NatureScot to commence work on biodiversity metric

Today the Scottish Government has published an independent research report undertaken by the SRUC (Scotlands Rural College) titled ‘Approaches to Measuring Biodiversity in Scotland’. This report supports the development of a Scottish metric for measuring biodiversity, to allow for consistent and comparable assessment of losses or gains in biodiversity across sites and sectors.

As well as this, the research sets out a number of key findings, such as:

• The importance of accessibility, understandability and flexibility when developing the biodiversity metric.
• Biodiversity metrics for Scotland should be clear, concise and transparent.
• To meet the needs of all four sectors (natural capital markets, planning and development, biodiversity conservation and monitoring and agriculture) a framework is needed that integrates multiple metrics or tools to monitor biodiversity.

NatureScot is now set to commence work on developing an adapted biodiversity metric that will be suitable for use in supporting the delivery of Scotlands National Policy Framework 4 (NPF4) policy 3b and plans to engage closely with all relevant stakeholders during this process.