Living Planet Report 2020

10/09/2020 in RZSS

The WWF Living Planet 2020 report has confirmed the worrying trend that wildlife around the world is declining at a rapid rate.

Our ground-breaking science and research continues to enable us to learn more about the incredible species in our care and inform measures to help safeguard species in the wild here in Scotland and further across the globe.

Saving Wildcats, a partnership lead by RZSS, is the last hope for the critically endangered wildcat in the UK. Based at Highland Wildlife Park, Saving Wildcats will establish the UK’s first large-scale dedicated conservation breeding for release centre for wildcats, grow the population through release into the wild, continue to remove the threats facing wildcats in the Highlands to create other safe areas for wildcat releases and work with local communities to understand how best people can benefit from the presence of wildcats.

Invertebrates are in decline globally. The pine hoverfly is so rare in the UK that no one has seen an adult in the wild for over seven years and it is currently restricted to just one site, a small forest patch in the Cairngorms in Scotland. To help boost the population of this pollinator, we have undertaken an ambitious conservation breeding project for pine hoverflies and have just completed our most successful breeding season yet.

Beavers are back in Scotland. We’ve been working on the reintroduction of beavers to Scotland in partnership with the Scottish Wildlife Trust for over a decade, first as part of the Scottish Beaver Trial and now as part of the Scottish Beavers reinforcement project. As a result of this work, in May 2019, the Scottish Government granted beavers European Protected Species status. This marks the first ever successful reintroduction of a mammal to the UK.

At Highland Wildlife Park and Edinburgh Zoo, our polar bears, giant pandas and other animals are vital ambassadors for their relatives in the wild and other threatened species around the world, helping raise awareness of the very real issues they  face and how we can help.

We will continue to fight against extinction by remaining involved in as many proactive partnership conservation projects as we can. We are making every effort to help stem the tide of extinction and hopefully celebrate many more successes along the way.

 

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We would like to thank the players of People’s Postcode Lottery for their generous support which has helped restore beavers to Scotland.