.png)
4 hours ago
2
Scotland faces a significant challenge to meet its pledges on protecting nature without more funding and a shift in attitudes, a senior conservation figure has warned.
Francesca Osowska, the outgoing chief executive of the agency NatureScot, said greater urgency and action was needed to meet a promise to restore 30% of Scotland’s natural environment by 2030.
In an interview with the Guardian, her last before leaving NatureScot, she said ministers should integrate nature restoration into policymaking across the government and its agencies in the same way the climate crisis had been fully integrated.
At present, only 18% of Scotland’s landmass met the 30% restoration target that the Scottish and UK governments agreed to in the Kunming declaration on tackling the biodiversity crisis in 2021.
That issue dominated one of Osowska’s final meetings before she takes over as chief executive of the Scottish Funding Council, which funds universities, on Monday. “With the funding constraints that we have, would I accept that that’s a challenge? Of course I would.”
She said Scotland had a “fighting chance” of hitting the target if policy across government and also subsidies for farming, forestry and uplands were directed at doing so.
“The one thing that I would really like government to do, in the same way that they did with climate change, is have nature as a cross-cutting theme across all portfolios, and that kind of mainstreaming, and that embedding, and that synergy,” she said.
World leaders have generally been too slow to address the scale and severity of the nature crisis, she said, which puts the security of people across the global south at risk.
The 30 by 30 goal was “totemic” and “trips off the tongue”, she said. Yet “it feels as if globally we’re resting on our laurels. Where are the global funding initiatives to support the delivery of 30 by 30, to go beyond, effectively, what is a recovery program into restoration?”
The impetus to embed nature recovery in global climate strategies that emerged at the Cop26 climate talks in Glasgow in 2021, an initiative partly driven by Osowska and NatureScot, and in the Kunming declaration, seemed to have fallen away.
“Disappointing would be a neutral adjective,” Osowska said. “It’s felt slow. It’s felt cumbersome.”
Environment charities in Scotland have been increasingly worried about long-term cuts to NatureScot’s funding, and some believe the agency has allowed itself to be bullied by the farming, forestry and fishing lobbies – a charge Osowska rejects.
In 2023, a coalition of conservation groups calculated the agency’s real terms funding had been cut by 40% over the last decade. Meanwhile Scotland has missed its climate targets, is off track to meet a goal to restore 250,000 hectares of peatland by 2030, has missed most of its forestry targets, and cut spending on agri-environment schemes.
Environmentalists are also unnerved by the latest Scottish government budget, which appears to show a 12.8% cut in NatureScot’s funding. Osowska said that was misleading, since it would also get money for nature recovery and peatland restoration, which would see its overall budget increase slightly.
Compared to other agencies and departments, NatureScot has been protected reasonably well. Asked whether she thought the settlement was adequate, fair or sufficient, she said: “Fair in the context, yes; enough, never; adequate: just about.”
Despite the risk of even tougher funding decisions in the future, Osowska said she was broadly optimistic about the Scottish government’s direction of travel. Ministers are due to publish a new nature recovery bill and new land reform legislation this year.
She said Humza Yousaf’s decision as first minister to end the power-sharing agreement between the Scottish National party and the Scottish Greens had “inevitably” weakened the voices for nature in the government.
But the key environmental policies set out in the Bute House agreement between the two parties were still being pursued by SNP ministers, including spending £65m by next year on nature restoration, £5m on Atlantic rainforest restoration, a new national park and marine conservation. “It’s bound to be different. The philosophy is different. But the commitments remain,” she said.
The next test was what the SNP, Scottish Labour and other parties put in their manifestos for the Holyrood elections due in May 2026.
“Of course I have concerns, and I wouldn’t have done this job for as long as I’ve done it if I didn’t have those concerns,” she said. “Are we better equipped to understand and do something about it? Yes. Should we all go a bit faster? Yes.”
