A Consultation on the Beavers in Scotland Strategic Environmental Assessment Environmental Report

I strongly agree that beaver populations in Scotland should be allowed to remain and that beavers should be strongly protected by law. As beavers are native animals that were driven to extinction by humans in the past for their pelts and other body parts we now have a moral obligation to protect them, as well as a legal one, under the EU Habitats Directive. We should also protect them because beavers bring many benefits such as flood risk reduction, improved water quality and increased biodiversity. They also bring many social and economic benefits such as ecotourism.
Beaver wetlands are part of the solution to some of the negative impacts of intensive agriculture, because of their ability to absorb damaging agricultural chemicals from run-off, slow the flow of water and capture silt in dams and pools. They should therefore be actively managed on farmland wherever possible to enable these benefits to occur without excessive impact on the farm. Thought needs to be given to ways to create incentives to farmers to tolerate well managed beavers between their fields and the waterways that they pollute, including the possibility of redirecting subsidies to encourage the toleration of areas of wetland to form in the hollows and lowest parts of the floodplain.
Culling should only ever be a very last resort after relocation and mitigation have been considered and ruled out or tried and proved impossible. The current reintroduction policy, while essentially good news, is too timid in my view. Beavers should, ideally, be reintroduced to the whole of Scotland, as they have been to many European countries. Well thought out proposals from environmental NGOs in other parts of Scotland should be given the go ahead to reintroduce beavers in areas such as Invernessshire and Galloway as well as north of the Great Glen, relocating them from the most problematic areas and bringing more in from the continent to provide a robust gene pool.

The evidence is broad ranging, detailed and thorough.

The report's findings on the predicted environmental effects are generally comprehensive and well reasoned. But in my view they are too negative and too cautious. The questions asked seem to be mainly about the possible problems caused by beavers. There is too little discussion of the many benefits that beavers can bring. In particular the section on beavers and salmon seems too heavily stacked in the direction of potential problems, when in other countries, particularly Norway, in very similar river systems, with similar landscape and landuse, fishermen experience no problems caused by the presence of beavers. Furthermore in the USA beavers are considered to have a highly beneficial effect on both Atlantic and Pacific salmon numbers. This is entirely unsurprising as beavers hold much more water on the land, and create more complex river systems with more pools, and riffles beyond the dams, more backwaters, more braiding and far more habitat for the invertebrates on which the parr feed. In terms of whole life cycle impacts there are many benefits to migratory fish which have received little mention in this report, compared to possible negative impacts.

The creation of riparian buffer zones with beaver wetlands could provide a critical solution for the reduction of agricultural run-off in intensively farmed areas. This could contribute to the prevention or reduction of environmental disasters such as oceanic deadzones around our coast resulting from algal blooms fed by farm nutrients and loss of soil and the resulting siltation of both rivers and seas, with damaging implications for fish nurseries. Oceanic dead zones are growing across the world causing further disasters for already beleaguered fish stocks. We need to use beavers to help us get beyond a point where the production of chips is damaging the survival of fish.

Such buffer zones would also provide habitat for many species including our much needed pollinators and many other invertebrates and wetland species whose numbers have been dropping catastrophically.

This methodology has been used in both the Netherlands in the "Room for the River" project and in Switzerland. In the Netherlands the beaver is known as "The Necessary Beaver." The Swiss government paper on the subject includes in its title the phrase "The Beaver is our Ally". The Scottish Government, like the Dutch and Swiss Governments and other governments around the northern hemisphere needs to start looking at the beaver as a solution to pressing environmental issues rather than as a problem in itself. But in order to do this effectively, some active management will be needed and when possible, there may need to be some redistribution of the funding currently paid to farmers. And some marginal arable land - effectively the very lowest land reclaimed by intensive drainage from the flood plain needs to be returned to nature to be 'managed' by beaver for ecosystem services rather than by farmers for progressively difficult arable farming as climate change increases the number of flood years. The beaver debate needs to be seen as an opportunity to rethink farming policy in the light of climate change, recent revelations about the state of our soil and SEPA data about diffuse pollution in the intensive agricultural areas.

Agribusiness interest cannot be allowed to predominate in this debate as these are not driven by concerns about the long-term health of our environment. If the production of affordable food is the concern, then we need to ensure that, however we achieve this, it is not at the expense of the natural world and of our descendants. Beavers are needed to ensure the sustainability of our countryside. Wetlands are the "kidneys of the landscape", and currently, without beavers, our landscape is heading for the dialysis unit.

The environmental report has correctly identified the potential impacts of beavers and appropriate mitigation - but it will be critical to see how such measures are implemented in practice. Sufficient funding must be made available for beaver management. Agricultural subsidies should be redirected to "public goods" such as wetland (the kidneys of the landscape) and away from extractive or polluting practices. Any evidence of wildlife crime involving beavers must be swiftly investigated and prosecuted.

I very much look forward to the moment when the long awaited protection for Castor fiber is finally introduced into Scotland law and believe that solutions will be found to the various conflicts that currently exist as the beaver proves its worth as ecosystem engineer extraordinaire.