What’s the problem?
The UK has lost nearly half of its biodiversity since the Industrial Revolution. It has fared worse in this respect than most countries in the EU, the G7 and China. It is consistently in the bottom 10% of nations in the Biodiversity Intactness Index. According to the Royal Society, the abundance of the UK’s estimated 70,000 known species of animals, plants, funghi and microorganisms is declining. UK flying insects have declined by 60% in less than 20 years (Natural History Museum). By 1984, the UK had lost 97% of its wildflower meadows (Kew Gardens). In the 1970s, it drained 10,000km2 of wetlands. Woodland and farmland birds are in steep decline – between 32% and 68% less than in 1970 (UK government). 0% of England’s rivers achieve standards of ‘good chemical status’ set in the EU Water Framework Directive in 2000, and 86% do not achieve “good ecological status” (House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee/UK government). In 2023, 57 international competitors in the World Triathlon Series became ill after an event swimming in the sea off Sunderland, apparently due to raised levels of faecal coliforms in the coastal waters. There is a lot to do to put all of this right.
A mixed response
The UK government was a strong and vocal supporter of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which is the real benchmark of national actions to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, and it claims to be in the forefront of efforts to implement it.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said in his introduction to the government’s Environmental Improvement Plan 2023 –
“… we played a leading role in striking a new global deal for nature at the UN Nature Summit, COP15, in December last year, making the case that restoring the natural world is vital in achieving net zero.
This new Environmental Improvement Plan sets out how we will drive this work forward with renewed ambition. It is a blueprint not just to halt the decline of nature in our country, but to reverse it – changing the trajectory that the country has been on ever since the industrial revolution. “
The Environmental Improvement Plan 2023 sets these environmental goals for the UK government (as environmental law is a devolved matter, this is a set of commitments applying to England) –
Goal 1 - Thriving plants and wildlife
Goal 2 – Clean air
Goal 3 – Clean and plentiful water
Goal 4 – Managing exposure to chemicals and pesticides
Goal 5 – Maximise our resources, minimise our waste
Goal 6 – Using resources from nature sustainably
Goal 7 – Mitigating and adapting to climate change
Goal 8 – Reduced harm from environmental hazards
Goal 9 – Enhanced biosecurity
Goal 10 – Enhanced beauty, heritage and engagement with the natural environment.
For the “Apex goal – improving nature”, the government declares that “We will halt the decline in our biodiversity so we can achieve thriving plants and wildlife”.
To that end, it pledges to –
“launch the Species Survival Fund to create, enhance and restore habitats;
create, restore and extend around 70 areas for wildlife through projects including new National Nature Reserves, and the next rounds of the Landscape Recovery Projects;
protect 30% of our land and sea for nature through the Nature Recovery Network and enhanced protections for our marine protected areas. We intend to designate the first Highly Protected Marine Areas this year;
implement the Environment Act 2021, including rolling out Local Nature Recovery Strategies to identify areas to create and restore habitat, and Biodiversity Net Gain to enhance the built environment;
support a transformation in the management of 70% of our countryside by incentivising farmers to adopt nature friendly farming practices;
publish an updated Green Finance Strategy, setting out the steps we are putting in place to leverage in private finance to deliver against these goals. We have a goal to raise at least £500 million per year of private finance into nature’s recovery by 2027 and more than £1 billion by 2030.”
It is explicitly acknowledged in the Environmental Improvement Plan 2023 that the success or failure of the UK government in achieving all the targets set out in that Plan must be measured against the Goals and Targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework which it signed in December 2022.
To take one example, Target 7 of the Global Biodiversity Framework commits the signatory parties to -
“Reduce pollution risks and the negative impact of pollution from all sources by 2030, to levels that are not harmful to biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, considering cumulative effects, including: (a) by reducing excess nutrients lost to the environment by at least half, including through more efficient nutrient cycling and use; (b) by reducing the overall risk from pesticides and highly hazardous chemicals by at least half, including through integrated pest management, based on science, taking into account food security and livelihoods; and (c) by preventing, reducing, and working towards eliminating plastic pollution.”
Will UK government policies on nutrient neutrality deliver this result? Will the Chemical Strategy and the Pesticide policy to be produced later in 2023 deliver what it has promised, “reducing the overall risks from pesticides and highly hazardous chemicals … by at least half”? Will the combined policies on water pollution and stormwater discharges and agricultural pollution bring pollution of rivers and coastal waters under control by 2030, “to levels that are not harmful to biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services”?
Currently, levels of pollution are preventing 84% of England’s rivers from achieving ‘good ecological status”: yet the government has discussed moving the goalposts so that more rivers achieve good status by not having to meet all the component parts of that test.
Under the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill the government is taking powers to replace the whole of Environmental Impact Assessment and Habitats Regulations Assessment with vaguely defined Environmental Outcome Reports, which will be ‘streamlined’: will that mean ‘deregulated and made less meaningful’?
The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 gives Ministers the powers to revoke or re-write 4,000 or so laws at will, including many which deliver protections to biodiversity and the environment, and any laws so rewritten must be less onerous, under a deregulation provision.
In its most recent approach to net zero and climate change, the UK government is proving to will the ends while denying the means. That is undermining trust in its sincerity about meeting its net zero goals. Inevitably, the government’s current attitude to net zero, opening a coal mine, issuing new rounds of oil and gas exploration licences, delaying meaningful interim commitments, raises questions about whether it may take a similar approach to its commitments on biodiversity and nature protection.
The UK and the “30 by 30” commitment
On 26 July 2023 the UK House of Lords Environment and Climate Change Committee published a short report entitled “An extraordinary challenge: Restoring 30 per cent of our land and sea by 2030.”
This report focuses on the UK government’s state of preparedness for the ‘30 by 30’ target of ensuring that at least 30% of its land, coastal and marine areas are under effective restoration by 2030. As noted, on account of the devolution of responsibility for environmental law, the Committee’s report is chiefly of significance to the position in England.
The Committee concluded that –
protected areas are not sufficient in extent and are often in poor condition;
only 6.5% of land in England is currently covered by designations such as Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), National Nature Reserve (NNR), Ramsar, Special Area of Conservation (SAC) or Special Protection Area (SPA), so a step change would be needed to meet the 30% target;
existing designations would all be needed, but government also needed to improve the quality and frequency of monitoring to improve the protection delivered, for example on land at SSSIs and at sea in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) – there being a particular need for improved marine monitoring, and the better regulation of damaging activities such as seabed trawling;
where funds were short, there could be a role for the proper use of ‘citizen science’ programmes to back up the monitoring undertaken by regulators;
the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) guidance should be adopted on defining adequately protected land;
other land and areas would have to be included outside and beyond existing designations, which raises wider questions such as the extent to which wider agricultural programmes such as National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and countryside governed by Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMS) could be brought up to the necessary standards to be part of the 30 by 30 component of the UK’s obligations.
Conclusions
Any current or future government that really means to deliver the required outcomes of the Global Biodiversity Framework will need a consistent, cross-government commitment to its delivery. In the same way that action on climate change continues to be doggedly resisted by the fossil fuel lobby (see Al Gore’s 2023 TED Talk - What the Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know) the political reaction to the EU’s Nature Restoration Law suggests that entrenched and well funded lobby groups may also oppose nature restoration. The response to that should be transparency, and the doubling and re-doubling of efforts to ensure public participation and Parliamentary support and participation in the law-making process. Worldwide, a million species are at risk of extinction. Biodiversity loss may be our own Silent Spring, and we need a response to match that we can believe in .