Patrick Hall & Andrew Leming: Beyond the Leaders’ Pledge: Stronger Action on UK Biodiversity

Late last month, the Prime Minister joined 64 other global leaders in signing the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature. The Pledge aims to build upon global efforts made under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which has taken on greater urgency in recent months, as various studies have shown that the world has collectively failed to meet any of the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets that were established in 2011. 

The UK’s State of Nature 2019 report and the RSPB’s analysis illustrates what this looks like in reality: 41% of UK species in decline, 15% under threat, and an estimated 15% of the 8,500 assessed species approaching extinction.

Beyond the signing of the Leaders’ Pledge, the UK must advance new, concrete policy measures to combat biodiversity decline and safeguard nature. Two areas of particular relevance for UK policymakers to focus their efforts are the proper management of and investment in Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), and combating the global Illegal Wildlife Trade (IWT). 

Point Three of the Leaders’ Pledge calls for a holistic, integrated approach to biodiversity protection, including in the area of marine biodiversity management. The UK has made significant progress on establishing MPAs over the past 20 years. But while the amount of marine areas under protection in the UK exceeds the 10% specified in the Aichi Targets, the Government has acknowledged that many MPAs are not being effectively managed and monitored.  

The focus on increasing this percentage of MPAs is important, but so is their effective management. Some have argued, including Lord Zac Goldsmith, that many of the MPAs may in reality be ‘paper parks’: that is, areas technically under protection, though lacking the resources and oversight required for safeguarding their biodiversity. Studies have shown that action on stronger measures to manage MPAs effectively would assist in species and biodiversity conservation more broadly, with significant added economic benefits. 

One such measure could be to ban bottom trawling in all UK MPAs, a practice which is currently still permitted. Bottom trawling commonly involves dropping a weighted net onto the ocean floor and dragging it. Bottom trawling disturbs or destroys everything in its path, including rocks and coral reefs that are habitats for marine life. Many maritime species not intended to be caught, such as seabird and turtles, are also caught and often do not survive. Bottom trawling frequently contributes to overfishing and undersized catches, leading to marine life being discarded. Bans on bottom trawling are already in place in other countries such as New Zealand, Indonesia, and certain states of the United States.

As part of its efforts on MPAs the UK should also consider its role in safeguarding biodiversity abroad, where stronger protections for marine areas in UK Overseas Territories should be encouraged as well. This is particularly important for the UK’s “Blue Belt” initiative to promote the establishment of MPAs in areas where coral reefs are coming under increasing pressure and native species of fish are threatened with overexploitation by commercial fishing. 

Point Six of the Leaders’ Pledge makes a commitment to reducing the IWT. As the world’s fourth most profitable criminal enterprise, the IWT has had a devastating impact on some of the most charismatic and endangered species on the planet. Through Royal Assent of the Ivory Act, funding for the Illegal Wildlife Challenge Fund and £220 million of funding for the International Biodiversity Fund that was announced late last year, the UK Government has gone some way to thwarting the IWT. 

In Bright Blue’s report, Global green giant?, we put forward several policy recommendations for the UK to go further on tackling the IWT. Similar legislation to the US Magnitsky Act 2012 - legislation which allows the US Government to sanction individuals implicated in gross human rights abuses by freezing their assets - should be enacted to allow sanctions to be placed on those who are suspected of committing gross species and habitat destruction, with the type of sanction and authority to enact them at the discretion of the UK Government.

Organisations may also become implicated in the IWT, particularly through their supply chains. The Wildlife Financial Taskforce brings together representatives from thirty international banks and financial institutions to increase investigations and prosecutions in relation to the IWT. The Taskforce currently operates on a voluntary basis in terms of its membership. By contrast, the Modern Slavery Act makes compulsory the assessment and prevention of slavery in the supply chains of organisations with an annual turnover in excess of £36 million. This framework should be emulated for monitoring financial flows that may be connected to the IWT. 

Brexit may also undermine the UK’s ability to tackle the IWT if it entails the UK’s departure from EU-TWIX (EU Trade in Wildlife Information Exchange), an EU-wide intelligence sharing database with records of over 55,000 wildlife trade seizures. Not only should the UK seek to remain a part of EU-TWIX once the UK has fully left the EU, but the UK Government should also seek to establish a Commonwealth version of the EU-TWIX programme to create a wider network of intelligence sharing on criminal IWT activity.

At present, the state of global nature is grim. Whilst the Pledge for Nature is a welcome gesture, unless supported by concrete policy measures it shall remain just that. The aforementioned policy recommendations offer a starting point for the UK Government to safeguard our ocean ecosystems, tackle the IWT, and ultimately stem the tide on biodiversity decline. Fundamentally, the signatories of the Pledge for Nature will be judged not by what they say and sign, but by what they do.

Patrick Hall is an Energy and Environment Researcher at the think tank Bright Blue.

Andrew Leming is an Energy and Environment Researcher at think tank Bright Blue.

Peter Bridgewater: What happens next is up to every one of us

Sunday 13 September the BBC broadcast a special documentary entitled “Extinction: The facts” narrated by Sir David Attenborough – and the title of this blog were the final solemn words of that documentary.  The programme was a grim reminder that the natural world on which we depend for life itself is under great pressure and even threat.  Many would have been upset at the footage of the last two white Rhinos – mother and daughter, but also the scenes of animals fleeing burning forests.  And all this while the news bulletins are full of the west of the USA burning.  Having lived through the last Australian “black summer” in January I could easily identify with many of the scenes and messages in the broadcast.  

Globally, the UN Environment Programme GEO6, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services -IPBES - Global Assessment, and the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Global Biodiversity Outlook  5 (to be launched this week) have conveyed the same message – biodiversity and thus ecosystem services are under pressure as never before.  The problem is that none of this is new, it has been endlessly rehearsed through similar assessments and outlooks since the 1980s.  So, what should happen next? 

 A typical response is that we need more land and sea in protected areas. A few weeks ago, Bright Blue organised a lunch-time presentation from Lord Zac Goldsmith who gave some interesting perspectives on a green recovery. One area he especially focused on was the great strides the UK is making in nature conservation through Marine Protected Areas in waters around the UK and the Overseas Territories (also known as the Blue Belt).  In response to a question, he acknowledged that sometimes declaration of a park or protected area is easier than subsequently managing it but vouchsafed that “paper parks” may be better than no park.  

The term “paper parks” was first used in the  World Parks Congress in Venezuela in 1992 referring to an area dedicated as a park or protected area that, while dedicated, has few or no resources with which to perform management.  Whether such paper parks really are effective, or could even possibly be a negative, is a topic on which there can, and should, be a lot of argument.  Over the last few decades, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and several International NGOs, have provided funding for developing protected areas in less developed countries.  The typical length of such funding support is 3-5 years, after which continued funding for ongoing management and surveillance of the area is frequently left to the scarce resources of the funded country, with the inevitable consequences.  

In general, declaration of any protected area, marine or terrestrial, without an assured continual stream of funding for management, maintenance and surveillance should be undertaken with the greatest degree of caution.  The most successful cases have been where local communities become energised following declaration of a protected area and in effect act as the guardians/mangers/stewards of that area.  The marine protected area (MPA) “core” of the El Hierro Biosphere Reserve in the Canary Islands is a great example where the local fishing community of the Island act as unofficial stewards/guardians of the core - a nursery site for the fish populations on which their livelihood depends.  This model of government-civil society cooperation to become stewards of biodiversity and ensure good management of the MPA is one local communities of the UK Overseas Territories will undoubtedly wish to emulate as the blue belt is expanded.

To make sure, then, that “what happens next” is positive for all of biodiversity, including ourselves, we must become stewards of land and sea. Until we do, we cannot achieve even the modest UN Sustainable Development Goals set in 2015.  We must develop better visions of what a good life is - and how we can achieve it - while living comfortably with our fellow denizens of planet Earth.  In talking sustainable development, much is often made that our economic models are leading us down the pathway to greater disconnection with nature.  But if we understand that ecology and economics both derive from the Greek word οίκος (which refers to three related but distinct concepts: the family, the family's property, and the home) then a way forward becomes clearer.  And perhaps the review of economics and biodiversity by Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta currently underway will offer new ways of thinking about ecology and economics and how people must relate to the rest of nature.  

For multilateral conventions dealing with nature, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, the Convention on Migratory Species etc, successes are difficult to find.  These three conventions have failed to  achieve their founding objectives,   and in all three cases the situation they were to resolve has deteriorated further.  This is largely due to a need for action on biodiversity to be local and national, rather than global.  In the UK, the 25-year environmental plan is offering positive, proactive ways forward.  But in the end, environmental plans, policies, and parks (on paper or in reality) only are only effective if the resources to manage, monitor and steward our shared environment are also secured and available.  Post-covid, this is the world we must strive for, together.  And that is what happens next, with a part for each of us to play.

