottish landownership data and how to accurately measure biodiversity. It provides important pause for thought as the Scottish Government consults on how to leverage in private finance to biodiversity recovery.
“For our members there are important findings regarding the number of key ecological sites they are custodians of, as well as where ecological recovery needs to take place. We wholeheartedly agree with UHI that community-led biological monitoring should have a far more prominent place in biodiversity assessments as well as the need for much stronger data to assist all landowners in understanding what biodiversity actions need to happen on their land.”
Dr Mike Daniels, a researcher at UHI’s Centre for Mountain Studies, added: “It is surprising, given the high priority of biodiversity in public policy, how difficult it is to get data on biodiversity outcomes for specific areas of land. Scotland needs better availability of land ownership data and greater transparency on how it is managed.”
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