Working towards a sustainable balance

Teresa Dent CBE, Chief Executive

The Langholm Moor Demonstration Project concluded that grouse moor management could improve and sustain protected moorland habitat and waders. © Laurie Campbell Greater emphasis on sustainable use and wise use.

The importance of soil is recognised in the new Agriculture Bill. GWCT research would not be possible without the continuing support of our loyal members, donors and supporters.

It was a great pleasure to be working with our new Chairman, Sir Jim Paice, last year. He is a passionate and knowledgeable countryman and as an ex-Government Conservative party minister, is very focused on establishing what the problems are, then finding ways to put them right.

As a charity whose strapline for at least the last 70 years is conservation through wise use, that is a very good fit. Wise use could be considered to be the terminology of the previous generation; in modern parlance it is sustainable use. A huge amount of our work in recent years and in the pages of this Review goes to the issue of sustainable use.

The 10-year Langholm Moor Demonstration Project, for which the final report was published in October 2019, studied where the sustainable balance lay between red grouse and raptors. It concluded that grouse moor management could improve and sustain protected moorland habitat and waders. However, we established that new forms of licensed management were probably needed to maintain the balance between raptors and red grouse which could allow an economically sustainable bag for driven shooting.

In the political section (see page 6) we look at the outcome of the Review of Grouse Moor Management in Scotland chaired by Professor Werritty, again looking at the sustainability of management practices associated with grouse moors.

One of GWCT’s guiding principles for sustainable use is that land used for shooting should produce a net biodiversity gain over and above that delivered on the same land in the absence of game management. These principles of wise use, sustainable use and net gain are not new and are embodied in national and international approaches to nature conservation and the environment.

The declarations of climate and biodiversity emergencies in 2019 has prompted huge attention on the sustainable use of biological resources. Support for the more sustainable use of soils is embodied in the new Agriculture Bill that is going through