Peter Bridgewater is a Senior Fellow at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, The Netherlands,  and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, Australia. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Sharon Darcy: Covid is a wake-up call that we are part of the natural world – and have much to learn

Covid-19 has exposed the fragile human-environment interactions which are frequently obscured by much of modern life.  A zoonotic disease, it has made us more aware that we are part of nature – not separate from it.  And lock-down has enabled many to reconnect with their local natural environment.

However, Covid-19 is not alone in making us reassess the relationship between nature and humanity.  Before the pandemic struck, concerns around climate change had risen rapidly in the public consciousness, particularly amongst young people.  Awareness that carbon emissions have real world impacts on people as well as planet was increasing, with the floods in Yorkshire and the Midlands this past February making this tangible in a very real way.  The connections between environmental health and social and economic wellbeing were becoming clearer. Yet we were still not properly listening, as many young people consistently – and rightly – told us.

Given the affordability challenges being faced by many across the country as a result of Covid-19, a short-term focus is in many ways understandable.  However, unless we learn the environmental, economic and social lessons from the pandemic, there is a real risk that a ‘build back better’ recovery will still not be truly sustainable.  The wellbeing of our citizens and communities will still be threatened by increasingly disrupted ecosystems and extreme, dangerous and unpredictable weather.  When the effective functioning of society and our individual and collective livelihoods are at stake, short-term consumer interests must surely be trumped by measures to secure the wellbeing of future generations.

But given the fast moving and dynamic environment, and the fact that change is not always linear, getting this right is challenging.  And institutional change can take just too long. Deciding who should lead on what – government, regulators, companies, civil society groups and individuals - can be difficult at the best of times.  In a crisis, where the to do list grows by the day and implementation is in the spotlight, it is even harder.  But waiting it out for stability and clarity may just exacerbate the problems we face and potentially severely reduce optionality if natural systems are pushed beyond their brink.

So what can policy makers and regulators do to speed the changes needed to secure a truly sustainable future while the clock is ticking?

Below is a possible set of sustainability principles to help guide decision-making as we come out of the corona crisis and navigate towards a more resilient future.  These principles are primarily designed to help the economic policy makers and regulators whose work shapes the key building blocks of the economy, such as public utilities and other essential services, but they clearly have wider applicability:

• Focus on the wellbeing of the next generation – crucial for the survival of all species, and top of the list.  In economic terms, this means paying due regard to long-term interests, recognising resilience and understanding the value of things, not just the cost. Sustaining natural life support systems such that they continue to function effectively into the future is a pre-condition for this.  Without them, humanity is lost.

• The precautionary principle should be enshrined as a duty of environmental and social care in all decision making as this is the key to avoiding dependency on activities and unnatural substances that permanently disadvantage all future life.

• Systems thinking. Siloed thinking in government departments and sector regulators means they can struggle to deal with this complexity. The Covid-19 experience has constantly demonstrated the disruptive effects of non-systems approaches to connected decision making. This principle requires policy makers and regulators to focus on desired outcomes and understand and act on boundary issues and interdependencies through identifying common ground and co-benefits.

• Recognise that change is constant and adaptation crucial – recent moves towards adaptive policy and regulation are warmly welcomed. As we will always struggle with feast, famine, droughts and floods, some redundancy in the system is needed to help us adapt to extremes and cope with new challenges. All this requires judgement, hard work, patience and practice.  Innovation is of course essential, but it needs to be integral to policy and regulatory thinking, not a bolt on activity.

• Diversification is a source of strength.  Applying this in practice to economic thinking from the top of government down to local communities, and from policy makers to regulatory and corporate boards, is key to provide the flexibility needed to deal with change. For it to be meaningful, it requires stakeholder engagement and taking account of a range of perspectives, including at the local, regional and devolved levels. Absent this, navigating uncertainty is far more challenging.  

• Circularity – nature is the great recycler, and nothing is wasted.  Policy makers and regulators need to consider how their decisions can help design in circular and zero waste/emissions solutions.  And crucially, how to honestly learn the lessons from what works and what doesn’t.  This is the great test of any post Covid-19 economy. Right now, we are nowhere near circularity.

Fundamental changes to our systems and institutions are essential to ensure a more sustainable and resilient future for people and planet. Let’s start by not wasting this crisis by ignoring some of the lessons that are right in front of us. Fashioning and adopting a new set of sustainability principles in economic policy and regulation would be a good place to start.

Sharon Darcy is Director of Sustainability First a think-tank and charity that seeks to promote environmental, social and economic wellbeing in public utilities. 

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Bright Blue.

Ali Morse: Our water environment is in crisis – and that crisis is spreading

Water pollution, especially around our largest cities, is nothing new. Three hundred years ago Alexander Pope wrote of dead animals and waste clogging the Thames, ‘blotting the silver flood’. By the 19th century, the same river was famed for its ‘evil odour’, with years of sewage pollution finally leading to the Thames being considered biologically dead by the mid-20th century. 

Whilst progress has been made in clearing up parts of the Thames, across the country our water environment is under unprecedented pressures - which threaten unprecedented consequences. 

Pollution, including untreated human and animal waste, soil runoff, mountains of plastic and a cocktail of chemicals, is choking the life out of rivers – as is water loss, from over-abstraction, leakage and wastefulness. This twin assault from increasing pollution and increasing water loss puts our water environment at increasing risk. 

Urgent action is needed to address the accelerating decline in our water environment from water abstraction reform, to water efficiency targets delivered through the Environment Bill, to the enforcement of a strong regulatory baseline to prevent pollution. This decline threatens not just the wildlife that relies on clean water, but is costing more money each year through poor crop yields, additional water treatment, a degraded natural environment and resulting ill health. 

A report published in July by the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) provides a stark warning on how these costs could increase yet further. The PAC report flags that over 3 billion litres of water in England, a fifth of the volume used, is lost to leakage every day, and notes the growing problem of over abstraction from rivers (particularly from rare and precious chalk streams). The report concludes with a clear warning that England faces ‘serious risk of running out of water within 20 years’. In the words of PAC Chair Meg Hillier MP ‘It is very hard to imagine, in this country, turning the tap and not having enough clean, drinkable water come out - but that is exactly what we now face’.

We know that we have a water crisis, and that it is getting worse. One of the lessons of the past few tragic months has been that we can’t afford to sit tight and hope that existential threats simply go away – we need to act on them, and to act quickly. 

Fortunately, the rudiments of a water crisis action plan are coming together. The UK Government’s 25 Year Environment Plan (2018) stated that ‘clean and plentiful water’ will be achieved, and committed to improving at least three quarters of our waters to their natural state ‘as soon as is practicable’. Although we’d like to see more, this commitment (along with further commitments in the Environment Agency’s own 2025 plan) is a good start – but it needs to be followed up with meaningful measures to ensure it is fulfilled. 

Several measures needed require investment; as such this autumn’s Comprehensive Spending Review provides an early opportunity for the Government to show it understands the urgency of the growing water problem that faces us. Actions such as boosting investment in water monitoring, and funding a major public campaign to tackle the wastage of water, will make a start towards plugging the growing cracks in our water infrastructure. 

In the meantime, we face a summer where there is risk of drought in parts of England – and of chalk streams in the South East drying up, as they have in recent summers. As the PAC report makes crystal clear, such water shortages will worsen over the years ahead, first wreaking further havoc among aquatic wildlife, then damaging the wider natural environment before finally hitting our own taps. Without swift action, starting in the Comprehensive Spending Review, our water system could constitute a devastating demonstration of an old maxim - what starts as an environmental problem, ends as a human crisis. 

Ali Morse is Water Policy Manager at The Wildlife Trusts and Chair of the Blueprint for Water Group. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Bright Blue.

Andrew Clayton: Is there a sustainable future for UK fisheries?

COVID-19 poses a serious threat to the UK fisheries industry, a traditional source of jobs and income for many coastal communities. Although shoppers are still emptying supermarket shelves and stocking up on staples—including fish—disruption to lucrative export and catering markets has led to a large decline in demand for fish caught by UK fleets, leaving many vessels tied up in port and putting much of the industry’s business activity on hold.

This disruption—and the economic pain it’s causing—is likely to continue for a while, and add to the uncertainty the fishing industry faces from Brexit and the still evolving relationship between the UK and the EU. Major pillars of the governance that underpins the UK fishing industry’s activities—the process used to decide how much fish can be caught and the rules under which products can be sold abroad—will potentially change later this year as London and Brussels negotiators hammer out the details of their future economic relationship.

Notwithstanding the unexpected social and economic shock triggered by COVID-19, lockdowns, and the highly political—and contentious—Brexit process, the lessons from fisheries management around the world, and in some cases closer to home, show that everyone benefits when managers make sustainability a priority. That’s because sustainability leads to a virtuous cycle in which fish populations recover, grow in size, and provide higher yields and profits for fishers. 

However, when governments shy away from improving the health of their fisheries, the reverse is true—overfishing leads to the further depletion of stocks, which, in turn, hurts the economies of fishing communities. So decision-makers need to take steps that will help fish stocks grow and keep fisheries resilient. 

