Understanding the Indirect Drivers of Biodiversity Loss in Scotland

There is a growing realisation internationally that efforts aimed at tackling the direct drivers of biodiversity loss by themselves, whilst important, will not be anything like sufficient to address biodiversity loss. Underlying the direct drivers are a range of indirect drivers, which are in turn underpinned by societal values and behaviours – it is these indirect drivers that have driven and continue to drive biodiversity loss and climate change. The Summary for Policymakers of the IPBES report (IPBES 2019b) states that “unsustainable use of the Earth’s resources is underpinned by a set of demographic and economic indirect drivers” or “underlying societal causes”. They comprise patterns of production and consumption, human population dynamics and trends, trade, technology and local, national and global governance. Addressing the indirect drivers at a global, national and local scale is necessary if we are not to exceed planetary boundaries and cause further significant losses of biodiversity (Fanning et al, 2021). The SPICe Spotlight report “Governing nature – halting biodiversity loss”, October 2022 notes ‘key shortcomings relating to governance and accountability structures and mechanisms for mainstreaming biodiversity into all areas of policy, including economic policy making, have undermined our ambitions’ and it invites Parliamentary scrutiny of specific key interventions to address ‘underlying drivers of biodiversity loss across policy areas’. Main findings This report follows the framework of the IPBES Report and its definitions of the indirect drivers. The indirect drivers are considered under five headings:•Socio-cultural (section 5)•Demography (section 6)•Economic (section 7)•Politics, institutions and governance (section 8)•Technology (section 9)We briefly summarise the description of these drivers given in the IPBES report, transpose these to the Scottish situation with relevant evidence presented to support this transposition and identify potential levers of change. Under each of the five section headings below a series of bullets illustrate aspects of the indirect driver causing biodiversity loss outlining how the impacts of that aspect of the indirect driver could be reduced. The latter are shown in italics. Each bullet also lists actors with key responsibility for the levers of change and for initiating action to address that specific indirect driver. The actors are shown in text in square brackets: [Individuals, Communities, Civic Society, Business, Local Government, Scottish Government and Scottish Public Bodies, UK Government, International institutions].Necessarily, these summaries can only give a high-level synthesis of a very complex world and we would recommend reading the whole report, but even here the synthesis is relatively brief with links to supporting evidence and a bibliography.