Imagine a Scotland where...
The flash of a kingfisher or the splash of an otter is common, a Scotland with red squirrels in our woodlands and beavers in our rivers. Imagine living amongst birdsong so thick we notice when it stops. A thriving environment doesn’t need to be something we have to travel far to find: it can be a part of our everyday life.
Scotland’s nature is our life support system: growing our food, filtering our freshwater, and underpinning our economy. Yet Scotland ranks in the bottom-quarter of countries worldwide for the health of our natural environment, with 1 in 9 species at risk of national extinction.
The nature crisis and the climate emergency aren’t separate problems – those profiting from the reckless fossil fuel economy are also profiting from plundering our natural world for short-term gain. We cannot solve one crisis without tackling the other and both require politicians to respond with
urgent, ambitious action.
Scottish Greens have led the way on the initial steps: in government, Greens secured a £65 million Nature Restoration Fund, supporting over 800 community- and charity-led projects, from restoring oyster beds under the sea to creating paths through revitalised native woodlands. We developed and passed the Natural Environment Act which will see the next government set legally-binding targets to protect and restore nature in line with UN agreements to restore 30% of habitats on land and at sea.
But we must deliver more to ensure a viable future for Scotland’s iconic nature.
The Scottish Greens will invest in our natural world, both for our wellbeing and that of future generations. We will rewild our hills and glens with native woodland and rainforest, and iconic species like beavers and red squirrels. We will restore our degraded moors and peatlands, and ramp up funding for nature restoration in every community across Scotland. And we will let nature recover, by putting biodiversity first in our planning system, and ensuring those who damage our natural environment pay.
Rewilding
- Reforest Scotland’s hills and glens, with 9,000 hectares of new native woodland each year, and a plan to restore Scotland’s unique west coast rainforest and ancient woodlands, accompanied by dedicated funding. We will ensure the majority of public forestry grants are ring-fenced for native woodland planting, and prioritise planting on public and community owned land.
- Create ‘wildways’ to link up Scotland’s designated nature protection sites, so that plants, animals, pollinators and fungi are more resilient and can naturally spread into more areas.
- Speed up the process for beaver reintroductions to restore healthy rivers and wetlands, while ending the avoidable killing of beavers already thriving in our waterways.
- Strengthen protections for red squirrels, seabirds, the remnants of Scotland’s west coast rainforest and our most at-risk native species, alongside an ambitious programme of action for managing invasive non-native species.
- Reintroduce keystone species – such as lynx – through a managed process where there is community support.
Restoring
- Increase the Nature Restoration Fund to £200 million, with more cash grants available for community-led and landscape-scale nature restoration projects across the country so that everyone can benefit from nature closer to home.
- Set a national mission to restore Scotland’s peatlands by restoring at least 45,000 hectares annually, including a programme of work to remove commercial conifer trees that have spread onto peat bogs, as well as working with governments across the UK’s four nations to ban the extraction and sale of peat compost.
- Introduce a licensing system to control the release of the millions of intensively-farmed gamebirds – such as pheasant and red-legged partridge – introduced into the countryside every year, to reduce the spread of avian flu to wild birds.
- Implement strategic management of Scotland’s out-of-control deer population so that the environmental damage of overgrazing is minimised, with new incentives to support land managers who reduce deer numbers on their land.
Recovering
- Implement an ambitious set of nature recovery targets under the Natural Environment (Scotland) Act 2026, aligned with the global goal of protecting 30% of land, freshwater and seas for nature by 2030. These will be accompanied by clear guidance for delivery partners and robust monitoring of actions to meet the targets.
- Ensure the changes to the National Planning Framework secured by the Scottish Greens are fully enacted, requiring developments to have a positive effect on biodiversity and take the nature crisis into account in planning decisions.
- Introduce tree planting requirements into the planning system, requiring developers to provide every community with access to nearby trees and greenspaces.
- Increase the fines that can be brought against individuals and companies who damage the environment, with imprisonment for those responsible for the worst offences, as part of wider measures included in a Corporate Accountability and Ecocide Bill.
- Provide direct funding for Scotland’s two UNESCO biosphere reserves in Wester Ross and Galloway/South Ayrshire, to support more nature restoration, job creation and tourism management in the areas.
- Increase funding for Scotland’s public environment agencies so that they can undertake their full range of duties, from enforcing penalties on polluters to monitoring the condition of nature reserves and protected features and species.