Resilience is critical because wild fisheries rely on healthy natural ecosystems to remain productive. To protect and maintain these ecosystems, responsible, precautionary management should mitigate inaccuracies in stock assessments, take account of interactions between species and changes in ecosystems, and provide transparent, predictable policy responses to changing trends or data that allow fishing businesses to plan effectively.

These basic principles were incorporated in the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) in 2013, reforms that the UK played a lead role in brokering. The UK now needs to demonstrate at least the same level of ambition when it sets its own fisheries policies as an independent coastal state. 

The story of the CFP since 2013 has been one of incremental progress, which was not fast enough to meet its own deadlines. For example, the EU still sets catch limits above the levels advised by scientists, and does so often in agreement with countries such as Norway, which is not an EU member. The EU has made progress protecting fish stocks where robust data is available, but allows for—and takes greater risks with—higher catch limits than scientists advise where the status of stocks is uncertain. This is the opposite of the “precautionary approach” required by international law and the CFP.

But too often fisheries management has focused only on maximising extraction of protein in the short term and for a single species at a time, rather than the long-term functioning of the whole ecosystem. This short-term perspective, which ignores the past productivity of some fish populations, has led managers to focus on avoiding further collapse of stocks rather than restoring the populations to their previous size—leading, in turn, to wild swings in productivity as recovering stocks become over-exploited and then crash again. 

The recent history of North Sea cod is a good example of how we haven’t fully learned the lessons of the past. This stock began recovering a decade ago from an all-time low, so consumers were told to eat it guilt-free again, and quota controls were loosened. But the stock was fished too aggressively and too soon, causing it to once again fall as fishing pressure crept too high, and the stock again headed below safe limits. This, in turn, led to a severe quota cut this year and all the accompanying economic losses. Other cod stocks around the UK—under pressure from environmental changes and being fished too aggressively—are also severely depleted. 

The UK government has promised to do better once outside the CFP, with “world-leading” fisheries management that would overcome past failings. The decisions it takes this year as it negotiates new frameworks—and 2021 management arrangements—will test this commitment. Although everyone agrees that fisheries need to be sustainable in the long term, political imperatives can take things in a different direction during the late-night talks each December at which the following year’s quotas are discussed and agreed to. In or out of the CFP, these highly politicised talks—among the UK, EU, and Norway—are likely to continue each autumn.

To achieve the stable fisheries management that would avoid the boom and bust we’ve seen in European fisheries, the UK should realise that stability goes hand in hand with caution. We cannot set short-term catch limits at the absolute maximum advised by scientists—or even above that level—year after year out of political expedience without seeing costly crashes in the medium term. Instead, the best way to overcome these risks is to agree to harvest strategies that include binding long-term science-based objectives for all fish populations—and stick to them.

The UK’s post-Brexit management system should be built upon such a long-term, precautionary, and ecosystem-based approach. To provide stable food supplies, jobs and livelihoods, the policy must maintain the functioning of complex marine food webs, avoiding wild swings—especially since productivity is already being affected by other threats, such as climate change. COVID-19 has shown us the damaging impact of a major demand shock on the fishing industry. The only way to mitigate future supply shocks is to prepare now—with forward thinking and cautious management.

Andrew Clayton is project director for The Pew Trusts’ ending overfishing in northwestern Europe campaign. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

David Wembridge: Citizen science in conservation

Between sessions at the UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP 26), the whistles and chatter of starlings should be played to remind delegates of the Danish dairy farmer, Peder Thellesen. Thellesen, who has no formal scientific training, may or may not be at the climate talks in person, but his work has been described as ‘a world-class example of the effects of climate change on the natural world.’ Between 1971 and 2015, Thellesen watched starlings on his farm, recording when they bred and the size of clutches and broods in 27 nesting boxes. He ringed a total of 12,450 birds (one in 16 of all the starlings ever ringed in Denmark) and found that they bred progressively later in the year, adding an extra day for every five years, as average seasonal temperatures increased. In a letter to the journal Nature, it was remarked: ‘As the language gap between scientists and the public widens, we find this work an inspiring reminder of the might of human curiosity.’

No less-a-feat than that of Thellesen’s patient, systematic observations of starlings was occurring at the same time in a suburban garden in Leicester. Jennifer Owen began hand-netting and recording butterflies with her children. A professional biologist, her curiosity was piqued by the biodiversity she saw around her and Malaise, pitfall and light traps were subsequently deployed. The inventory study that followed over the next 30 years, between 1972 and 2001, recorded 2,673 species of plants, fungi and animals. The 2,000 or so species of insect didn’t include any attempt to count or identify similar species in large groups, and when she did look at one such group in detail, she found seven species previously unrecorded in Britain and four, entirely new to science. When Owen published the interim findings in 1991 it was ‘the most complete account of the wildlife in a garden any in the world.’

‘Thellesen’s starlings’ and ‘Owen’s garden’ are exceptional, but they are examples of the individual curiosity that underlies citizen science: collaborative, crowd-sourced endeavours between professional and non-professional scientists. In the last two decades or so, citizen science has found its footing, and in environmental and biodiversity research it has flourished. In Britain, around 7.5 million volunteer-hours go into collecting biodiversity monitoring data every year. More than a million people have taken part in Open Air Laboratories (OPAL), a UK-wide citizen science initiative which began in 2007, carrying out soil, air, water, biodiversity, and climate surveys. More widely, half the 120 million records in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility are thought to be from non-professional sources. Often, citizen science is an alliance of individuals, NGOs and academic groups. Volunteers might capture information on smartphones, transcribe handwritten records, categorise images or collect samples, for a myriad of taxa and environmental data, and datasets can be built up that extend over decades, at a national scale.

The value of such long-term datasets in understanding how species respond to a changing world is paramount and they are central to informing environmental management and policy. But they don’t lend themselves to the typical span of university research funding. Citizen science does so more easily. As an example, UK-based wildlife charity People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES) began public-participation surveys in 1998, recording stag beetles and garden mammals. In 2003, it started the Living the Mammals survey, recording mammals in urban green spaces and this year the survey completes its 18th year. Over that time it has involved around 4,000 people, and its findings have informed reports such as the Office of National Statistics’ UK natural capital accounts and three State of Britain’s Hedgehogs reports. PTES also runs the National Dormouse - and Water Vole - Monitoring Programmes, set up in the 1990s and 2015 respectively, the Great Stag Hunt, recording stag beetles, starting in 1998, and surveys of traditional orchard, wood pasture and hedgerow habitats, which all rely on volunteers.

It’s recognised that citizen science can fill gaps in traditional sources of data, in areas such as the UNEP’s Sustainable Development Goals. Public-participation projects can harness enough collective curiosity and effort to enable studies that, in practice, couldn’t be achieved any other way. But its value is as much in its direct connection with individuals as it is in the science. If by ‘people’ we mean ‘everyone who isn’t a professional scientist’, involving people in science creates a loop: from people to science, to policy, to people.

If we are going to avoid the worst of the environmental crisis, we have to change how we live and the faster we do so, the better our prospects. If individuals invest in the science that drives policy, the next step - from policy to a change in individuals’ behaviour - becomes easier than if policy pushes in a linear fashion. Recording environmental quality in OPAL surveys or species’ abundance in PTES’ Living with Mammals survey connects people to their environment and fosters a sense of ownership and agency.

Through environmental citizen science, people become more aware of the green and blue space around them, of conservation concerns, and become more knowledgeable. Citizen science can benefit science, public understanding of policy, and people. It shows ‘the might of human curiosity.’

David Wembridge is the Mammal Surveys Coordinator at the People’s Trust for Endangered Species. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

David Wembridge: The language of conservation

The words we choose are important. Do we talk about ‘climate change’ or a ‘climate emergency’? Do we face a ‘loss of biodiversity’ or an ‘extinction crisis’ (or even an ‘insect apocalypse’)? It depends on our audience. So, as conservationists, who should we be talking to? Environmental change impacts us at a societal level—affecting human migrations, food security, the occurrence of zoonotic diseases, such as COVID-19—but within society, who effects change?

The Guardian newspaper has made an editorial decision to use ‘climate crisis’, together with ‘climate science denier’ rather than ‘sceptic’, but ‘crisis’ has certain connotations. Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford's Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics Department, interviewed for The Life Scientific, has made the point that while ‘crisis’ implies an urgency, it also suggests we should ‘wipe the slate clean’, that this isn’t about blame and it’s down to individuals to act, when perhaps we actually need governments and institutions to pick up the gauntlet.

But policy has traction in individuals and conservation is inseparable from people, from culture and societies and communities. More than most fields in science, conservation biology rubs up against political and popular movements, globalisation and technology.

