THE Scottish Greens have sounded the alarm over the increasing amount of wildfires Scotland has experienced in the past few weeks.
“Scotland's on fire,” the party's co-leader, Lorna Slater, told The National.
“We need to take climate change very seriously. It's not a hypothetical thing that might happen at some future point. This is already happening. It's already affecting people here.”
Her comments come as an extreme warning for wildfires has been issued by the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.
Firefighters are currently tackling a blaze affecting an area of grass in Glen Rosa on Arran. Meanwhile, in Thurso in the Highlands, four appliances are dealing with a separate grass area on fire.
It adds to dozens of further outdoor fires across Scotland in recent weeks, including large fires in the Galloway Forest Park and Inverpolly Forest in the Highlands.
Recent analysis suggests that spring is the fastest-warming season in Scotland, and that it’s largely down to climate change and the jet stream - a river of fast flowing air high up in the atmosphere - flowing further to the north of Scotland.
“[It’s] really concerning. I mean, really frightening,” Slater said – speaking at a pre-party conference event at an environmental project in Stirling (below).
“This is along with the flooding that we still see. Some of the extreme storms. This is climate change happening to us, and it is our rural communities, our farmers, our coastal communities that are most affected. It's them that are losing their homes and their businesses and their livelihoods. This is horrifying.”
She also took aim at parties including the Conservatives and Reform UK, who have both expressed doubts about the move towards net zero.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, for example, said last month that it was "impossible" for the UK to meet its net zero target by 2050 - a goal set by a previous Tory government.
Nigel Farage, Reform UK’s leader, said in February that net zero is a “complete and utter disaster”.
Slater described the comments as “frustrating and frightening” and said net zero isn’t optional.
“It's not optional to save our lives, to save our livelihoods. That's not optional,” she said. “As climate change progresses, not only will there be devastating heat waves – deadly in many parts of the world – it will also affect how we grow our crops. That's our food security. It will [lead to] more floods.
Slater added that governments everywhere, including the Scottish Government, simply “have not done enough to prevent this from happening”.
“It is the most serious thing that has ever happened to humanity, and it's something that we know how to prevent and is utterly within our power to do something,” she said.
Slater added: “It's very clear what Scotland needs to do. The climate change committee has been saying it for years. The Scottish Greens have been saying it for decades. The key issues in Scotland are where we're emitting the highest levels of carbon – our transport sector.
“That means getting people out of airplanes, out of their cars, and into better modes of transport, meaning making towns and cities safer for cycling and walking so that kids can cycle to school.
“Like, that's what we want. We want kids to be able to live in places where they can safely cycle to school. We want neighbourhoods to be designed so that people can walk to the dentist, walk to work. That's what we want, is to build this feature that is not only better for the climate in terms of reducing those emissions, but it actually makes life better for everybody.”
