The Spey flowing out of the Highlands is Scotland’s most iconic salmon river on whose banks stand distilleries producing half of all Scotch whisky. Once famed for its crystal-clear water, it is threatened today by more extreme weather patterns caused by climate change which have combined disastrously with long-standing over-exploitation of the river.

The fate of the Spey – 107 miles long, running north from its source in Loch Spey in the Monadhliath mountains to the Moray Firth east of Inverness – is so important because it is symptomatic of the destructive impact of warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers on the Highlands as a whole.

These conditions are also happening in the rest of Britain, but it is seldom realised that it is in the Highlands that they have by far the most radical impact. This is because the region has already suffered the most extreme weather and has one of the most fragile natural environments in Britain, which makes it peculiarly vulnerable to a changing climate. A vast area is negatively affected, since the Highlands are the same size as Belgium, making up a third of Scotland and a tenth of mainland UK.

The most visible and dramatic signs of the new climate regime are two giant wildfires – one of them described by scientists as the first so-called “megafire” ever in the UK – which burned away great swathes of moorland and pine forest in 2025 and 2026. In the Cairngorms National Park, the size of Somerset and the largest national park in the UK, smoke from the wildfire rose over Speyside for weeks on end this summer. A less visible but still menacing casualty of climate change and human misuse is the fall in the water level of the Spey and the vast network of tributaries which feed it. Probably these negative developments have yet to peak, but they already include less snow in winter which melts quickly instead of releasing its water slowly in the spring.

“The Spey is no longer the famous river it once was,” says Harriet Einsiedel, a land-owner who has lived on the Spey near Aviemore since childhood. “The river is much lower in summer and this May you could walk across it.” Salmon and other wildlife are far scarcer than they used to be. Flowering waterweed has largely disappeared. In a part of Britain notorious for extreme precipitation, a spring on a hill overlooking Einsiedel’s house, which once supplied her with drinking water, ran dry this August, so she has to depend on bottled water supplied by the local water company.

She blames the decline of the Spey and Strath Spey (the Spey valley) on excessive abstraction and diversion of its water by a variety of users, such as the more than 50 active whisky distilleries on the river and its tributaries which include brands with a worldwide reputation such as The Glenfiddich and The Glenlivet. But by far the biggest and most damaging diversions, dwarfing all the others, are two hydro-electric schemes which divert huge amounts of water out of the Spey valley in order to generate hydro-electricity, much of it used to power an aluminium smelter at Fort William.

Deeply concerned by this, the Spey Fishery Board (SFB)........

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