Earthrise, the image of a gibbous Earth above the lunar horizon, taken on 24th December 1968 by Bill Anders on board Apollo 8, has been described as ‘the most influential environmental photograph ever taken’ and credited with beginning the environmental movement, although it followed Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the formation of WWF at the start of the decade. A single, emotive image that caught the zeitgeist. More recently, the final episode of Blue Planet II, broadcast in December 2017, produced a step change in awareness of marine plastic pollution. In April, the following year, the UK government announced it was considering a national ban on single-use plastic products in response to public support. Consumer research found that almost nine out of ten people who saw the programme said they had changed their behaviour with regard to plastic use. In Richard Thompson’s view, director of the Marine Institute at the University of Plymouth, ‘A few minutes of […] Blue Planet II has done more to raise awareness than the decades of underlying research could ever have done alone [and] perhaps the most important Blue Planet effect has not just been in bringing the message into the living room, but also into the company board room.’

For one reason or another, these images were a spark that ignited change. They resonated with people; individuals were the touchpaper.

There is a pressing need to halt the destruction of biodiversity. We need to act quickly, often without knowing the full facts and in places that are difficult to work in, in countries that are politically unstable or regions that cross geopolitical boundaries. At the same time, conservation must be evidence-led, identifying long-term changes in datasets spanning 10 or 20 years. Addressing the COP25 UN climate talks on 11th December 2019 in Madrid, Greta Thunberg put it: ‘We no longer have time to leave out the science.’ But science takes time.

And science is difficult to communicate. A reasoned, passive voice, uncertain and burdened with caveats, amid the noisy clamour of more natural voices and social media. Even governments may not listen. COVID-19 has made experts fashionable again, it is OK to turn to modelers and epidemiologists and public health experts for advice, but it wasn’t very long ago that the UK had enough of experts, according to Michael Gove. In the US, under Donald Trump’s administration, the Environmental Protection Agency has had all reference to science removed from its mission statement. ‘The language changes here are not nuanced—they have really important regulatory implications’ said Gretchen Gehrke of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative.

Science is not enough, even when it is the only thing we can use to reasonably make decisions. In the light of the Randomised Badger Culling Trial, culling badgers to control bovine TB doesn’t make sense; despite this, the politics of culling badgers in England continues, as they have for the last 10 years. In an open letter in 2012, wildlife management and disease experts urged the government to reconsider its policy of culling, among them, a staggering number of the most eminent biologists in the country. At the time, Lord (Robert) May, formerly the Chief Scientific Advisor of the UK Government, said ‘It is clear to me that the Government’s policy does not make sense,’ and five years later, Tim Coulson, Professor of Zoology at Oxford University, was no wiser, ‘It’s not clear to me why the government believes this as it is contrary to scientific understanding’. Like a transport policy declaring the Earth is flat.

As conservationists, we’re acutely aware of the need to speak up: we can advocate policy or avoid being ‘policy prescriptive’; we can engage with governments and businesses and individuals—but we cannot take it as read that we’ll be heard. We should always consider how our message could be more effective. In choosing our words, we should bear in mind those of Patrick Barkham: ‘Despite all our writing about ‘nature’, we still lack the language to bring its jeopardy—our jeopardy—to the forefront of our troubled minds’.

David Wembridge is the Mammal Surveys Coordinator at the People’s Trust for Endangered Species. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Alastair Driver: Rewilding in the ELM scheme: Keeping our eyes on the prize

When I decided to write this blog in early March, the world seemed a very different place. We had a new government settling in, the Agriculture and Environment Bills were due to sail through parliament and a new dawn was breaking on the future of farming and the natural environment. Then suddenly nature bit back – and bit back hard, reminding us of just how inextricably linked the health of the natural environment is to the health of the human race. The short-term economic impacts of COVID-19 will, as we know, be huge, but how will governments respond to the clarion call to work with nature, rather than against it, in the longer term?

As it happens, the originally chosen subject for this blog – the Environmental Land Management scheme – is in fact now an even more important part of the solution for us here in England – and indeed as a model for many countries around the world. The principle of public money for public goods is spot on. We absolutely should be rewarding land managers for managing their land in a way that benefits the natural environment and thus society as a whole, and we should be expecting our food production system to be properly valued by the marketplace and not needing to be propped up by additional public contribution.

However, given that the public consultation for the scheme has been paused temporarily until the virus crisis is over, we now need to ensure that we do not get drawn into a knee-jerk reaction around concerns over food security. It is clear from this crisis that it is not food production that needs fixing, rather that it is food distribution, and as we known for many years, food wastage. We may be wasting less food overall while the crisis prevails, but the normal time “developed world” wastage levels of around 40% of food produced, are simply unsustainable and unacceptable. So yes, the planned National Food Strategy will be more important than ever, but no, it absolutely must not compromise the principles of the ELM scheme. If we can embed such a scheme effectively, with core principles intact, then not only can we sustain a healthier environment, but we can also learn to treat food supply with much greater respect, and thus become far more efficient with the food we do produce.

So what of the scheme detail itself? Well as it stands, Tier 1 of the scheme does include several generic examples of farming activities - for example nutrient management, pest management and livestock management - which could easily be interpreted as “business as usual”. So it is essential that these activities are very clearly defined and very obviously targeted at genuinely environmentally beneficial activities and are not just rewarding farmers for avoiding bad practices.

Tier 2 focuses on the right kinds of activity, such as habitat creation and restoration, natural flood management interventions, species introductions and management etc, but needs a greater emphasis on connecting up both activities and landholdings to create a mosaic of areas where a range of productive enterprises of high nature value are encouraged. For example, low-impact mixed forestry, harvesting of natural products, and extensive meat production.

But it is Tier 3 which aims “to deliver land use change projects at a landscape scale to deliver environmental outcomes”, which has the greatest potential to provide significant “public goods” and thus help mitigate climate change and reverse biodiversity loss. However, it is missing one fundamental activity in the list of examples given, namely the key activity of “rewilding”. As it stands, Tier 3 would incentivise individual activities such as large scale tree planting, peat bog restoration or large scale wetland creation etc. But it would be much more effective to explicitly incentivise rewilding, taking a systems approach to the way land use is managed – or not. This involves supporting multiple interventions in the same large area over the same timeframe to kick-start the restoration of natural processes. There is not enough space here to describe the many reasons why this makes sense, not least those related to efficiency, but I know from my discussions with farmers and landowners all over the country, that the inclusion of the specific mention of rewilding in Tier 3, backed up by a clear definition and principles, will inspire a major new wave of landowner action to deliver multiple benefits at scale for the greater good of society as a whole. In doing so, we will provide a more resilient and diversified future for rural communities throughout the country and become a world leader in tackling the global climate emergency and biodiversity crisis through land and water management.

Professor Alastair Driver FCIEEM is the Director of Rewilding Britain, an organisation founded in 2015 that aims to promote the rewilding of Great Britain. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Peter Bridgewater: Fact and Fiction amidst the lockdown; perspectives on COVID19 and the wildlife trade

If you are reading this blog on your mobile phone with 5G reception you are likely to get COVID-19.  Ok, I have your attention, but that is perhaps the most outrageous claim among the many promulgated (widely, I might add) about the COVID-19 virus.  Much commentary has also suggested that, as with all the recent widely distributed infectious diseases, COVID-19 appears to have originated from the wild. Several recent studies have emphasised this origin for novel disease, but there are still many unanswered questions about the ways of transmission, and the role changes to intact wildlands have in enhancing transmission from wild animals to people.

Again, despite swirling conspiracy theories, and in the absence of firm proof at this stage, it seems the virus infected “patient zero” after contact with a wild animal at the so-called wet market at Huanan in Wuhan, China. Wait, I hear you ask, how is that from the wild?  Well, this market has all manner of wild-caught produce from marine and freshwater fish to many exotic wild animals, alongside domestically reared animals. 

Such a market is not a place for those with fragile stomachs, but while much is legally caught, or harvested from the wild, or perhaps captive bred, there exists the possibility for illegally caught wild animals to be sold.  Of course, if the source was illegally traded there is zero chance of this link now being discovered.  Once into the human population the initial source is somewhat irrelevant anyway, and not only has there been human-human transmission, it appears big cats at the Bronx Zoo were cross-infected from people.

Some early genetic work on the virus found connections with this same virus in bats.  Bats are well-known havens of viruses, especially the so-called microbats, but also the megabats (flying foxes or fruit bats). Even as I write I read results of  a study that detected six new Corona viruses in Bats in Myanmar.  Bats are used for “wild food”, often illegally.  But the collection and sale of bat guano (faeces) from bat caves as a very rich fertiliser presents another infection route.  Back to how the virus reached patient zero – a study reported in Science on the comparative genetic structure of COVID-19 viruses implicates pangolin as an intermediate between bat and human, although other animals yet untested could fit the bill.

