The Scottish Government's consultation on its energy strategy closes on Tuesday 30th May. Here Rebecca Bell, RSPB Scotland's senior policy officer, set out our position on it and how you can also let the Government know your thoughts.
Getting our energy system right for wildlife
Sometimes our work to save nature means dealing with immediate threats to wildlife – such as the Shiant Isles Seabird Recovery Project, aimed at providing safe breeding sites for some of our globally important seabirds – and sometime it involves trying to find solutions to long term, complex problems, such as the decline in farmland birds, including lapwings and skylarks.
Sometimes it’s a combination of the two – where the solution to the long-term problem (climate change – which is causing problems for a huge number of species, including causing seabirds to starve) has the potential to do great harm to wildlife in the short term (such as the windfarms in Tarifa, southern Spain, which kill over a hundred birds of prey each year).
Fortunately, the key word there is potential: we know that harm to wildlife is not an inevitable result of developing renewable energy – if it is well planned, well sited and well monitored, we can have a green energy system, meet our climate change targets, reduce the long-term threat to wildlife globally and avoid harming sensitive species.
That’s why our work on energy is so vital, and why we are responding in detail to the Scottish Government’s consultation on its energy strategy – because the decisions made about what kind of energy system we want, how it’s funded and how its planned will all affect what happens on the ground (and in the air).
We want to see high levels of renewable energy, developed in harmony with nature. This means that we need the government to identify the best sites for energy (preferably using the approach we developed in our 2050 Energy Vision), and then direct developers towards them. We also need investment in understanding our environment, so that we can use the best possible knowledge to build wind farms, and other renewable developments, in places that won’t harm the species we love.
We’re pleased that the Scottish Government has produced an energy strategy, that it sets a target for 50% of our energy use to come from renewable sources (ambitious but achievable, according to our research) and that it says that the energy strategy will work “in harmony with the natural environment” – although we need a lot more detail on how all this will actually happen.
And energy is not just about renewable electricity – it’s about how we heat our homes, how we travel and how we power our lives.
Currently heat and transport are very dependent on fossil fuels, so we need to find ways to use less in the first place, and alternative fuels to replace oil and gas, petrol and diesel. Crucial to this is land use planning – making sure developers build homes that are energy efficient, that have heating systems that are efficient and make best use of resources – such as heat pumps and district heating. And making sure that homes are built where it’s easy to take public transport, or walk, or cycle to where we need to go.
These decisions need to be made at the top – by government – and so they need to know that organisations such as RSPB Scotland, and their members, want these things to happen. So if you get chance this weekend, which not send in your own response to the consultation? You can respond online here. The Scottish Government is also looking for view on onshore wind and unconventional oil and gas extraction, also known as fracking.