Scotland has ambitious strategies for biodiversity protection and climate action with the intention of achieving a greener, fairer and just future. As most land in Scotland is devoted to some form of agricultural production, farmers and land managers are key players in achieving a transition to more sustainable agriculture and horticulture.
A lunchtime webinar on Wednesday April 27th 12.30 to 14.00 will discuss findings and recommendations from the Scottish Government funded Lessons Learned project which has reviewed the development of the SARS-CoV-2 wastewater screening programme in Scotland. As part of this event, we will be sharing learning about how to be more prepared for rapid response collaborative research in future crises.
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Combining local, contextualised knowledge with generalised, scientific knowledge is seen as best practice in decision making for biodiversity management. However, there is the potential for conflict if these two knowledges do not concur. We compared people’s predictions for biodiversity change under different woodland management scenarios with those from a simple ecological model. We found general agreement, but stakeholders were more optimistic about the benefits of some scenarios compared to the models.
Soil biodiversity is critical to ecosystem functioning, but our understanding of the richness and distribution of soil organisms lags far behind that of biodiversity above ground. The difficulties of detecting organisms that spend all or most of their time living below ground and a shortage of skilled scientists able to identify them have contributed to our general lack of knowledge. This is particularly true in alpine zones which support some of our most natural habitats and provide important ecosystem services, including supporting unique biodiversity, carbon storage and water supply.
The main youth conferences in association with COP26 were the Youth4Climate conference (hosted in Milan at the end of September 2021) and Coy16 – the 16th annual UN Climate Change Conference of Youth (hosted in Glasgow at the end of October 2021).
March 2022 update on database based on the Peatland Action Programme in Scotland.
Working with Scotland’s water sector and water users such as the farming sector, school children and teachers, we have designed this informative, engaging and fun series of educational posters on the important topic of water. We hope that by communicating a clear message about water, and explaining the very words used to best describe it and its many links to human life, young people and the general public will be better able to respond with real solutions in the places they live and work.
The conference themes this year are:
Engaging oral and poster presentations will seek to address the relationships between landscape and societal interactions.
Sessions will seek to analyse what steps have been taken since COP26 towards carbon neutrality, as well as what actions are required to achieve Scotland’s net zero target by 2045.
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Dietary patterns in Scotland remain unhealthy and this has an impact on health. In particular, the health harms associated with carrying excess body weight are well documented, with obesity now the second-biggest preventable cause of cancer, behind smoking. Furthermore, people who live in more deprived areas tend to be most impacted and significant inequalities in the levels of obesity persist between people living in the least and most deprived groups in Scotland.
Professor Julie Fitzpatrick OBE