Wildfires and climate change are at the top of the agenda right now and in this blog Andrew Midgley, our Senior Land Use Policy Officer, looks at some of the issues that we face in Scotland.
In June this year, a fire started near Cannich in the Highlands and despite the best efforts of firefighters, gamekeepers and our staff, this fire eventually made its way on to our site at Corrimony where it ripped through about half of the nature reserve. This came after the West Halladale fire in 2019 in the Flow Country, which affected our Forsinard Flows nature reserve, and a fire that affected our Dovestone nature reserve in England. These events mean that the issue of wildfire is at the forefront of our minds.
Indeed, as the Scottish Government’s Climate Adaptation Programme points out, there is likely to be an increase in the frequency in wildfires in future and we all need to think about our preparedness for them and work together to improve our resilience to this increasing threat.
The issue of wildfire is, however, a bit of political football at the moment because the government is in the process of tightening the regulation surrounding the practice of muirburn and because the RSPB has been arguing for change, we find ourselves as a target in this debate. In this blog I want to start by addressing some of the criticism that is directed at us, then look briefly at the Bill that is passing through parliament, before looking a little further ahead.
Wildfires affecting our nature reserves
While not unexpected, we have been disappointed to see that some have taken the opportunity of recent fires to point fingers and imply that our land management practices are part of the problem. In response, we would highlight that the Cannich fire, the West Halladale fire and the Saddleworth Moor fire in England all started on land owned and managed by others and then eventually spread onto our land.
Take the case of the West Halladale fire—which some disingenuously refer to as the Forsinard fire—and which started near the village of Strathy on the north coast. That fire burned around (and crossed) the north coast road for two days, mainly threatening the villages of Strathy and Melvich before a change in wind direction pushed it 12 km to the south and onto our Forsinard Flows nature reserve. In fact, the fire burned for days on land managed by others before reaching us. The total area of the nature reserve burnt was approximately 654Ha which was around 3% of the total Forsinard Flows nature reserve area and just 11% of the entire area burned, so the idea that our land management is at fault is simply erroneous.
It's also worth considering how these fires started. The Cannich fire apparently arose from a camping stove setting fire to vegetation and the suspected cause of the West Halladale fire was prescribed muirburn that got out of control, although we understand that this was not properly investigated. In each case the cause was accidental on the part of others. Clearly, any strategy to reduce wildfire risk must involve reducing the risks of initial ignition through education and awareness, training and possibly regulation (such as bylaws on barbeques etc).
But a core strand of criticism directed at us is around fuel load. The idea being that because we do not burn on our reserves, we are allowing a large build-up of fuel that, if ignited, will result in a wildfire that is much harder to control. Of course, there are many, many land managers that do not burn simply because it does not accord with their land management objectives and this is perfectly reasonable. A land manager that is seeking to establish a woodland through planting and natural regeneration is increasing fuel load; burning to reduce fuel load just runs completely counter to their objectives of establishing a woodland. Are critics trying to argue against the creation of new, native woodland to address the climate and nature crises by any means? Because that would be the result if their criticisms were heeded. The key issues for these land managers will be fire prevention in the first place, effective response mechanisms, should a fire rise, and possibly landscape planning with wildfire in mind. Different landowners have different objectives and that will always be the case.
There have also been criticisms that our reaction to these fires has been inadequate. Again, in response, we would highlight that we worked collaboratively with other land managers and under the direction of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS). At Cannich, for example, our staff attended the daily rendezvous set up by the SFRS, where decisions were made about who to send out, with what equipment and where they should go. As in any wildfire situation, questions of ownership and land management objectives are put aside, and everyone works together to tackle the fire in a coordinated way.
Having said all of this, like any sensible organisation, we accept that we can all make improvements to our wildfire management practices. Like other land managers we are keen to learn from these incidents and improve our approaches to tackling wildfire in the future, collaborating with our neighbours. This is an issue that all land managers will have to address and collaborate on.
Wildlife Management and Muirburn Bill
It’s just unfortunate that, right now, the context of the passage of the Wildlife Management and Muirburn Bill through the Scottish Parliament makes collaboration somewhat more difficult.
