
Helping nature to adapt
Making use of nature’s capacity to adapt to change is one of our best tools for managing climate change impacts.
Making use of nature’s capacity to adapt to change is one of our best tools for managing climate change impacts.
As well as adapting to climate change ourselves, we have a duty to help nature to adapt too. In turn, this will provide us with benefits such as clean water, flood prevention, biodiversity and carbon storage. We will need these ecosystem services even more as our climate changes.
So that we can help nature to adapt to climate change, NatureScot has developed eight Adaptation Principles.
We are putting these Adaptation Principles into action through our own land management and the advice we provide, as we learn more about how climate change has and will continue to affect Scotland's habitats and species.
Helping nature adapt calls for knowledge of:
We test, refine and demonstrate climate change adaptation on our National Nature Reserves. We monitor our work to see which adaptation methods work best in which situations. Others can then benefit from the lessons we learn, and protected areas can be guided by our approach.
NatureScot leads on a number of priorities in the Scottish Climate Change Adaptation Programme (SCCAP). Helping nature to adapt is one of these.
We must monitor our progress in this long-term activity to;
To help us to track our progress, we have developed a set of adaptation indicators with ClimateXChange. These can be used to assess how well Scotland’s natural environment is adjusting to climate change.
A series of indicator cards will also be produced, to set out the latest evidence about adaptation indicator trends. Indicator cards help to establish baseline information and will show the Scottish Government where policy action is needed to encourage and strengthen adaptation.
View the example of the indicator card for snow-bed species.
Recent studies have improved our understanding of how dune systems might be affected by climate change, which prompts us to consider how we might use coastal processes as part of the solution, rather than as something to be controlled by management.
Read the case studies below to see how to turn our Adaptation Principles into action.
Climate change adaptation is also an important element of many species conservation projects. Read the example below, on how restoring riparian woodland can help upland rivers to adapt to climate change.