GRAZING on some Scottish coastal areas may have to end to help protect them against the effects of climate change.

Leading Scottish environmental academic Professor Stewart Angus has warned that the low-lying coastal areas of western Scotland now face 'significant ecological changes' due to rising sea levels and worsening weather patterns.

Professor Angus, who is coastal ecology specialist for Scottish Natural Heritage, believes it may be necessary to ban livestock from grazing or feeding in certain sand dune systems. He has been researching the flat coastal plains of Uist in the Outer Hebrides for the last 30 years and reckons that they are now in danger of undergoing major change. While his main focus has been on Uist, he says the same potential for drastically changing biodiversity is also true of other low-lying 'machair' coastal areas, such as in other parts of the Outer Hebrides, Orkney, Tiree and Islay.

Professor Angus said: “These areas are experiencing the fastest rates of relative sea-rise in Scotland, around six millimetres a year. In addition to that, you have significant areas in Benbecula and western South Uist that are well below mean high-water spring tide. If you have a land area lower than the sea then you have to have some sort of protection and that protection is the dune ridge, so it’s absolutely critical that the dune ridge is maintained in as healthy a condition as possible.

“The other thing that completes this ‘worst case’ scenario is higher rainfall. So when you put together higher seas, greater rainfall and the erosion of dunes you could be seeing ecological changes," he warned.

“In a flood situation, you will get freshwater and sea-water mixing and, for example in Uist if you have, say, a five-metre high flood, it will almost certainly lead to major ecological problems, with real knock-on effects for the likes of crofters and biodiversity.”

In 2005, five members of the same family in Uist lost their lives fleeing a storm when the car they were travelling in got caught in a flood. Since then, remedial work has been undertaken by the council, but many locals believe it to be inadequate.

Professor Angus said that it may now be necessary to fence livestock out of certain dune systems, to prevent erosion, and the removal of seaweed from the beach to fertilise land needs to be closely monitored – but certainly not banned, he stressed, as it 'adds to biodiversity in the machair crops and is a brilliant thing for the environment, generally'.

“All the organisations that have an involvement in this need to get together,” he suggested. “We are all concerned but there are rays of hope in terms of how we can approach it. But we need to enhance resilience by working with the natural eco-systems – that’s far more likely to be successful than trying to resist natural processes, because the forces involved are just so great.”