Scotland’s Changing Nature – Making climate change and biodiversity loss relevant

Action to address the joint biodiversity and climate crises has a lot working against it. Bad faith actors, misinformation, greenwashing, entrenched systems and personal agendas– and that’s before falsely fragmented agendas and tensions between species-centric and process-based approaches to conservation.

One of the biggest of these roadblocks is relevance, to you, your work and your world. There are several reasons why this is a challenge:

1. Time. We often discuss the climate crises in projections for the future. This makes potential outcomes of the climate and biodiversity crises difficult to comprehend for our day to day lives. Although the long-term results from every increment of the short term – a continuum – we tend to falsely polarise the ‘short’ and ‘long’ term as if they are different things (e.g. short and long terms aspects of the carbon cycle).

2. Space. Until very recently the western world has been shielded from the impacts of biodiversity loss and climate change. Although we may feel bad for those suffering from storm surges and drought, until it is at our front door we are unlikely to act, by which point it will be too late. Another area for falsely disaggregated continuums. The global aspects of Earth systems, including nature regulating climate, emerge from a myriad of local actions.

3. Numbers. The joint crises are often discussed in numbers; 2 degrees warming, 7% wetter, net zero by 2045, 30 by 30. For those of us who work in science and policy, these numbers mean something very tangible, they are measurements of change, instruments of arguing and they very much convince us of the need for action. For the rest of the population, these numbers may not have the same effect especially when they are presented without the context in which they were developed and have meaning. Without an advanced degree in statistics, it can be difficult to interpret what these numbers mean for the world and, more importantly, what they mean for you. An ironic converse of this is the lack of tangible measurements for the impact of Nature Based Solutions means it is less likely to receive policy support, as those who create policy are convinced by numbers.

4. Shifting baseline. The results of the climate and biodiversity crises are often extremes of events that already take place. When these events exist on a sliding scale, change over time can be difficult to spot especially as occurrences are sporadic. A boiled frog.

5. Symptoms. We are better at treating the symptoms of an issue than treating the cause. Engineered responses to storm surges, flooding and drought are common but often have a limited lifespan and may cause other issues. Treating the cause of the climate and biodiversity crises is more difficult, often because we can’t see the benefits, especially if they accumulate over time and bigger spatial scales.

6. Connections. Changes are often discussed in isolation, focussed on the environment, the economy or society, but rarely crossing these boundaries, making connections and looking at the bigger picture. Any response to issues identified will do the same, responding to only a part of the picture, rather than discussing from source to sea.

So if all of these things are standing in our way, how do we make climate change and biodiversity loss relevant?

Scotland’s Changing Nature is attempting to do this. These narratives use iconic Scottish species as a window into landscape scale environmental change that Scotland is and will undergo due to climate change. These narratives attempt to address each of the challenges identified above, in each case making the changes relevant to the reader. We explore the changes in Scots pine, seagrass, wild Atlantic salmon, curlew, mountain hare and people, discussing how they have changed over time, in space, weaving narratives through the numbers, addressing changing baselines, looking at the big picture and making connections across the environment, economy and society. The resulting resources identify key threats and the actions that can be taken, making links between actions to identify those that tackle multiple threats. This systems view of restoration and change makes the biodiversity crises relevant to economic threats and cultural importance. (These resources will be released from the last week of September).

The next step, beyond expanding this pool of species, is to look beyond individuals to industries and landscapes. Adaptation planning considers the impacts of climate change to you and your organisation. Using the approach taken by the Scotland’s Changing Nature narratives, we can look beyond individual organisations and consider larger changes, larger impacts and larger actions that can be taken to address them. Transformative change and systems thinking needs systems communication, connecting the dots and making the crises relevant.

Emphasising connections and that we can control the things we do locally, now and it is these actions and connections that will lead to global and long-term effects for climate-nature. Think global act local (Local Agenda 21 (1992)!)!

By Dr Eleanor Gourevitch

Dr Eleanor Gourevitch, will be running a workshop at the Scotland Conference alongside colleague, Dr Clive Mitchell.