Green minister Lorna Slater has hailed the reintroduction of beavers to Scotland as an example of the global change that’s needed in how we treat nature.
Speaking as she heads today to the crucial UN COP15 biodiversity summit in Canada, Slater said the “destructive force” of man-made activities on the natural environment needed to end. It comes after UN secretary general Antonio Guterres, opening the conference in Montreal this week, warned humanity had become a “weapon of mass extinction” against species worldwide.
But Slater, Scotland’s biodiversity minister, said rewilding efforts to bring beavers back to the country in recent decades showed the “stewardship role” people could adopt towards wildlife instead.
The Canada-born Scottish Greens chief told The Record: “When my dad grew up in the UK, beavers had been extinct for hundreds of years, hunted to extinction. And now children growing up in Scotland will grow up alongside beavers.
"They'll be part of their natural environment, they'll learn about the amazing things that beavers do, like natural flood management, like creating these micro-ecosystems where other species can thrive.
“That is an amazing story of regaining something that was lost, of getting that abundance back and of passing something on that’s better to our kids and grandkids. What we want is more of that kind of story.”
In 2009, conservation groups brought wild beavers back to Scotland for the first time in 400 years - which were made a protected species in 2019. Their numbers have increased to more than 1,000.
It’s hoped the COP15 talks will for the first time set legally-binding global targets to protect nature - with campaigners aiming for a deal which covers 30 per cent of all lands and seas with protections by 2030. Around the world, a staggering one million animal and plant species are thought to be under threat due to human activities.
Slater said: “I've certainly grown up with this story of loss, of extinction, every year - and those losses are accelerating.” The Scottish Government minister added: “The perfect outcome of COP15 would be for all the nations of the world to commit to protecting 30 per cent of our land for nature - and properly protect it - to stop those extinctions, to stop that story of loss.
But the nature summit comes off the back of the wider COP27 climate conference in Egypt which was widely seen as a disappointment in terms of efforts to curb global emissions.
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