By Rob Edwards
Scottish ministers are facing “reputational damage” for failing to keep their promise to protect the nation's precious countryside, animals and plants, the government’s nature conservation agency has warned.
In a new assessment, Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) says that crises with otters in Shetland and natterjack toads on the Solway coast have contributed to the stagnation of efforts to improve the state of Scotland’s 1,800 designated conservation areas since July last year.
Many sites are getting worse because of pollution, poor management, neglect and other threats. As a result, the Scottish government’s target to “improve the condition of protected nature sites” is being missed.
The target is a watered-down replacement of an earlier government aim to “increase to 95 per cent the proportion of protected nature sites in favourable condition” by 2010. That was also missed, as less than 77 per cent of sites are currently judged to be in a favourable condition.
SNH’s latest assessment comes in a report to a recent board meeting in Inverness on “business performance” over the last three months of 2011. The report highlighted the lack of progress on designated conservation areas.
“A key risk to the programme is a failure to deliver improvement in the favourable condition indicator resulting in reputational damage for SNH and Scottish government,” it said.
One problem was a “worrying” but hitherto unreported crash in the population of otters at Yell Sound on Shetland. SNH has launched an investigation into why 85 per cent of otter holes had been found to be unoccupied, with some clues suggesting that they may be short of fish to eat.
The number of rare natterjack toads at the site of a former explosives factory at Powfoot near Annan in Dumfries and Galloway has also declined. According to Chris Cathrine, from the Amphibian and Reptile Groups of the UK, this could be because of a combination of disease, poor management and climate change.
The SNH report said that only 22 natural features in designated areas had been brought into favourable condition in 2011–12, compared to a target of 137. This made hardly any difference to the overall proportion in favourable condition, which went from 76.7 per cent to just 76.8 per cent.
Environmental groups described the government’s failure to meet its target as “a major concern”, and called for more investment. “We fear that a shift in focus to those parts of nature that simply generate a financial profit mean that this ecologically critical network is being neglected,” said Paul Walton, from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in Scotland.
“We urge SNH to see new approaches as an extension of, rather than an alternative to, the essential baseline conservation mechanisms like protected areas which underpin our environmental quality.”
Deborah Long, conservation manager at Plantlife Scotland, pointed out that it was not going to be easy to improve the condition of the natural areas that were suffering. “But that does not mean that the target should be dropped,” she said.
“It would disastrous for Scotland's protected areas, the health of Scotland's wider countryside and the success of ecological networks if SNH and the Scottish government were to drop this target because it got too difficult.”
SNH accepted that it faced major problems in meeting the government’s target. “There’s no avoiding the fact that we face big challenges,” said the agency’s programme manager for designated sites, Phil Gaskell.
“Some of the early progress was obvious and more easily made. Now we are involved in the harder sites involving more complex issues, including joint management between a number of landowners and occupiers.”
Gaskell acknowledged that SNH had “fallen short” of the previous target to bring 95 per cent of protected natural features into favourable condition by 2010. “To address this, we will be focusing attention and resources on a limited number of specific habitats and species groups where we believe progress can be made most effectively,” he added.
The Scottish government stressed that it remained committed to improving the condition of protected nature sites. “We do not underestimate the challenges involved in doing so,” said a spokesman. “SNH is engaging with land owners and managers to identify and deal with any issues.”
– Rob Edwards, environmental news and comment.
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