The puffin population on the Isle of May has dropped by 30% in the last two years. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, this is what Climate Change means on the most basic level. The current, at times fanatical, obsession of Scottish conservationists with nothing but native species is a form of Climate Change denialism.

Climate is the principals eco-forming force, it is the differences of climate between northern Europe and, say, the Med why their respective ecosystems are (dramatically) different; change the climate of a given place, and the species must, necessarily, change too.

The natural response to changing climate is migration. This is how the Scots pine came to Scotland after all, gradually moving north from the south of England as temperatures were rising after the last ice age. But this natural response will not work for us in the UK this time around, for:

  1. Human induced Climate Change is happening at too fast a rate relative to natural lifecycles to be effective, e.g., trees reach maturity on a scale marked out not in years but centuries, which we do not have.

  2. About 8,000 years ago (also thanks to a climate change driven events) Britain became an island, which prevents migration from and to this small landmass.

  3. Even if we ignore the water-bound south of England, the UK’s ecosystems are far too depleted to be able to count on any meaningful northerly migration within, there is nothing much to move.

This is the reality of 21st century Scotland; its historical (aka ‘native’) species are already at the upper limit of their viability, and there is nothing much to take their place naturally. If we are serious about nature, ecology, conservation, biodiversity (choose whatever terminology floats your boat, it makes zilch of a difference), we should be already working on seeding ecosystems that will remain viable at +4C temperature increase.

What is given is that Scotland’s ecosystems a hundred years from now will be markedly different from what they are now, the only open question is whether they will be deader than the ecosystems we are familiar with today.