To be clear where we stand, we support the Scottish Government’s Bill, one of the purposes of which is to introduce a system of licenses for those undertaking muirburn (the use of fire as a management tool in land management). At the moment, muirburn is weakly regulated under the 1946 Hill Farming Act and a largely voluntary code of practice. A new approach under a system of licences seems to us to be a reasonable form of regulation for what is a high-risk activity.
The reason it is contentious is that some land managers fear the legislation will restrict their ability to undertake muirburn. Their argument is that any restriction on muirburn may lead to higher wildfire risks because of increasing fuel loads.
We would simply point out that muirburn will still be allowed under licence for sporting management and while the government had initially talked of banning burning on peatlands, it has listened to land managers and specifically constructed the Bill in such a way that it will be possible to apply for licenses to burn for the purpose of wildfire management, even on peatland.
We would also point out that we have been listening to land managers too. While our focus is on wanting to protect peatlands from further degradation (and muirburn is one of the reasons that 80% of our peatlands are degraded), we support the approach taken in the Bill. It seeks to achieve a reasonable balance between retaining all the possible tools in our land management toolbox and protecting our precious peatland resource by adding better regulatory oversight. We would, however, expect this sort of burning to be tightly regulated with a high burden of proof for its use. That seems entirely reasonable when, if poorly managed, it has the potential to cause such harm to our natural environment.
While there is a great deal of noise around this issue, it looks like what we’ll end up with is a system whereby muirburn is still allowed for specific purposes, but with much better regulatory oversight, which seems like a reasonable place to be in the context of the climate and nature emergency.
Looking to the future
What the passage of the Wildlife Management & Muirburn Bill has flushed out is that there are different ideas of how to deal with the wildfire issue, and it will be important to explore these more fully.
Everyone agrees that we need to improve our resilience to wildfires, but it appears that different interests have different strategies in mind. Sporting interests, in particular, have long used fire to manage vegetation to promote grouse numbers and are now putting great importance on burning as a tool to reduce wildfire risk. They argue that we need to use muirburn to reduce fuel load and therefore reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. Under this way of thinking, they argue that regular burning makes a landscape more resilient because the risks associated with high fuel load are reduced.
Our view of what a resilient landscape looks like in future is somewhat different and doesn’t rely on being locked into a permanent ongoing cycle of burning to hold habitats and landscapes in ecological stasis dominated by managed heather. While we don’t claim to have all the answers, for us a landscape is likely to be more resilient to wildfire if it is much more diverse and in better condition than the landscapes we see today, which are the result of centuries of management. The heather dominated hills are an artifact of our management for sport and farming, and given that heather burns readily, we have artificially created a landscape with high fire risk.
Our upland landscapes will be more resilient when the existing habitats are in good condition and when habitats that have suffered long-term decline—such as native woodlands—have been restored at scale. We know, for example, that healthy and restored peatlands are less susceptible to damage from wildfire (from research following the 2019 West Halladale wildfire) and we know that native broadleaved woodland burns less readily than heather-dominated moorland or commercial conifer plantations.
Consequently, our focus is more on habitat restoration and habitat creation. We want to see extensive peatland restoration and particularly rewetting to raise water tables in our bogs and much more extensive native woodland cover. We need to be thinking about how we enhance the resilience of the landscape to fire without just defaulting to ongoing burning, never allowing these habitats to transition back to more diverse and natural woodland and plant communities. Wildfire is clearly an extremely important issue, but so too is the nature and climate crisis. We must find a way of addressing both at the same time.
But while there are different visions of what resilient landscapes will look like in future, there isn’t necessarily a black and white choice to be made here. While we put our focus on landscape restoration, we accept that there will continue to be a limited role for fire management. Similarly, while sporting interests put greater emphasis on fire management, many estates are also actively engaging in landscape restoration. The debate is around where the emphasis lies, finding the and working together. In this context, perhaps it would be useful for an organisation like NatureScot to lead some work exploring what resilient landscapes will look like in future.
In the end, one thing is certain: we are going to have to adapt to climate change. So, despite our differences, we must collectively find ways to discuss these issues in a constructive way. All land managers have a role to play and expertise to bring to the table. We are all in the same boat and the challenge we face is how to adapt to a changing climate, how to become resilient to increasing wildfire risk, how to create long-term carbon storage in vegetation and, especially soils, and how to reverse biodiversity declines at the same time.