I am delighted to have started on 1 July 2024 a 6 month contract working at the Office for Environmental Protection (‘OEP’) – www.theoep.org.uk
The European Court of Human Rights ‘ECHR’ delivered a landmark ruling on 9 April 2024 in a climate case brought by 2,000 Swiss women, mostly in their 70s
Three key components of a credible UK approach to chemicals regulation are, as at April 2024, currently missing.
On 6 February 2024, in the face of strong opposition from farmers in the EU and their trade bodies such as COPA COGECA, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the abandonment of the proposed Sustainable Use of Plant Protection Products Regulation, which contained the Commission’s aim to halve pesticide use. This had been an important part of the Commission’s ‘Farm to Fork’ strategy and its Green Deal.
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.
In December 2022, chaired by China and hosted by Canada, the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity reached agreement on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework an ambitious set of commitments aimed at halting and reversing biodiversity loss and the accelerating rate of species extinctions now thought to threaten 1 million species.
I recently had the opportunity to join a guided walk across chalk grassland at the National Trust’s site at Devil’s Dyke and Saddlescombe Farm, near Brighton in Sussex, led by the Trust’s Lead Ranger Dan Fagan. It was a reminder of how much more you can see and learn about in the company of an expert guide. As well as enjoying spectacular countryside and views, we learned about the huge pressures on England’s chalk grassland, 80% of which has been lost since the 1940s, and the real value of this critical habitat.
Reading long government policy documents sometimes resembles the feeding patterns of the Whale Shark. You need to swallow oceans of print to find the fragments of policy plankton that suggest what is really going on. These are some initial reflections on the UK government’s Plan for Water announced on [ ] April 2023, and their implications in particular for England.
In June 2022 the European Commission proposed a major Nature Restoration Law for the European Union. It has still to be debated and agreed across the Member States and the European Parliament, but it represents a very important initiative. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in December 2022 concluded negotiations at COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Biodiversity internationally is in crisis, with a million species at risk of extinction.
On 25 October 2022, the same day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister, the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill was given its Second Reading in the House of Commons, and will now go for consideration in a Public Bill Committee. The Bill contains a sunset date of 31 December 2022 for 2,400 pieces of “retained EU law”, including 570 pieces of environmental law. By this date these laws will be revoked, unless they are re-enacted or replaced by whatever alternative Ministers or the Devolved Administrations consider appropriate.
On 29 October 2022 the new Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Therese Coffey, announced that the UK government was unable to meet its own statutory deadline of 31 October 2022, set in its own Environment Act 2021, for setting the minimum number of key environmental targets required by that legislation. It is apparently still working through the 180,000 responses from the public about its earlier consultation on environmental targets.
