NATIONAL PARKS
pristine rivers and lochs, ancient forests and stunning coastline and islands, all rich in wild- life and history. Our landscapes enhance our quality of life and our well-being; they give us inspiration, refreshment and enjoyment. Our national parks are an important reason
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why people visit Scotland, and directly support our economy. Tourism is worth £4bn to Scotland and provides 200,000 jobs, making it comfort- ably our largest industry. To put that in context, whisky brings in £800m a year and sustains 41,000 jobs; oil employs 100,000 Scots. With landscapes of such quality you might
expect Scotland to have several national parks, the principal tool used across the world to safe- guard and manage fine landscapes. However, although the world has over 3,500 national parks, including 60 in Canada, 29 in Norway and 14 in New Zealand, Scotland has only two: the Cairngorms and Loch Lomond & The Tros- sachs. Over 20% of Wales and 12% of Iceland is designated as national parks, compared to only 8% of Scotland. The Scottish Campaign for National Parks
(SCNP) and the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland (APRS) have been campaign- ing for national parks for over 60 years. Both bodies believe that more of Scotland’s land- scapes deserve designation as national parks, and that the Scottish Government should have a strategy to implement their 2011 manifesto commitment to ‘work with communities to explore the creation of new national parks’. However, as they don’t, SCNP and APRS
Above: Loch Lomond & The Trossachs, just a stone’s throw from Glasgow, has been an incredibly successful national park.
have written one for them. Their joint project to prepare and promote a strategy for more national parks in Scotland is a policy that is popular with the public: in polls 90% of Scots support the concept of national parks. Indeed, apart from a few landowners and farmers who feel that they may be subject to more regulation, it’s difficult to find anyone who doesn’t like the idea of national parks. Often the most difficult decision is where to draw the line – those areas of Highland Perthshire that were left out of the Cairngorms National Park saw the benefits and campaigned to get in, a campaign that I’m happy to say was eventually successful. ‘National park’ is the leading internationally-
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recognised designation for places of the highest national importance for natural or cultural heritage, including landscape, wildlife and recreation. Many are truly wild; others, as in Scotland, are wholly or partly lived-in, working landscapes. The sort of world-renowned places designated as national parks include Jotunhei- men in Norway, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the
cotland’s landscapes rank amongst the
best in the world in their richness, quality and diversity. We have wild mountains,
Galapagos Islands in Ecuador, Cradle Moun- tain in Tasmania, the Karakoram in Pakistan and Yosemite in the USA. National parks bring a whole range of
environmental (no wind farms), social (less development) and economic (European grants, more visitors, higher house prices) benefits to the areas in which they are situated. Although many of these benefits can be delivered in other ways, national park designation deliv- ers more effectively because it generates a high profile, supports
the active management of
an area, encourages integrated planning and management by all public bodies, and ensures additional resources to help make the most of the landscape whilst conserving it for future generations. Another crucial issue is the inher- ent permanence of national park designation: other arrangements may come and go, but national parks are rarely abolished. In 1947 the Ramsay Report recommended
five areas of Scotland as national parks, and in 1990 the former Countryside Commission for Scotland recommended four areas. After lengthy pressure from non-government organi- sations, Scotland eventually joined the national park family in 2000 when the Scottish Parlia- ment passed the National Parks (Scotland) Act to make Scotland one of the last countries on earth to have national parks, with both national parks being designated in 2002-03. Nor do national parks only exist on land.
In recognition of our superlative marine envi- ronment, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Scottish Executive put in a great deal of work during 2005-06 towards preparing for Scot- land’s first coastal and marine national park. Sadly, this was shelved after the 2007 election in favour of work on the Marine (Scotland) Act, which was eventually passed in 2010. So what SCNP and APRS are proposing is
seven further national parks, with one of them of the coastal and marine variety. Although the exact boundaries of the seven additional parks are yet to be decided, they would be: Ben Nevis and Glencoe; Wester Ross (Applecross, Torridon, Poolewe and Loch Maree); a coastal area around Mull (possibly stretching up past Coll and Tiree to the small isles of Eigg, Canna and Rum); the isle of Harris; Glen Affric; the Galloway coast and/or forest; and the northern Cheviots (south-east of Jedburgh and Kelso). It’s time that the Scottish Government
lived up to its rhetoric about national parks, both on land and at sea. They have promised national parks, and the concept continues to have overwhelming support from the public and those people who live in the affected areas. It’s time this beautiful country stopped taking its natural glory for granted.
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