Scientists want to release 160 wolves in Scotland to help UK hit net zero target
Scientists have suggested reintroducing dozens of wolves into the Scottish Highlands in order to help the UK reach its climate targets.
Researchers at the University of Leeds have suggested that the reintroduction of grey wolves to the Cairngorms, as well as the south-west, north-west and central Highlands, could help reduce the issue of red deer eating tree saplings, which stops natural woodland regeneration.
The scientists predicted that a population of 167 wolves would thrive if reintroduced into the wild and would be enough to reduce red deer populations to a level that would allow trees to regenerate naturally.
This could expand the native woodland, which could take in and store a million tons of carbon dioxide each year, equating to about five per cent of the carbon removal target for UK woodlands, researchers said.
Each wolf would lead to an annual carbon uptake capability of 6,080 tonnes of CO2, which the researchers estimated would make each of them 'worth' £154,000, according to the accepted current valuations of carbon.
It's the first time that the impact of reintroducing wolves for woodland expansion and carbon storage in the UK has been assessed.
Wolves were eradicated from Scotland about 250 years ago, leaving deer with no natural predators. The wolf population in Western Europe is approximately 12,000. Meanwhile, British deer numbers have increased from about 450,000 to two million today.
The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Ecological Solutions and Evidence journal, acknowledged the idea is controversial, not least with farmers worried about livestock.
Researchers acknowledged the idea's potential controversies when it comes to farmers' livestock. The growing number of wolf numbers in Europe previously led to their protected status being downgraded in 2024, which appeased farmers, but caused concern for environmentalists.
Co-author of the study, Lee Schofield, said that they recognised 'that substantial and wide-ranging stakeholder and public engagement would clearly be essential before any wolf reintroduction could be considered".
He said the aim was to "provide new information to inform ongoing and future discussions about the possibility of wolf reintroductions both in the UK and elsewhere".
The study 's lead author, Prof Dominick Spracklen, said: 'There is an increasing acknowledgment that the climate and biodiversity crises cannot be managed in isolation.
'We need to look at the potential role of natural processes such as the reintroduction of species to recover our degraded ecosystems and these in turn can deliver co-benefits for climate and nature recovery.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
ITV News
a day ago
- ITV News
'In 40 seconds, everything was gone': The Swiss village destroyed by climate change
Sometimes climate change is hard to visualise, but not the disaster that struck the Swiss alpine village of Blatten on May 28. In the middle of the afternoon a glacier that had stood above the village for centuries broke free from the mountainside and crashed down onto Blatten. The Swiss authorities had seen in coming and evacuated the inhabitants 10 days earlier – only one person is missing, which is both miraculous and a tribute to Swiss engineering. But the 300 people who lived there lost everything. Daniel Ritler had lived all his life in Blatten. The restaurant and delicatessen he ran with his wife Karin now lie under millions of tons of rock and mud, themselves invisible under millions of gallons of water. 'The whole thing happened within 40 seconds. In 40 seconds, everything was gone. Houses that were built in 15 and 16 centuries were buried, all buried', he told me. The sheep Daniel kept in the pristine alpine pastures above the village also survived, but whether they or the Ritlers will even be able to return is uncertain, perhaps even unlikely. First the geology of the Lotschental valley must stabilise, and that itself could take many years. This disaster was not caused solely by climate change – erosion and minor earthquakes in these mountains also played their part – but there's little doubt that without the significant warming the Alps have seen in the last few decades it wouldn't have happened. On current trends, glaciologists confidently predict that by the end of his century, 2100, there will be no more glaciers in Switzerland. This doesn't just mean a lot of melt-water: the ice in a glacier binds together huge quantities of mud and scree and rock, so when the ice melts much more than water comes down a mountainside. Professor Stuart Lane, a British glaciologist who lives in these mountains, and teaches at the University of Lausanne, says that as good as Swiss engineering may be, you cannot engineer away a problem as big as the one that hit Blatten. Indeed, difficult decisions may have to be taken about moving whole towns or villages out of the way of collapsing valley walls. 'The only way you can get a glacier back is by increasing snow in winter and reducing ice melt in summer', he said. 'So only with a reversion to the climate of 50-60 years ago will you see glaciers come back again'. And you don't have to be a top scientist to know how unlikely that is.
