Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 18 November 2020
The decline of species, habitats and biodiversity in Scotland is due to a multitude of factors, but human impacts through land use, pollution and habitat destruction have been key. In Scotland, species have been driven to extinction through persecution, habitats have been obliterated through overgrazing, native forests continue to degrade, propped up by public subsidies, and our marine ecosystem is being systematically destroyed. As was revealed earlier this month by Open Seas in The Ferret, a leaked Government report concluded that
“marine habitats in five regions have shrunk between 2011 and 2019.”
The report states:
“The target of no loss … has not been achieved in the Moray Firth, West Highlands, Outer Hebrides, Argyll and Clyde regions.”
That includes a loss of 10 per cent of the Clyde’s maerl beds, 53 per cent of Argyll’s flame shells, 27 per cent of Outer Hebrides seagrass and more than 90 per cent of the Highlands’ serpulid reefs. The report blames those declines on dredging, trawling, anchoring, overfishing and engineering works as well as climate change, ocean acidification and pollution from fish farms.
The dredging damage in Loch Carron in 2017 was a wake-up call, but ministers have been unwilling to limit the continued damage, even inside marine protected areas. Although the scientific evidence and advice is for action, the Government apparently prefers to sidle up to the vested interests of that damaging industry instead. In the small isles marine protected area, scallop dredging continues even today, six years after designation. What is the point of a protected area if it is going to be carved up to prop up environmentally damaging practices? Remember, the seabed is publicly owned—it belongs to us all.
Efforts to reverse those trends of decline have been compromised by the willingness of Government ministers to cosy up to the industrial shooting, farming and fishing lobby, whose interests have been consistently privileged in policy development. There exists a structural blindness to the long-term elite capture of public policy, but, sometimes, the mask slips. In 2013, at the centenary dinner of the National Farmers Union of Scotland, the then cabinet secretary, Richard Lochhead, stated, without a hint of embarrassment:
“It is an honour to serve as your minister in the Scottish Government.”
He then went on to say that he had the honour of being their representative in Government. However, Mr Lochhead was not the farmers’ minister and he was not their representative. That blurring of the subtle but important distinction between agriculture policy delivered in the public interest and the vested interests of producer groups is now so well entrenched that nature’s voice is almost never heard, and the trend has been continued by the current cabinet secretary Fergus Ewing, in his own incorrigible style. In 2018, he stated publicly that, to his way of thinking, no industry was more precious than the salmon farming industry, and that he would deal with the industry’s detractors.
A nature emergency has been in existence in Scotland’s seas and land for decades. It is time to put nature, not vested interests, first.
16:46