And here is where wildlife trade becomes relevant.  Pangolin are probably the most widely illegally traded animals.  While the meat is a prized delicacy in Asia, the scales are highly regarded in traditional medicines.  Up to now trade in pangolin has been regarded as a conservation issue, but COVID-19 suggests it could be a human health issue too.  At the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in Johannesburg in 2016, delegates applauded as all eight pangolin species were “up-listed” to be among the most endangered species, that should not be traded.  And yet, here we are… 

Whether bat, pangolin, both, or even another vector entirely, illegal trade is clearly a major route to poor human health.  Last week a letter was sent to the World Health Organization, signed by 200 organisations dealing with animal welfare and conservation demanding an end to all wildlife trade.  There are important complications to all this – those people, largely rural poor and indigenous, who use wild-caught meat for protein.

The Wildlife Conservation Society issued a slightly more moderate policy recommending ending all (not simply illegal)  commercial trade in wildlife for human consumption, and recognising that there may be a need to work with Indigenous peoples to ensure their cultural and nutritional needs are properly respected in such decisions. Such “big-bang” polices appear superficially attractive yet there are all sorts of complications, which paradoxically may encourage yet more illegal trade! 

China’s response has already been that it will thoroughly ban the illegal trading of wildlife – a welcome and measured response.  On April 8, BBC news illustrated a news item on COVID-19 and trade with a photograph showing elephant tusks – using a familiar, charismatic, heart-tugging meme.  Wildlife trade that is illegal must be tackled seriously, but we have to stop featuring iconic species which are not implicated in disease spread. 

April 7 was ironically World Health Day, and the Acting Executive Secretary for the CBD in a message said “The One Health approach, which recognises the intrinsic connection between human health, animal health and the health and resilience of nature, can help guide us towards an effective post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework and help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.” 

We can’t argue with that, but lets try to keep a clear head on the issues of disease from the wild, seek solutions that stop illegal trade yet don’t punish rural poor and indigenous peoples of the world, but allow us all to be more prepared in future – for COVID-19 will not be the last.  We are but animals, after all.

Peter Bridgewater is a Senior Fellow at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, The Netherlands,  and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, Australia. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Suzanne Burgess: B-Lines: Connecting habitat for pollinators

Imagine trying to travel around Britain without our road and rail network. Or imagine if nine out of every ten miles of road just didn’t exist – life would be extremely difficult! Well for much of our wildlife this is the reality. Many animals and plants have become confined to tiny fragments of habitat and for many, they are unable to move across the countryside as our climate and landscape rapidly changes.

There are over 4,000 species of native bees, butterflies, hoverflies and other pollinating insects in the UK. It is the diversity of insect pollinators that is important. Insects are responsible for pollinating at least 70% of our crops and 90% of wild plants - worth approximately £690 million to the UK economy each year.

Recent research highlights that the abundance of our pollinators is in drastic decline and several species are now threatened with extinction in the UK. The major factor contributing to pollinator declines is the substantial reduction in the area and connectivity of wildflower-rich grassland. Habitat loss and subsequent habitat fragmentation prevents insect pollinators from moving and mixing across our landscape which can lead to isolation and local extinctions.

Buglife is working to address pollinator declines through our B-Lines initiative. B-Lines are continuous routes that weave across the countryside connecting the best sites for pollinators. Through B-Lines we are working with others to restore and create large areas of wildflower-rich habitat within a prioritised and connected network. This approach is helping to conserve and enhance existing insect pollinator populations, while also making it easier for these pollinators and other wildlife to move freely around our countryside. B-Lines have been identified across most of the UK with the remainder to be completed by the end of 2020.

Scotland’s first B-Lines the John Muir Pollinator Way

In Scotland, the very first B-Line was identified along the John Muir Way (JMW) in 2015, known as the John Muir Pollinator Way. The JMW is a 134-mile walking and cycling route that passes through nine local authorities from Dunbar in East Lothian to Helensburgh in Argyll & Bute. Using this long-distance route as a large-scale pollinator network was a new approach for the project. It offered huge opportunities to deliver environmental objectives alongside recreational benefits.

An initial mapping exercise identified opportunities for habitat creation and enhancement along the entire route of the JMW, including on school grounds, golf courses, public parks, sites with nature conservation designations including Local Nature Reserves and more.  

The first site along the route identified for habitat creation works was selected in Bo’ness in Falkirk through a partnership project with the council. Through this project over one hectare of amenity grassland was transformed into a colourful meadow. The area was sown with a diverse mix of both native wildflowers and grasses to provide forage for pollinators throughout the season, as well as food and nesting habitat for other invertebrates and wildlife. Locals and visitors using the JMW have also benefitted through the addition of colour to the area. 

Since this meadow, further funding has been received to enhance sites for pollinators along the entire route of the JMW. A total of 65 sites have been created and enhanced (so far) with more sites due to benefit along the route in 2020.

Through habitat creation works, Buglife are engaging with communities to raise awareness of the plight of our pollinators, how B-Lines are benefitting them and what they can do in their local area. The creation of flower rich areas for pollinators in urban areas is having a positive impact on the health and well-being of people and communities. 

As well as enhancing habitat for pollinators along the JMW we are also working with partners and communities to enhance habitat along B-Lines in South Lanarkshire, West Lothian and North Ayrshire and have run successful meadow creation projects in Fife and Glasgow. The sites we work on are all on public land and it’s important for people and wildlife that the areas are managed appropriately to ensure that plant species diversity is maintained for the long-term benefit of wildlife.

 With the rest of the Scotland B-Lines map due to be completed shortly, who knows where else we will go to enhance and better connect habitat for pollinators. The best thing about B-Lines is that anyone can get involved!

Suzanne Burgess is the Manager of Buglife Scotland. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Peter Bridgewater: Better governance for nature: transforming society for a better world

In what is being called a biodiversity super year the first week of March saw representatives from about 120 nations party to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) meet in FAO headquarters, Rome, to continue discussions begun late last year on constructing a new Global Framework for Nature.  The meeting had to be moved from Kunming, China because of the situation with COVID-19.  The change in location for that meeting is, of course, ironic, since the virus almost certainly crossed to humans through infection from wild species.  Now more than ever, human health and wildlife health are inextricably intertwined and a clear reason why we need a better framework for interacting with the rest of nature.

Earlier, in January, the World Economic Forum gathered in Davos, Switzerland, and had before it the Forum’s annual Global Risks Report. Over the past decade, most of the environmental risks identified for businesses have been climate related, and business and government could be forgiven for thinking climate is the environmental issue. But in 2019, and even more in 2020, the Global Risks Report also identified a rapidly rising risk from biodiversity loss. In part, this follows the release in April 2019 by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem services (IPBES) of a global assessment on biodiversity and ecosystem services. The major headlines trumpeting the report’s release, even in the prestigious Journals Science and Nature, read “1 million species heading for extinction”, leaving an impression of crisis.

Like so many headline statements, the “1 million species to go extinct” may be accurate, but, equally, may be way off.  The result of this focus on extinction in the IPBES Assessment also means less attention has been given to other areas of concern - or hope. For example, in response to human activities many organisms are showing rapid biological evolution.  Novel ecosystems, where species are co-occurring in historically unknown combinations, are emerging and playing important roles in delivering services from ecosystems and enabling nature conservation.  While these novel ecosystems do not excuse the need to address biodiversity loss, they emphasise that biodiversity change is a more important term and deserves consideration in informed decision making.

The IPBES Assessment illustrated plausible futures for biodiversity and ecosystem services through a range of policy scenarios. Most scenarios showed a bleak picture – but those that included transformative change in the policy mix showed static or improving states of nature. The question is: just what is this transformative change? How do we develop and implement it to avoid poor policies that lead to continued biodiversity loss and environmental degradation? What is the correct mechanism to facilitate finding evidenced-based and agreeable compromise across conflicting sectorial interests? Certainly no easy task, but something that government, business and civil society must collectively deliver on. Perhaps Gandhi’s famous words that “we must be the change we want to see happen in the world” perfectly characterises transformative change.

The IPBES Assessment emphasises that to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals, understanding the links and feedbacks between climate change and biodiversity must be front and centre of thinking and action by all nations. It has been clear for some time that climate change and biodiversity change are inextricably linked – but governments, NGOs and intergovernmental process still act as though they were in separate silos.  Yet, the relationship between climate and biodiversity is still poorly developed, with some proposed mitigation measures to achieve the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change likely to have significant negative impacts on biodiversity. The rash of tree planting schemes being announced globally by governments and NGOs is one example, as, unless properly thought through, this can lead to worse, not improved, results for conservation with little impact on climate.

On the 13th of February the University of Portsmouth launched a new research and training Centre for Blue Governance, covering seas and freshwaters.  This nascent Centre, and doubtless others, can help in facilitating innovative governance approaches, so there is coherence in law, policies and action on biodiversity and ecosystem services.  Integrated governance across land and seascapes means not just legal frameworks, but a mix of policies, legal instruments and critical implementation activities combining to ensure positive trajectories for nature conservation, ecological restoration, sustainable use of biodiversity, sustainable forest management and planning for natural and engineered infrastructure. 

