Scotland needs to do better on environmental protection

There’s been a lot of thinking across the third sector recently on suggestions for party manifestos in the forthcoming Scottish Parliamentary election in May. It’s certainly a good time for some fresh and challenging thinking.

It’s recognised that parliamentary democracy and trust in political parties is undermined by repeated failures to deliver on promises and projects. It’s in the interest of all parties to ensure more effective delivery of national commitments. The consequence of not doing so will be potential fragmentation of the current political landscape, voters turning away, or turning to more extreme parties, and the possibility of the rise of autocracy.

Failure to deliver rapidly, or indeed at all, by political institutions is often blamed on the constraints of public accountability. However, in a mature democracy, it is essential to retain broad public engagement and support, while also seeking improved and urgent delivery.

Both politicians and the public have long known that actions can only solve problems if they are timely.  Benjamin Franklin said, “You may delay, but time will not”. Evaluations by environmentalists repeatedly show that we don’t have much time left – yet, worldwide, governments dither. This has real consequences – for example, biodiversity has suffered in Scotland, resulting in a very poor biodiversity intactness index of just 56 per cent, despite successive Scottish Governments adopting repeated editions of the national biodiversity strategy since 2004 and the land use strategy since 2011. No area of seabed around Scotland achieves good ecological status, despite the first marine strategy being published in 2015. This is distressing in its own right, but also erodes the quality of life for current and future generations. The people of Scotland have a moral right to a healthy environment, but are being denied.

Failure of delivery on promises and commitments in national strategies is very prominent in the environment sector in Scotland (e.g. repeated failure of annual climate targets; failure of 11 out of 20 international Aichi biodiversity targets; failure adequately to control fishing in Marine Protected Areas; ditching of the car-kilometre reduction target). These failures undermine public respect both for the environmental targets themselves (witness the increasing antagonism to net zero) and for parliament, government, and the agencies expected to follow through on the promises. 

Despite numerous praiseworthy public statements, the declaration of a “climate emergency” and a nature crisis in Scotland are increasingly (and understandably) perceived as empty rhetoric. Scottish Environment LINK recognised this a long time ago with its plea to turn “rhetoric to reality”.  

Environmental strategies in Scotland are launched into the public arena with the plea that it is everyone’s responsibility to deliver the commitments. However, in the real world, it’s well known that if something is everyone’s responsibility then it is no-one’s responsibility. These strategies uniformly lack any robust professional programme delivery scheme or any uniquely identifiable accountability. 

Invariably there are many potential and contributing delivery agents but, too easily, they side-step responsibility, no doubt due to other priorities and a lack of either any discernible leadership for the task or any accountability for delays. So, the initiatives fail, repeatedly and predictably. This is well exemplified in the recently published Scottish Public Service Reform Strategy, entitled Delivery for Scotland. It has 18 workstreams and over 80 actions, but there is no mention of any identified accountable persons, allocated resources, or target delivery dates.

A new model of delivery of environmental and biodiversity commitments in Scotland is needed – one that satisfies the fundamental requirement of a whole-system approach. That means encompassing land, fresh water and the seas; it means ensuring that nature-friendly solutions are adopted in every sector; it means ensuring public subsidies for damaging activities (e.g. forestry grants) are removed while also seeking investment from the private sector; it means properly protecting the fish stocks that are still being over-fished in Marine Protected Areas; it means ensuring that actions are coordinated across multiple agencies and not performed piecemeal; it means addressing and adapting to both the climate and biodiversity emergencies in a manner that does not generate conflicts between them. It also means avoiding conflict with the communities who live in, depend on, and need to build a future with, a healthy environment. Collaboration between communities and specialists must be trusted to find a way through complex issues, and that needs consistent, enduring, support. The current environmental delivery structure in Scotland is inadequate for all these tasks. 

Laying out the scope and scale of this challenge leads to an almost inevitable conclusion:  Scotland needs a new Environmental Delivery Agency. It would be staffed solely by professional programme and project managers. It would strategically channel all the many fragmented environmental grants provided by government, such as for agriculture and forestry, along with other funding sources such as from biodiversity enhancement payments. It would have necessary powers such as the ability to buy and sell land, require designations and licences from NatureScot and Marine Scotland, and to object to local authority development plans. 

Under ministerial direction, it would run multiple, concurrent, professionally-managed projects and programmes to deliver key aspects of multi-stakeholder environmental strategies and commitments. Crucially, it would create prioritised, co-ordinated programmes of work with named individuals accountable, with appropriate resourcing, with interdependencies and risks identified, with milestones, target end-dates, and identified benefits. The agency would commission, monitor, and report on the practical work being undertaken by the multiple other essential delivery partners. 

Government says creation of any new agency will be a last resort.  Environmentalists would say we are at the point of last resort.

James Curran is Visiting Professor, Centre for Sustainable Development, University of Strathclyde

Sinéad Collins is Professor of Microbial Evolution, University of Edinburgh

Neil B. Metcalfe is Professor of Behavioural Ecology, University of Glasgow