Brexit could be a rare opportunity to reverse Wales’ wildlife decline
WE ALL need nature – it provides our food, water and air, energy to heat our homes, green spaces for our children to play in, the wildlife that enchants and inspires us – we couldn’t live without it.
Worryingly, Wales is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, with one in 12 species threatened with extinction. Luckily, we have an opportunity to turn it all around – and your voice is at the heart of it.
Some 80% of Wales is farmed, so the laws that govern farming have a huge effect on the wildlife that live in our countryside. As we leave the EU, Wales gets to design its own laws that govern how we manage our land.
Farming has the biggest impact on our land in Wales, but there are other things that affect it too, like planting trees, managing the countryside for nature and providing clean drinking water. This change in the law could either do everything for nature or, in the worstcase scenario, do nothing to protect it.
The laws could bring back more birds, bumblebees, plants and butterflies to our countryside, or we could lose even more, which could be catastrophic for our future generations.
If you grew up in Wales in 1980s, you would have seen 80% more curlews – long-legged birds with iconic curved beaks that have haunted our uplands and inspired stories for hundreds of years. Today, it is feared there are less than 400 pairs of curlews in all of Wales; a fraction of their former population.
This is largely because they’ve lost the upland meadows where they nest and bring up chicks, as more land is taken up to produce things for humans. If we don’t turn around curlews’ decline soon, we could lose them from Wales forever, and our young people might never get to see the birds they’ve read about in stories.
Shrill carders are one of the rarest bumblebees in the whole of the UK and have one of their last healthy populations left in southeast Wales, where they survive on some of our few remaining grasslands that are rich in wildflowers.
It’s estimated that in England and Wales only 2% of grasslands have a high diversity of species left – diversity that wildlife like the shrill carder bumblebee need to survive.
If these declines continue, we could lose pollinators like the shrill carder bumblebee forever. (Especially as its homes in both Wales and England are threatened with major new roads like the M4.)
However, curlews and shrill carder bees aren’t the only species faced with worries about their future. Much of the loss of wildlife is because we have farmed and managed the land in a way that depletes nature rather than restoring it.
That’s why this is such an important time for change in Wales – there is a way to produce food and other resources for humans without jeopardising the nature we all love and depend on. But we must raise our voices to make it happen.
Let’s tell the Welsh Government that we want new laws governing our land and farming to restore nature, not deplete it. If we get this right, new Welsh laws could bring wildlife back to our countryside – like it used to be only few decades ago – and help famers manage their farms so that they’re also wildlife-friendly.
To make sure the Welsh Government makes a positive change for both farming and nature, you can add your voice to their open consultation. Just visit bit.ly/YmgyrchCampaign or go to @RSPBCymru on Twitter or Facebook to add your voice using our online campaign action.
If you have any questions about the changes coming up for farming and nature in Wales, or how to take part in the online action, email campaigns.wales@rspb.org.uk.