The bottom line is, whether you are in government, business or are an active NGO, understanding the potential effects of your activities – direct or indirect – on the state of nature should be part of your daily routine.  And if we have global and national governance frameworks that support and amplify individual actions, then 2020 can be the year for nature, and the 2020s can be the decade of nature.

Peter Bridgewater is a Senior Fellow at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, The Netherlands,  and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, Australia. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Roxane Andersen: The carbon beneath our feet - North Scotland's Flow Country

When glaciers retreated after the last ice age, the persistent cool and wet Scottish weather created the perfect conditions for a very special place to form – so special that it has been put forward as a potential UNESCO World Heritage Site.

As the sun breaks through the clouds, a warm glow illuminates the undulating land and lifts the mist. The dull, brown colour turns golden for an instant, and splashes of vivid greens, burnt orange and crimson red are revealed. The surfaces of dozens of scattered dark-bottomed pools shimmers softly.

A breeze – or a gale – chases away the small, blood-thirsty midges that otherwise hang about. The landscape seems to go on as far as the eye can see under big, wide skies. The burns, streams and rivers swell, and carry the water all the way from the peatlands to the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. We are in the North of Scotland, and this is the Flow Country.

But other than this wild, raw beauty, why is it so special?

In the Flow Country, Sphagnum mosses, along with cotton grass and shrubs have grown slowly for thousands of years, but have decayed even slower. Over time, this has allowed peat – the partially decomposed remains of plants – to accumulate. In the Flow Country, peat has cloaked 4000 km2 and in places, to depths of more than 6.5 meters, making it the largest peatland of its kind in Europe and possibly the world. The range of conditions and landforms found between the mountains in the west of Sutherland and the rugged Caithness coast has enabled distinct forms of peatland to develop, each with unique surface patterns and highly specialised vegetation communities adapted to the local climate. As well as plants, assemblages of micro-organisms, invertebrates, birds and mammals also depend on the Flow Country to survive and are not replicated anywhere else on the planet.

In this peat, the Flow Country also holds an estimated 400 Mt of Carbon – this nearly twice as much as in all the woodlands and forests of Great Britain. Yet it is but a small fraction of the estimated 600 Gt of carbon stored in all the peatlands of the world - according to the United Nations Environment Programme, that’s more than twice as much carbon as the world’s forests hold. And peatlands do that despite occupying only 3% of the Earth’s land area, making them second only the Oceans in their climate-cooling capacity over millennial scales.

But this carbon, and the highly specialised species assemblages that have enabled peatland to persist for millennia, are under threat. Research has shown that global degradation of peatlands, mostly through land-use conversion for agriculture and forestry, has already turned our most efficient terrestrial carbon sink into a net source of CO2  to the atmosphere. That’s because disturbances, and particularly drainage, disrupt the delicate imbalance that stops organic matter from accumulating slowly. Once exposed to oxygen, the carbon held in the peat is therefore returned to the atmosphere at a much faster pace, fuelling global climate change. 

Much like the rest of the world’s peatlands, the Flow Country bear the imprints of centuries of human activities, from cutting to grazing to burning. In the 1980s, controversial afforestation took place over 67,000 ha in the Flow Country fuelled by a government led tax-intensive scheme, driven by timber shortage after the Second World War. Following the recognition of the conservation value of the Flow Country and changes in legislation removing the subsidies, the first attempts to reverse those changes and restore the Flow Country started more than 25 years ago, led by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Peatland restoration initiatives started in many other countries around the same time, and today, peatland restoration is widely recognised as an essential element of a global strategy to mitigate climate change and reduce emissions.

Scotland currently has ambitious restoration targets and leads the way with their “Peatland Action” programme, funded by the Scottish Government and managed by the statutory agency Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH). Since 2012, this programme has added to other restoration initiatives and funding support (for example from EU LIFE) to deliver 50,000 ha of restoration management. Having declared a climate emergency in 2019, the government has now announced that a further £250M will continue to fund peatland restoration activities over the next ten years, in what the UN has declared to be the “Decade of Ecosystem Restoration”. 

Underpinning these restoration activities, a rich and varied community of researchers continuously work to deepen our understanding of how peatlands are responding to the compounded threats of land use and climate change, as well as restoration. NGOs like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Plantlife, government agencies like SNH and Forest and Land Scotland, the James Hutton Institute, the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, several of the UK’s Universities and even landowners and managers have joined forces to take the science, and the practice of peatland restoration further. The alignment of the science, the practice and the governance towards a common purpose is yet another thing that makes the Flow Country such a special place.

So why should the Flow Country be celebrated, and why should we care, more generally about peatlands? Perhaps because for so long, the astonishing contribution they can make to global climate and water regulation, and to biodiversity, has been overlooked and underappreciated.

Perhaps because time is running out to not care about the carbon beneath our feet.

Dr Roxane Andersen is the Chair of the National Peatland Research and Monitoring Group. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Will Parsons: Solving the climate crisis means solving the nature crisis – by creating a Nature Recovery Network

We are facing two inextricably linked crises: the climate emergency and the massive, ongoing loss of nature. We cannot solve one without addressing the other. The climate emergency is a leading driver of biodiversity declines, while the loss of wildlife and habitats also leaves us ill-equipped to reduce our emissions and adapt to change. By joining up existing habitats and creating new ones, we can reverse these declines and empower nature to be our greatest ally in the fight against climate change.

The power of trees and woodlands to pull carbon dioxide from the air is well known; but they are only part of the picture. Wetlands, grasslands, peatlands, saltmarshes, farmland, seagrass beds, life in our seas and soils are all hugely important for absorbing carbon. These vital habitats and ecosystems also provide the natural richness we all depend upon, by cleaning our air and water, reducing flooding and coastal erosion, supporting pollinators, making us happier and healthier, and providing the nutrients for growing our food – all of which makes us more resilient in the face of the climate emergency.

But nature in the UK is heavily depleted. The 2019 State of Nature report found 41% of species have declined since 1970 and one in seven are at risk of extinction, with the loss, degradation and fragmentation of habitats a leading cause of this decline. These losses disrupt the natural systems which regulate our climate and mean wildlife is far less able to move, reproduce and adapt.

For instance, the UK’s peatlands contain 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon, but 80% of them are damaged and may be releasing up to 23 million tonnes of CO2 a year, more than is absorbed by our woodlands. Wetlands can store a whopping 1.9 tonnes of carbon per acre annually, but the UK continues to lose these to development and farming, and they have undergone massive historic decline – one million hectares were drained in the 1970s alone.

Saltmarshes have truly heroic powers to absorb carbon at a rate faster than peatlands or woodlands and store it for thousands of years; but we are losing around 100 hectares each year to development and rising sea levels, releasing stored carbon. The conversion of grasslands to arable food production also releases soil carbon – between 1990 and 2006, an estimated 14 million tons of CO2 were released by grasslands being put to the plough.

Clearly, recovering nature should be our priority in fighting climate change. To do this, we can’t simply stick to conserving and maintaining existing protected sites. This approach has evidently failed. We need a coordinated, effective response to the nature crisis that restores and reconnects habitats – a Nature Recovery Network.

A Nature Recovery Network on land will involve mapping our landscape to identify important areas for nature and where habitats and wildlife corridors can be created to join these up. This will provide a national framework, helping join up separate efforts to conserve and recover nature so that they make a meaningful contribution to nature’s recovery at a national scale. It will also help identify and protect natural carbon stores – 66% of carbon in nature-rich areas lies outside protected sites.

It will ensure greater value for public and private investment, allowing net gain payments and the new Environmental Land Management scheme to be deployed in a way which will more effectively create and reconnect natural places. It will also help coordinate planning so that development doesn’t help destroy our natural life-support system. And by mapping where habitat can be created and joined up, it will help us meet crucial biodiversity targets and provide a clear yardstick by which to measure our success.

On sea, we need an ecologically coherent network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and Highly Protected Marine Areas (HPMAs) that are properly managed to recover life in our waters. Globally, oceans absorb up to 35% of all CO2 emissions. But in the UK, our marine environment is in crisis and ecosystems which store huge amounts of carbon are threatened.  One example is seagrass beds, which can sequester up to 2.1 tonnes of carbon per hectare annually; UK seagrass beds have declined by nearly 50% in the past 35 years.

By properly protecting and creating more habitat on land and at sea, we can increase the potential for healthy ecosystems to lock up carbon. Reconnecting and restoring nature will also ensure that the natural systems which sustain us are more resilient and better able to adapt to climate change.

The possibilities are enormous: globally, natural solutions to climate change could provide an estimated 37% of cost effective CO2 mitigation needed to limit warming to 2°C. By comparison, ocean-based renewable energy could provide up to 12% of mitigation. The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth – a shocking fact, but clearly there is not only a great need, but huge potential for restoration through a Nature Recovery Network.  

