This statement outlines the APRS position on Climate Change, our Countryside & Landscapes, including our position on Climate and Energy
Our situation
We are in a Climate Emergency. Global temperatures have risen even faster than has been predicted by climate scientists, putting us beyond our previous worst case scenario for global heating. We look set to break the 1.5°C barrier in the next couple of years, where dangerous and uncontrolled heating becomes much more likely.
Despite our knowledge of the damaging effects of fossil fuels, and the knowledge of how we can eliminate their use and stop our slide towards an unlivable world, we are way off course.
This is an existential issue, with far-reaching impacts, and the most pressing challenge for all of us in the next decades.
What Climate Breakdown means for our Landscapes
Climate change means that Scotland’s landscapes will change, and are already changing. Sea level rise, increased and more intense rainfall, and warmer temperatures will bring unprecedented changes: coastal erosion and flooding will reshape our coastlines and landscapes, higher rainfall and warmer temperatures will affect what can grow and live. Human infrastructure will be destroyed and have to be relocated.
And there will be changes to the landscape resulting from policy decisions designed for climate mitigation and adaptation. Even more will be demanded from our land. Land will be expected to provide sites for energy generation, transmission and storage, for the food production required to achieve greater food security, for homes, for biodiversity recovery, and for outdoor recreation and tourism. Our soils, and especially our peatland – Scotland’s biggest carbon store – will have to be protected and restored for carbon sequestration. Woodlands will be needed for the same purpose. And, in addition, land is expected to provide carbon offsets for companies’ and individuals’ fossil fuel use. However the challenge of reconciling these diverse and often conflicting demands on land is beyond the scope and capacity of Scotland’s existing planning mechanisms.
The way forward
We are at the stage where both mitigation and adaptation are absolutely critical and required at a scale that goes way beyond incremental change. The IPCC has stated that “limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees would require far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
So what do these ‘radical’ and ‘unprecedented’ changes mean for Scotland’s countryside and landscapes?
APRS has always recognised that our countryside and landscapes are constantly changing and has strived to ensure that land-use decisions bequeath to future generations a countryside that is at least as beautiful, biodiverse and rewarding as that which we enjoy today. Decisions about land use can enhance our landscapes and countryside but they can also diminish them.
We can choose to re-meander rivers and burns to attenuate and absorb flood water, or we can erect and fortify hard barriers to flooding. We can choose to reduce grazing pressure to allow denser vegetation, regenerating woodlands and hedgerows to reduce the likelihood of, and risk from, landslips and soil erosion. We can create salt marshes and wetlands on vulnerable reclaimed land by managed realignment to protect settlements from flooding, or we can build seawalls higher and higher. We can create energy networks that facilitate smaller scale renewable generation close to where people live, rather than buttress the centralised system built originally for nuclear and coal power stations. We can radically reduce deer numbers to allow woodland to regenerate naturally where it would have once grown or we can plant deer-fenced blocks of Sitka spruce over whole landscapes. We can, if we so choose, create a resilient landscape with a mosaic of land uses and habitats.
The choices we make, therefore, bring the opportunity to enhance our landscapes and countryside. We should use them. We need to acknowledge that land is our most precious resource and, when there are competing interests and priorities, we need a through and strategic approach to land use change. This is absolutely vital, and something that APRS has always advocated.
Within a planned approach to land use change, there are win-wins to be identified and grasped but there are also trade-offs. And these are often most visible in terms of impacts on the land and competing land use. Land is one of the most obviously limited resources that we have. As Mark Twain said “Buy land, they’re not making it any more”.
Energy and landscape
Our reliance on cheap and usable Energy, in the form of fossil fuels, has caused the climate crisis, and Energy has to be a huge part of the answer. Energy-related development is also a good illustration of the trade-offs over competing land uses; impacting some species and habitats, using land that then cannot be used for other purposes, and changing landscapes.
We need to dramatically increase the provision of renewable energy so that we can switch our fossil fuel-heavy economy to renewables. Scotland has already made huge strides in this: we are already net exporters of renewably generated electricity and there is still much consented capacity to come on stream. Scottish Government policy envisages the country remaining a net exporter even after domestic consumption has ramped up as electricity replaces fossil fuels for heating, transport and other uses.
The country’s natural renewable energy resources are thus a huge asset. But exploiting them is not without environmental cost including landscape and visual impacts. This reality makes energy, and the path that society pursues to eliminate greenhouse emissions, central to APRS’s mission again, just as it was in the era of hydro-power investment.
If we are to minimise the damage inflicted, we must work on reducing demand – using less energy, through efficiency measures and through switching what we do, and how we do it. This is where we have been particularly slow off the mark. The UK has the least efficient houses in Europe and we are still locking-in inefficiencies for the future.
Because the catastrophic effects fossil fuels have on our home planet have not been factored into decision-making, we have developed an economy that is predicated on plentiful and cheap energy. This was illustrated by the energy crisis – had the green policies cancelled by Cameron’s Government in 2015 continued, they would have saved the economy £8.3bn a year as measured in 2022.
It is clear we have a very long way to go to make the dramatic changes needed to move away from this current economic model. Policy measures have focused heavily on the supply side, generating more energy but doing far less to reduce demand. We need to redress this balance.
Even if we do manage to get a handle on the demand side, however, there is another element to the energy equation – and it relates to choices taken over how much energy we produce in order to export.
With the current model of predominantly multinational energy developers, wherever there is profit to be made, there will be demands for more development. Equally, where there are areas where development is desirable but not as profitable, it will go elsewhere. This is why APRS has been calling for strategic spatial planning for energy for many years and why it is time to have firmer policy direction and publicly and community-owned energy.
Our renewable energy resources, and our landscapes, are two of Scotland’s most important assets. Renewable energy development is imperative and can potentially benefit not only the overall economy but also the local communities which host it. But we must avoid the pitfalls of the past. With fossil fuels we pursued low-cost energy at the expense of our environment, disregarding the externalities of that energy consumption. There is a risk that we could be, once again, creating energy infrastructure without paying sufficient regard to the impacts.
Apart from the fact that there are many landscapes that do not have the capacity to accommodate industrial-scale energy infrastructure, we need a switch away entirely from the extractive mindset which takes resources from the earth, uses them up and then sends waste into our atmosphere, or rivers, our seas and our soils.
The National Planning Framework brings some clarity to the situation. Previous National Planning Frameworks were centred on delivering economic growth as their central purpose, but the recently published NPF4 offers a departure from this. With a statement that reflects the language in that 1.5 degree report it says “We must embrace and deliver radical change so we can tackle and adapt to climate change, restore biodiversity loss, improve health and wellbeing, reduce inequalities, build a wellbeing economy and create great places.”
This means recognising the human need for beauty as part of human flourishing, and a decent standard of living for everyone. Our aim should be a wellbeing economy that ensures that future generations benefit from countryside and landscapes at least as rich, beautiful and rewarding as those we have been privileged to inherit.