News: The State of Nature
In 2016, Britain was described as one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. With the latest State of Nature report now published, has anything changed?
Findings from the latest report
After the events of the last year or so, it might surprise readers of BBC Wildlife Magazine
that there are still people who need to be convinced that the planet is facing an environmental crisis.
Direct activists from Extinction Rebellion have taken to the streets to highlight Government inaction to curb climate change. While in May, scientists from 50 countries produced a UN report that warned human activity is impacting natural ecosystems so completely that it is “eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”
Now, we also have State of Nature 2019
(SoN 2019), the third in a series of reports produced by a partnership of more than 50 of Britain’s leading wildlife conservation and environmental groups. SoN 2016, in particular, made headlines by describing the UK as one of the “most nature-depleted countries in the world.” All of which begs the question – what can a third report tell us that we don’t already know?
“There’s evidence that the public think that nature is getting better,” says RSPB conservation scientist Dr Daniel Hayhow, who helped compile the report. “Somehow the message is not getting out there that that’s not the case.”
It’s not just the wider population who may be in denial. Next year, a major meeting of the 196 nations that are party to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the treaty that came into existence at the
Rio Earth Summit of 1992, will take place in China. Ten years ago, all signatories were given a series of 20 targets for 2020, and the UK will have to admit that it has failed on at least 15.
“The CBD is a fundamental opportunity for holding our governments to account on their actions to protect biodiversity,” explains Hayhow. “Unfortunately, most of the targets set in 2010 are unlikely to be met at a global scale, and it’s important to be able to say in advance of that final reporting period that nature is still in decline and human impacts on wildlife are increasing.” SoN 2019, therefore, will be both a factual record and lobbying tool at one of the most important environmental conferences in a decade, which will decide what the UK will be asked to do to address biodiversity loss over the next 10 years. The SoN partnership also sees this report, like the previous ones, as a way to engage people with the need for action. But if, as generally recognised, it becomes harder to do this if the message is all doom and gloom, is there anything we can glean from its pages that gives us cause for optimism? First of all, says Dr Jo Judge, chief executive of the National Biodiversity Network Trust (NBN), not only do we know more about what’s happening to nature in the UK than almost any other country in the world, but SoN 2019 is even more comprehensive in its analysis than those that went before. The number of species for which we have distribution data, for example, has increased from 3,148 in 2013 to 6,654 now.
Many of these new records already existed, but – until recently – the methods hadn’t been developed to include them, because the data collection had been done by the UK’s army of ‘citizen scientists’ and not through a systematic monitoring programme. Though many of these volunteers are experts in their own right, it has nevertheless required new analytical techniques to derive reliable trends from this data. Best of all, these records are often for taxonomic groups that are mostly ignored by politicians and the public. “Birds and mammals are quite easy to get people to talk about,
One area where SoN 2019 breaks new ground is in looking at the state of our marine fisheries.
but bryophytes [the group of plants that includes mosses and liverworts], lichens and caddisflies don’t always get the juices flowing,” says Judge. “But, like everything else, they’re important, because they are the building blocks of our ecosystems. You need to have everything to have a truly healthy ecosystem, but people don’t always think about them.”
And here’s another reason to be hopeful – not only do we know what issues are having the biggest impacts on our biodiversity, we also know how to reduce or even eliminate these. In the 2016 report, agriculture was identified as having the greatest impact, but in the intervening years, there have been some significant developments.
Brexit – if and when it eventually happens – could be seen as an opportunity to change the way farmers are subsidised, so that they are paid to produce ecosystem services as well as food, instead of just giving them money on the basis of how much land they manage.
The new Agriculture Bill (stalled in the House of Commons for nearly a year now) will get rid of the so-called Basic Payment and solely subsidise farmers to produce clean water, healthy soils and biodiversity in the form of, for example, pollinating insects. Other issues hitting our wildlife include pollution, increasing urbanisation, the decrease in woodland management and invasive, non-native species. Emissions of many pollutants, SoN 19 points out, have reduced over recent decades, one of the reasons, for example, why otters have recolonised every English county. Similarly, our woodland cover grew between 1998 and 2018 by 9 per cent, though only 43 per cent of our woodlands are sustainably managed, leading to declines in some woodland species, such as dormice. Increasing urbanisation is taking away space for wildlife, but there are things we can do to offset this, says Hayhow. Research carried out in Bristol, Edinburgh, Leeds and Reading found that 60 per cent of the area of these cities is green space, such as parks and gardens, and therefore has the potential to contribute positively to biodiversity.
“It’s crazy to think we are not using this green space properly,” adds Hayhow. “A lot of it is mown to within an inch of its life, and neither biodiversity nor people are benefiting. There is now a concept of achieving a net gain in biodiversity through development enshrined in our planning policy in England and Wales – we just need to see it carried through.”
The big impact that we have little, or arguably no, control over is climate change. The picture here is complicated by the fact that, as temperatures increase, we both lose and gain species. Some – such as the capercaillie and mountain ringlet butterfly – may find the UK is eventually outside their natural range, while others – including a number of dragonflies and
damselflies, and waterbirds such as the spoonbill and cattle egret – are increasingly finding temperatures (and our reflooded wetlands) to their liking. But, in the long term, the impact is certain to be negative, argues Hayhow.
One area where SoN 2019 breaks new ground is in looking at the state of our marine fisheries. As with agriculture, the way we fish could be transformed after we leave the EU, but the report suggests we are currently going backwards in our efforts to do this sustainably.
“The Government has a commitment to fish in line with the maximum sustainable yield, and at one point we’d achieved about 60 per cent of our stocks being fished sustainably, but that has now dropped to about 49 per cent,” says Helen McLachlan, fisheries programme manager for WWFUK. On the bright side, that compares to a figure of only 7 per cent of our stocks being exploited within maximum sustainable yields as recently as 1990.
In other areas, such as the accidental killing, or bycatch, of non-target species, we have made even less progress.
“Look at harbour porpoise bycatch,” says McLachlan. “An average of three animals a day are caught in gillnets. It amazes me that we are no further forward on this.”
Part factual record, part lobbying tool and part public-engagement exercise, SoN 19 has a multi-functional role in the battle to reverse our wildlife declines. By the time the fourth one is published in – presumably – another three years, we will know the outcome of CBD 2020 and have some idea how our attempts to improve the state of wildlife are progressing. Perhaps, then, how effectively we are responding to the crisis will become clear.
FIND OUT MORE There are more details about State of Nature, including the 2016 and 2013 reports, on the RSPB’s website: bit.ly/rspbson