Will Parsons, The Wildlife Trusts. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Rebecca Pullinger: The value of green belts

Green Belts cover one tenth of England and are an official planning designation to prevent urban sprawl. But, given that the Green Belt is the countryside next door to 30 million people in some of our largest towns and cities, they are also so much more than this. They provide a unique opportunity to enhance and restore natural spaces that are accessible to millions of people, offering not just benefits for wildlife, but for the health and well-being of us all. 

The Green Belt also offers a vital resource in the mitigation of, and adaptation to, the climate emergency, such as through wetland creation and woodland planting. The provision of these and other natural capital offer excellent value for money in Green Belt due to its close proximity to people, as well as its long-term designation. Improving how we manage agricultural land in the Green Belt could also have major benefits to creating sustainable food networks and supporting local farmers.

While not primarily designated for nature, Green Belts offer good opportunities for conservation. Important wildlife habitats most in need of conservation, known as ‘Priority Habitats’, already cover 13% of all Green Belt land, or approximately 207,000 ha. Almost a fifth of all the deciduous woodland in England, which supports some of our most iconic and much-loved species, can be found in Green Belts. 

Enhancing and restoring habitats in the Green Belt is crucial if we are to create landscapes that are better for nature. Focused investment and long-term, collaborative management are needed to create more, better and more-joined up wildlife habitat and spaces for people. This way, Green Belts could play a vital role in landscape-scale conservation initiatives such as Nature Recovery Networks.  

Green Belts also offer people vital and easy access to nature, and 13% of Green Belt land is given over to recreational areas. Almost half of all the Country Parks in England are found in Green Belts, along with a third of all Local Nature Reserves. Green Belts also have a high proportion of England’s Public Rights of Way as well as one third of Community Forests. While some of it may be scruffy and currently have little value to people, much of this space is used and loved.

And the wider public value the Green Belt too. In a recent survey commissioned by CPRE, the countryside charity, 60% of people said they would be more likely to vote for a political party that wants to protect and enhance the countryside, including Green Belts. 

Green Belts also contain a large proportion of our agricultural land, and farmers and land-owners that manage this are stewards of our countryside. We must support them to make these spaces better for nature and more accessible to people through Environmental Land Management Systems that reward the delivery of public goods. This will contribute to nature conservation and help to create sustainable, thriving communities in and around our Green Belts. 

In some areas of our Green Belts, local authorities, communities and environmental charities have already come together to deliver conservation that has provided major benefits to people and nature. For instance, the Mersey Forest, half of which is in the Green Belt around Liverpool, Warrington, Chester, Formby and Northwich, is managed by a partnership of seven local authorities along with Natural England, the Forestry Commission, the Environment Agency and the local Community Forest Trust. One site within the forest was transformed from derelict industrial wasteland into a thriving woodland that is rich in wildlife and local heritage, and nine sites have been linked to provide 28 km of off-road walking, cycling and horse-riding. 

So one thing is clear - more must be done to realise the full benefits of our Green Belts. We need to prioritise natural capital investment in these areas, where social and economic returns are high and environmental gains can be maximised. We must also develop and implement long-term, collaborative management plans that put nature and people to the fore; and we must promote Green Belts so they are more accessible, more sustainable, and more beneficial, for us all. 

Rebecca Pullinger is the Land Use Campaigns and Policy Officer at CPRE. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Olly Feaver: Is lab-grown meat the solution to our biodiversity crisis?

We hear a lot about the damage that farming, and in particular emissions from ruminants are doing to the environment. However, what is often less discussed is the damage that livestock farming does to biodiversity. A report by WWF shows that the most damaging impacts from livestock production are on water quality, soil quality and biodiversity loss, caused particularly by the intensive crop production for animal feed and the release of nitrogen and phosphorous pollutants. In fact, 60% of global biodiversity loss can be attributed to livestock farming. 

The UK is at the forefront of this problem, with a meat-reliant diet and economy to the extent that 85% of agricultural land is used for livestock farming (including feedstock), compared with 66% of agricultural land across the EU. 

The solution?

The problem is clear: rearing livestock and feedstock for animal produce is damaging the environment and harming biodiversity. A significant number of people are already opting for plant-based diets, including high profile figures such as the Chief Executive of Greggs. But rather than attempting to influence the behaviour and the hearts and minds of the people through encouraging meat-free diets, it would perhaps be easier to change the technology and the product. 

And there is a future technology waiting to be deployed, where consumers would not be denied a dietary choice: it is time for the Government to get behind research and development of in-vitro, or lab-grown meat.

In-vitro meat (commonly referred to as lab-grown, cultured, or clean meat) is a technique of cellular agriculture, where muscle cells are grown in a nutrient solution, and developed into fibres. This uses origin cells from any animal, and characteristics of the meat can be determined by adjusting the growing conditions. Public appetite for the practice is growing, with a dedicated restaurant in New York already taking bookings for their opening in several years. 

The current technology still requires living animals as the source of the nutrients and stem cells necessary to sustain the cellular growth, but it is predicted that if everyone were to switch to lab meat, the planet could one day go from 1.5 billion cattle to a few thousand.

Challenges

There would however be a whole host of challenges to overcome to make this viable, sustainable, and achieve the goals of reducing environmental and ecological degradation currently caused by livestock farming. 

The most obvious challenge would be the necessity for a broad national and international conversation, as well as extensive education around the concept of meat, food production, and lab meat. This would represent the country’s most significant dietary shift to date, and there would need to be a consensus and understanding of the product, the process, the implications and reasons for its existence, and most importantly the cultural and ethical side of the debate. What is produced? Why should people buy into the concept? Should non-meat eaters consume it? Can it really be called meat? These are all questions that would need to be considered, and government will inevitably need to develop and oversee a robust regulatory framework.

One of the most difficult aspects to realising the environmental benefits of lab-grown meat is around the energy inputs. The process itself is relatively energy intensive. Opponents to the technology argue that whilst the original methane emissions from ruminants are significantly worse than CO2, methane has an atmospheric lifetime of only around a decade. In comparison CO2 has a lesser global warming potential (GWP), but persists in the atmosphere for much longer, continuing to enhance the greenhouse effect for over a century. 

In order to avoid replacing one greenhouse gas in the atmosphere with another, it will be key to ensure that energy inputs are produced from renewable and sustainable sources, and continue to enhance the technology to reduce energy consumption.

Another is the current costs and investment required. The Dutch company Mosa Meat, produced their first beef burger at a reported cost of $250,000, and state that their current process would amount to $9/burger at scale.  As with many other promising environmental technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCUS), we cannot afford to wait for the prices of the technology to come down. Instead research, refinement and deployment should begin now, and in doing so will bring down costs later.

Outcome

Despite a significant number of challenges, in-vitro meat provides potential for the UK to embrace and become global leaders in a new technology, and revolutionise the relationship between meat and the environment. This could offer the opportunity for swathes of agricultural land to be freed up, allowing for more sustainable arable farming with a public-good based subsidy system, and a chance for biodiversity to thrive whilst consumers can continue to eat meat.

Olly Feaver is a Researcher at Policy Connect and has written this in a personal capacity. The views expressed here are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Kierra Box: The Environment Bill is ambitious, but must go further to turn it from holey dinghy into flagship legislation

2019 has been a bumper year of promises when it comes to protecting our environment. This week’s Environment Bill offered the definitive opportunity to translate these promises into a legal guarantee – enforced by a world-leading watchdog - to make sure government, now and in the future, upholds standards we can be proud of. But for now, that chance has been missed. 

The big hole in this Bill is a legal commitment that environmental protections won’t be weakened – a non-regression clause. Government has repeatedly promised that Brexit will not lead to backsliding. If these promises were made with integrity, there should be no opposition to including this guarantee within the bill. In fact, while such a commitment couldn’t bind future governments, it could force them to explain, in Parliament, what value they see in taking actions that threaten our environment and the lives and livelihoods that depend upon it. It would set a direction of travel and provide a long-lasting legacy.  

To protect that legacy, we need a fierce guardian. A custodian of our environmental laws, regulations and commitments, able to ensure they’re applied correctly, are not ignored or overridden, and that their efficacy is measured. Such a guardian must have the powers, funding and impartiality to make sure that the rules are followed by all public authorities. This government’s 25 Year Environment Plan cannot hope to achieve the outcomes it seeks without an effective watchdog. 

This means we’ll need to see some major improvements to the commitments that did make it into the Bill published last Tuesday. 

Building on the existing Bill

First up, the proposed Office of Environmental Protection now has a sensible remit, covering the full gamut of environmental protections from nature to climate protection. It is set an extensive role, providing advice, review and enforcement of environmental law. Yet, this Bill lames it. It restricts the watchdog’s impact to issuing notices, reviewing explanations, apologies or obfuscations given in response to wrongdoing, and seeking only the most limited legal recourse. The EU courts were fully independent, able to carry out objective reviews, launch legal action and issue fines – surely the UK can equal, if not improve upon this model?   

