Wildlife

The Wildlife Group works to achieve its aim to ensure Scotland’s natural heritage, on land and sea, is complete in its diversity, composed of fully functioning ecosystems and resilient to accelerated environmental change.

Group Objectives

  • Biodiversity post 2020: what we would like to see in the post 2020 target route map and actions.
  • Focus on enabling national ecological nature networks to be recognised and delivered
  • Ensuring nature’s needs are accounted for in bills and acts going through the Scottish Parliament.

 

In 2019, LINK’s Wildlife group was delighted to have assisted with the preparation of State of Nature Scotland 2019. Craig Macadam, Vice chair of LINK and report author, said: “This latest report highlights that Scottish wildlife and the abundance of different groups continues to be in decline and that there are several species at risk of extinction. It is not just our iconic species such as the wild cat that are at risk but also many of our lesser known species of wildlife. It is our diversity of wildlife that is important to ensure a healthy environment. Invertebrates provide us with a number of essential services that are ‘FREE’ and worth millions of pounds to the UK economy. For example, without the diversity of insect pollinators including bees, hoverflies, butterflies and more our soft fruit industry (strawberries and raspberries) could collapse! It is essential that we work together to ensure the long-term survival of wildlife and provide a healthy environment for them to survive and thrive in Scotland.  The report reveals that since recording began 49% of Scottish species have decreased, 28% have increased. Nature is changing rapidly, with 62% of species showing strong changes. Of the 6,413 species found in Scotland that have been assessed 11% have been classified as threatened with extinction from Scotland.

State of Nature Scotland 2019

 

 

 

Convener

Alistair Whyte

Vice Convener

Dr Paul Walton

Staff Liaison

Juliet Caldwell

The Wildlife group has a number of active members, a full list is shown below.

The Wildlife Group also run the Nature Champion Initiative, which asks Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) to lend political support to the protection of Scotland’s threatened wildlife and habitats by becoming ‘Nature Champions.’

 

Latest News

Humanity’s war on nature: was COP15 a battle cry or a white flag?

13 Feb 2023

It’s now a month since COP15 in Montreal. The COP15 summit gave us commitments to global nature targets to halt the loss of nature by 2030 and to restore it by 2050. We also saw commitments to conserve and manage 30% of the Earth’s land and seas for nature; halt the extinction of known species, […]

LINK welcomes draft Scottish Biodiversity Strategy

30 Jan 2023

The Scottish Government published the ‘final draft’ of its biodiversity strategy at the tail end of last year. It coincided with the UN biodiversity conference in Montreal, where world leaders agreed on a global framework for nature’s recovery, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. LINK welcomes the publication of the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy (SBS) […]

COP27 and the need to move faster together

23 Nov 2022

At the end of COP26 in Glasgow last year, we concluded that some progress had been made, but the rate of progress was not fast enough (LINK Thinks blog 22 November 2021). Another 12 months into the decade when a real and accelerated effective change is needed, has COP27 delivered? In a single lifetime, we […]

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