Scottish seabird conservation - action plan: consultation

Introduction

Scotland’s coastline and waters are of global importance to seabirds. The twenty- four species of seabird regularly breeding in Scotland include approximately 60% of the world’s breeding population of great skua, 46% of the world’s northern gannet and 16% of the world’s Manx shearwater^[1]. As top predators, seabirds are indicators of the health of marine ecosystems, playing a crucial role in maintaining balance within marine food webs. Seabirds also have a significant role in the economy and our cultural identity, supporting a thriving tourism industry that is vital to local economies, particularly in rural and island communities.

However, seabirds are in trouble (OSPAR Quality Status Report, 2023). The proportion of species experiencing widespread and frequent breeding failures has been increasing over the last half century. In the UK this trend is evidenced by the UK marine bird indicator (Marine Strategy part one: UK updated assessment and Good Environmental Status, 2019) with breeding seabirds continuing not to achieve Good Environmental Status (GES) in both the Celtic Seas and Greater North Sea. The severity of the situation has been brought to light by ‘Seabirds Count’ the fourth census of Britain and Ireland’s internationally important populations of breeding seabirds. The census revealed that two thirds of Scotland’s seabirds have declined over the last 20 years, with eight species declining by more than 50%. This is without the impacts of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) and autumn/winter mortality events resulting in further large-scale declines at many breeding colonies. More seabird species are on UK Birds of Conservation Concern 5 Red List (Stanbury et al., 2024)^[2] than ever before. Urgency for action to support seabird recovery and resilience to our changing world has never been greater.

This urgency is captured in the ‘Scottish Biodiversity Strategy to 2045: tackling the nature emergency in Scotland’, which sets out a clear ambition for Scotland to be Nature Positive by 2030, and to have restored and regenerated biodiversity by 2045. The Scottish Biodiversity Strategy provides a vital new context and urgency for our work and places an emphasis on accelerating restoration ‘more urgently and at greater scale than we have done up to now’ and recovering and protecting vulnerable and important species, making sure we make ‘every effort to prevent the extinction of globally threatened species’. By delivering the Scottish Biodiversity Strategy and GES under the UK Marine Strategy, we will also deliver international obligations and commitments to protect and conserve the marine environment^[3] and perhaps more importantly, protect the vital marine environment on which significant parts of Scotland’s economy depend.