BY the time you flick open or click on this publication, the shape of the next Scottish Government will start to look obvious. But rather than tempt fortune, I thought I’d explore a few of the megatrends that will certainly face this Holyrood administration, no matter how the seats fall, over the next five years of their term.

Speaking of the biggest of those megatrends – our mounting climate catastrophe – I can’t avoid mentioning what seems to me a major flaw in one the SNP leadership’s electoral messages. Which has been that independence can only be turned to when we have “defeated”, or are on the “road to recovery” from, the Covid pandemic.

The flaw is that coronavirus is only the first of a series of pandemic viruses that will come upon us in the next few years, driven by megatrends that are pretty implacable.

In her March blog for the vaccine alliance Gavi, Priya Joi identified eight candidates for “the next pandemic”. Across such delights as Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, chikungunya and the Nipah virus, the triggering conditions are worryingly consistent.

Irresistible global warming and agro-business deforestation opens up infectants (like bats and mosquitos) to dense suburban and urban areas. And if globalised travel and trade routes start flowing again, the wider world will once more be under pandemic assault.

Even if we begin to descend those near-vertical graphs of 6% year-on-year reduction in carbon (note we only managed 5% even during the systemic lockdowns of 2020), which aims to avoid 1.5% of warming over pre-industrial eras, we will be travelling through a biospheric vale of tears for some time. (If the pandemics don’t get us, methane released from warming steppes and seas might well do.)

If this vista is right, then independence can’t wait on “recovery”. We’re not “recovering” from all this baked-in disruption until the end of the century (if we’re lucky with our sustainable progress). There are thus two clear reasons, one domestic and one global, for independence to be pursued regardless of any temporary pandemic “victory”.

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One is that Scotland needs full sovereign powers, as quickly as possible, to build the internal structures and institutions necessary to protect ourselves. We are a largely communitarian society, able to come together quickly and consensually under adverse conditions.

Scots could probably thole the level of digital coveillance and mutual monitoring that societies need to apply, if they are to react and adapt well to biosphere threats (as many East Asian and Australasian countries have).

Does that collective patience exist throughout these islands, in a Brexited rUK brimming with an individualistic distrust of experts and governance? I’m not relying on it. So might we indeed need some kind of jurisdictional border, in order to do things differently?

Secondly, a planet-positive independent Scotland – pursuing world-leading zero-carbon and sustainable energy targets – can play its part in global leadership, lending its voice (and exemplar) to top tables and wider policy circles.

We can show that democratic principles and idealism can drive the necessary pace of change, as we grapple with climate emergency. Scottish independence could be quite a display of ecological soft power, attracting new kinds of planet-conscious investment and talent... if we can get started earlier, than later.

Reading around the more global predictions, there is one other consequence of climate breakdown which will directly impact upon Scottish life in the next five years. That’s the permanent opening up of a trade route from the Pacific to the Atlantic through the Arctic circle, due to inexorable ice-cap melt there.

This is one of the core trends identified in Scotland 2070, an exciting work of foresight written by Hillary Sillitto and others. “Look north for the next 100 years, not south,” they recommend.

Under that headline, they bundle together the policy paragons of the Nordic societies with the geo-strategic position of Scotland. Scapa Flow becomes the perfect stop-off point for container ships before their next leg to Europe.

An independent Scotland emerging in this window will have to grow up quickly. We’ll be positioned at the fulcrum of whatever forces Russia, Scandinavia and Europe want to exert over the management of this new northern passage. But again, it would be best to start on such statecraft earlier than later, imbuing our first actions with our best principles.

Another set of trends facing the new Scottish administration over the next half-decade,

Covid-accelerated but already disruptive, are technologies that both challenge the very functions of humanity, and also amplify some of our oldest tendencies.

If I’m right about how biologically unstable our era is to become, then many of us will have to get used to a degree of “virtuality” in our lives, as we intermittently flee from public spaces when they become crucibles for contagion.

We will have to get used to lives that are more deeply embedded. As Sillitto suggests in the Scotland 2070 book, the home may start to become the homestead, a localised place for work, rest and play. But we will also be more profoundly disembedded, as we Zoom, TikTok and (coming mid-decade) peer through our Apple Glasses at augmented realities. We will put pressure on our interminable screen existences to become less flat, stressful and alienating.

IF our social fabric does become this strange, Matrix-like mix – virtual, networked behaviours conducted in private spaces, with odd, unpredictable periods of frenzied public interaction – I’d suggest it can’t all just be left to tech and content giants in California.

Again, independence as a way of exercising jurisdiction over your media and network space, in order that democratic values can be upheld, may become absolutely necessary. If increasing hours of our life are to exist in a “metaverse”, as the advertising gurus put it, then there has to be a Scottish public stake in it. We can’t just let our interior lives be programmed by

the American wizards of software and narrative.

This relates to what will, I predict, be a huge and increasing challenge for a Scottish Government over its next term, if these demanding conditions pertain. And that’s a general and severe degradation of public mental health. How do we maintain collective hope and optimism, as our lives are being radically restructured, the old habits and institutions falling apart before our eyes? Where can we ground ourselves, in this actual-virtual environment?

We have to be able to think in 20 to 40-year cycles if we are to begin to meet the climate emergency. We need to be ready to take every prevention of regress, each minor stabilisation of conditions, as a great victory for all of us. I find it hard to conceive of a more supportive mentality for that challenge than being in a newly independent country, trying to turn “life in the early days of a better nation” into reality.

It’s why I hope the next term of the Scottish Parliament, if the expected majority of independence-supporting parties transpires, is when this project really starts. But it must do so by fully facing the strange extremes of our times and finding new ways to make us feel secure in the face of deep risks. Not just “no complacency” – but “no nostalgia” either.