ESCom 2020 workshop: Scotland’s National Ecological Network – progress and practicalities

This report summarises the contents and outputs from the workshop ‘Scotland’s National Ecological Network: progress and practicalities’, held on 11 March 2020 at the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation.

Scotland’s Programme for Government 2019-2020 and Biodiversity Route Map to 2020 set out ambitious targets to address climate and biodiversity emergencies, including the development of regional land use plans and strategies. A critical part of this process involves understanding and taking action to ensure delivery of the greatest climate change, biodiversity and other benefits from our land management decisions. Embedded in this approach to more sustainable land use is the need to take stock of progress towards regional and national ecological networks to increase resilience into the future.

Following on from the Nature Connections workshop (March 2017) and Nature Connections parliamentary roundtable (June 2019), we organised this workshop to provide a forum for people working in this important subject across Scotland to meet, update and exchange new information and ideas between policy, practice and research on how we can progress towards the creation of regional and national ecological networks in Scotland.