Metro
a day ago
- Metro
This is where the UK plans to hide nuclear power waste for thousands of years
Here's a puzzle for you. Imagine you have enough 'stuff' to fill St Paul's Cathedral to the brim five times over. This stuff is toxic to life on Earth. And it's going to stay toxic for centuries. Where are you going to put it? It's a question that has vexed experts ever since the world was yanked into the atomic age by US physicist J Robert Oppenheimer around 80 years ago. At first, it was military nuclear tests, and then it was civil nuclear power: all of it produces radioactive waste, and that needs to go… somewhere. Amid the British government's enthusiastic backing of nuclear power and investment in the new Sizewell C power plant on the Suffolk coast, figuring out the destination for this lethal product is as important as ever. 'Things that were ruled out along the way were the classic, why can't we fire it up into space?' said Neil Hyatt, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK's Nuclear Waste Services (NWS). 'Well, look at the track record of space launches and how many are unsuccessful, and imagine that's not a satellite coming back down to Earth but spent nuclear fuel…' Some suggested it could simply be placed far from civilisation – but this required ensuring people would know to stay a safe distance for thousands of years, as languages evolve and symbols change meaning. Ideas included new religions, hostile architecture and glowing cats, resulting in one of the greatest Wikipedia pages of all time. In the early days, the UK got rid of our potentially cancer-causing waste by chucking it in the sea near the Channel Islands. But as political pressure grew and the London Convention banned marine dumping of radioactive products, scientists had to get more creative. Gradually, international thought was united around one deceptively simple idea: put the waste very, very deep under the ground. Sadly, it's not the glowing green sludge that you've seen Homer Simpson spill from metal barrels at Springfield Power Plant. High-level waste, which results from the reprocessing of spent fuel, is radioactive liquid which is converted into a solid block of glass. Intermediate-level waste consists of the leftovers from old and operating nuclear facilities, including fuel cladding, rubble, and – yes – some sludge. It's usually immobilised in cement and packed into stainless steel containers. In 1982, a specialist body called Nirex was set up with a remit to find a place to build an underground store in the UK, but every initiative crumbled in the face of protests. Some didn't even get as far as drilling to investigate the local rock. Seventeen years later, in 1999, a report from the House of Lords said any efforts to create a facility for 'deep geological disposal' would need to involve communities from the start. Selecting a site is complicated – like everything else in this story – by the extreme timescales involved. The waste will stay toxic for so long, scientists must take into account how the ground itself is going to shift over the next 100,000 years. Yes, that's 100 millennia from now. For context, it's been about 100,000 years since Homo Sapiens first left Africa. 'We're looking for rocks that have been stable for millions of years or hundreds of millions of years,' said Professor Hyatt. 'The reason for that is the radioactive waste hazard decays quite quickly over the first sort of 300 years, and then you're left with this tail that decays a bit more slowly. 'After the order of 100,000 years or so, the radioactivity has decayed to a level approximately equal to the original uranium ore.' There are currently three sites in contention to house the UK's geological disposal facility (GDF): Mid-Copeland and South Copeland in Cumbria, and Theddlethorpe in Lincolnshire. All are free to withdraw from the process whenever they like. That approach is influenced by Onkalo in Finland, a similar project which is decades ahead of the British effort. Pasi Tuohimaa, a spokesperson for site operators Posiva, said: 'None of the projects in the world fail because of not knowing the technology. Instead, they fail because of the political situation or bad communications.' But aside from investment in community projects, the main incentive for the selected sites to stick with the proposal is the sheer scale of it. The storage vaults for the UK's 750,000m3 of waste will be constructed in tunnels covering an area of around 36km2 at a depth of between 200 and 1,000 metres. If all goes to plan, the process of depositing will begin in the 2050s and end about 175 years later. To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Like a medieval cathedral, generations of people will work on the project, knowing they will never live to see the moment it is backfilled and the contents are (fingers crossed) never seen again. It's almost certainly the biggest infrastructure project in the UK that most people have never heard of. As Professor Hyatt says, it's a 'long, long, long, long mission life.' More Trending The Finnish nuclear waste at Onkalo will be stored in rock that has barely moved in close to a billion years, which – according to Mr Tuohimaa – demonstrates how safe it is. 'The nuclear industry is the only industry in the world that knows where its waste is after the next ice age,' he said. 'When there's no London left, and there's two kilometres of ice on top of northern Europe, there's no Stockholm, there's no Copenhagen, everything is demolished – but we know where our waste is.' This story was first published on September 1 2024. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: The teenage Orkney killer who got away with murder for 14 years MORE: Rich people 'will have robot butlers by 2030′ – but there's a major flaw MORE: What is New World Screwworm and can it spread to humans?
ITV News
2 days ago
- ITV News
ITV News in Antarctica: Scientists fear Emperor penguins could be extinct by end of the century
ITV News Science Correspondent Martin Stew is the only journalist on board the British research ship the RRS Sir David Attenborough, as it takes part in an expedition deep within the Antarctic Circle They are the largest and most iconic penguins in Antarctica - but scientists from the British Antarctic Survey fear that Emperor penguins could be on the brink of extinction by the end of the century. Emperor penguins rely on sea ice to breed. It needs to be stable for around several months. If it breaks up before chicks can swim, they will drown. The extent of sea ice has declined by 1.5 million square kilometres over the past 30 years - that's an area six times the size of the UK. This decline is a result of warming oceans. Because Emperor penguins live in such remote areas, the only way to track their numbers is through satellite imagery of colonies from space. They can be spotted by the tell-tale staining on the ice caused by penguin droppings. A new analysis of up-to-date satellite imagery suggests that the birds' numbers have declined by 22% in the northwest section of Antarctica over the last 15 years. This is an increase from a 9.5% reduction across the entire continent between 2009 and 2018. Dr Peter Fretwell, who works for the British Antarctic Survey, explained that more research is needed to determine whether this decline in the northwest is reflected across the continent. "If it is,' he told me, 'that's worrying because the decline is worse than the worst-case projections we have for Emperor penguins this century." The area covered by these recent findings is 2.8 million square kilometres - 11 times the size of the UK. It is significant because it contains 30% of the world's Emperor penguin population. Dr Phil Trathan, co-author and emeritus fellow at BAS, stated: "The fact that we're seeing this decline faster than computer models predicted means there must be other factors at play besides the loss of breeding habitat. "The only way we'll see a population turnaround is if we stabilise greenhouse gas emissions. "If we don't, we'll probably have relatively few Emperor penguins left by the end of this century." Interestingly, there has also been a decline in areas where sea ice has not diminished. The report highlights other factors, including changing storm, snow, and rainfall patterns; increased competition for food resources; and open ocean conditions that make penguins more vulnerable to predators like orcas and seals.
