ESCom 2020 workshop: Scotland's National Ecological Network - progress and practicalities

This report summarises the contents and outputs from workshop ‘Scotland’s National
Ecological Network: progress and practicalities’, held on the 11th March 2020 at the
Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation.

Scotland’s Programme for Government 2019-2020 and Biodiversity Routemap to 2020 set
out ambitious targets to address climate and biodiversity emergencies, including the
development of regional land use plans and strategies. A critical part of this process involves
understanding and taking action to ensure delivery of the biggest climate change,
biodiversity and other benefits from our land management decisions. Embedded in this approach to more sustainable land use is the need to take stock of progress towards regional and national ecological networks to increase resilience into the future.

Following on from the Nature Connections workshop (March 2017) and Nature Connections
parliamentary roundtable (June 2019), we organised this workshop to provide a forum for
people working in this important subject across Scotland to meet, update and exchange new
information and ideas between policy, practice and research on how we can progress
towards the creation of regional and national ecological networks in Scotland.