Secondly, original proposals offered the welcome prospect of an ambitious list of binding targets aimed at driving real improvement - potentially including cutting carbon emissions, curbing our plastic addiction, investing in tree planting, and restoring natural areas. But the bill laid before parliament guarantees only four long term targets - on waste, biodiversity, water and air. It is riddled with loopholes allowing even these to be delayed, sidestepped or watered down - including an opportunity for government to abandon measures with a high economic cost or to explain failures in Parliament with no requirement to remedy them. A serious repair job will be needed to endow these aspirations with the heft and gravity required to shape future action.

And thirdly, to hit net zero and restore nature, all public bodies will need to pay more attention to the environment than ever before. That means we need to ensure that outside of the EU we apply the environmental principles which have helped deliver continued environmental improvement for the last 4 decades ambitiously, across all levels of government.  

There are also some serious flaws with the way the principles have been included in the new bill. The Withdrawal Act 2018 (in a clause championed by Zac Goldsmith as a backbencher) required that nine established environmental rights and principles, with their origins in international treaties we have signed, be given a legal basis in the draft Bill – and they were, when it was published last year. But the version of the Bill now laid before Parliament has completely omitted three of them: public access to information about the environment, the ability to participate in decision making about environmental matters, and the right of people to access environmental justice. 

This omission is a serious error that must  immediately be rectified as the Bill passes through Parliament. People can’t be shut out of opportunities to understand or challenge environmental policy. And there is no rationale for simultaneously setting up an Office of Environmental Protection to help communities hold public agencies to account while undermining the legislative basis for such action. 

It’s also worth considering this bill in the context of the UK’s exit from the EU. The proposed deal currently fails to extend the date at which the transition period ends, in effect cutting it from almost two years to just over one year. It simply is not feasible for an environmental watchdog to be up and running in 14 months when the bill establishing it has only just begun passage through Parliament. A proper transition is the sensible way to deliver Brexit. To get the most out of a future Environment Act, we need to extend the transition until all needed environmental protections are up and running. 

This year the UK became the first country to declare a climate emergency. It is time to act on that emergency. It seems unlikely that we’ll see an Environment Act this side of an election, but we need it fast. Let’s hope that MPs on all sides of the chamber take the chance to shape it into the great environmental legacy it could be and make this holey dinghy into flagship legislation.

Kierra Box leads on the Brexit campaign at Friends of the Earth. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Bright Blue.

Philip Box: All things built and beautiful: The role of buildings in saving nature

Ongoing pressure for new housing and development represents a significant challenge for nature conservation. Yet this need not be a binary issue. The need to conserve nature is also a vital opportunity to deliver better places. Here, the work of the government-initiated Building Better Building Beautiful Commission represents an important step, encouraging a greater focus on quality whilst expressly highlighting the role of nature.

In order to stand the test of time, and secure community support, truly sustainable places will need to be beautiful. As nature represents a central component of beauty in the built environment, sustainability and beauty should not be perceived as conflicting. Instead, they should be seen as vital partners. 

Concrete jungles

As the recent State of Nature 2019 report illustrates, both urbanisation and new development can contribute to species decline, through the removal and fragmentation of habitats. Indeed over 22,000 hectares of UK green space, an area twice the size of Liverpool, were converted into artificial surfaces, most of which was for housing, between 2006 and 2012. 

The policy of biodiversity net gain, introduced in the Environment Bill, aims to improve matters. New developments will be required to replace any lost biodiversity, and provide an additional 10% on top. In addition, new Local Nature Recovery Partnerships are intended to enable a strategic approach, identifying key priorities with habitat maps. The hope is that these will then enable the creation of integrated nature recovery networks, and habitat corridors. 

But we need to go further. Net gain will have a two-year transition period, and crucially does not cover existing buildings. There are also practical questions over how net gains will be maintained over the long term. This, is where beauty comes in. 

Better, Greener, Faster 

Considering ‘beauty’ in the built environment helps us recognise how building for nature can also significantly enhance people’s lives. Nature’s place in beauty is underscored by a long cultural history and deep significance in the UK, from Wordsworth to Turner. Its value in ‘good design’ more broadly is reflected in its proven value for our mental health. Research has shown that more species-rich, natural places are significantly better for our mental health and wellbeing than bland, ‘greenwashed’ titbits.  

Here, the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission (BBBBC) has been vital in promoting a focus on beautiful design, and the role of nature, in new development. Following our response, we were very pleased to see the role of nature in beauty thoroughly acknowledged in the interim report. Indeed, the value of biodiversity-enhancing green infrastructure in good placemaking was subsequently echoed in the Government’s own National Design Guide, and will hopefully be reinforced further in the upcoming National Model Design Code.  

Yet, this should be just the start of a wider conversation. For a long time, conservation charities have highlighted how the rise of artificial grass and paving-over of front gardens have both had an adverse impact on wildlife and our resilience to the impacts of climate change (notably flooding). As such, if we are to truly address the biodiversity crisis in this country, we must look beyond new development. 

To this end, UKGBC is creating a ‘sector ambition’ for businesses across the construction and property sector. Built around targets for net environmental gain and nature-based climate resilience, proposals put to consultation crucially covered both new and existing buildings. 

Here, the BBBBC’s work could usefully live on beyond the release of the final report. Its brief, but welcome, focus on regenerative design, and wider recommendations, would provide a valuable basis for a broader conversation about the quality of our existing towns and cities. 

What next?

As DEFRA looks set to explore wider ‘environmental net gain’, delivering environmental improvements beyond just biodiversity, beauty should remain a valuable component. Crucially, the conversation should not just be about delivering good quality new development, but how we improve the quality of places that already exist. 

The pursuit of beauty in the built environment stands out as a real potential ‘win-win’. It’s an idea that, if embraced properly, could deliver places that benefit both people and nature. Whatever the vicissitudes of politics to come, it is vital that the beauty, and quality of our built environment more generally, remain on the agenda.

Philip Box is a Project and Policy Coordinator at the UK Green Building Council. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Griffin Carpenter: The accidental privatisation of fishing quota has hurt coastal communities: With a new Fisheries Bill we can change this

Ever since the Brexit referendum we’ve heard a lot about ‘our fish’. No one truly owns the fish in the sea – fish eggs and fast swimmers prevent ear tags from working here – but for the purposes of management, fish are fundamentally a public resource owned by all of us. In the UK, neglect over marine resources has seen them accidentally privatised, but there is now an opportunity to change this.

Commercial fisheries in the UK are predominantly managed through quota limits – a cap on the amount of fish that can be harvested in a given year. These quota limits are agreed annually by EU fishing ministers, distributed to Member States in fixed shares, and then distributed by Member States to their fishing fleet according to national legislation. Brexit does not change this – the UK has always had this power over what happens with fishing quota.

Whether the UK has used this power is another story. The UK governments (fishing is a devolved matter) originally allocated quota based on historical catch records in the 1980s (a process that rewarded those overfishing the most and penalised the small-scale fleet which were not required to keep catch records at the time). Since this point these quota allocations became ‘fixed’ in the 1990s and continue today as ‘fixed quota allocations’ (FQAs).

UK fishing quota had, unbeknownst to the public, become accidentally privatised: as a court ruled in 2012 a ​“legitimate expectation” around FQAs had formed, despite this expectation being ​“built very much of sand” as ​“no one can own the fish of the sea”. With an estimated value of £1.1 billion, researchers cite this ownership claim as the largest ​“squatting claim” in UK history. 

This transfer from public control into private hands is not just shocking for its value, but also for the significance for marine resources and the little scrutiny it has received. Successive governments have promised to do more for small fishing communities, but without quota reallocation the trend to centralise in large ports will continue. There are calls to allocate FQAs based on social and environmental criteria, but again, without reallocation, there is no opportunity for this. 

Although managing fishing quota has always been up to UK governments, the fact that a UK Fisheries Bill is coming – we assume at some point – gives an opportunity to change policy and reclaim fishing quota as a public resource and allocate it for public good.

To much disappointment, the draft Fisheries Bill has not seized the opportunity and instead kept the FQAs in place. The government is now only consulting on what it terms ‘new quota’ from Brexit. This is problematic as the ‘new’ quota does not actually exist as there has been no Brexit and no agreement with the EU on a fair way to share the many species moving between UK and EU waters. If this quota does arrive, most of it will not be for the ‘right’ species for the small-scale fleet to benefit. The concept of new quota is misleading anyway as recovering fish populations increase the tonnage of quota from one year to the next, so there is more quota going around. This provides the opportunity to change the quota percentages (i.e. the FQAs) without anyone being worse off. But most importantly, if not now – when we are thinking about how our fishing industry should work after Brexit – then when? 

The government’s timid approach which disadvantages the majority of stakeholders is likely explained by the powerful minority: the large-scale quota holders. The National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations (NFFO) wrote a briefing in defence of the security provided by FQAs to ward off any changes to the system and implicitly to their existing FQA holdings. 

Next week fishers, policymakers, and interest groups will be meeting to plan the ‘future of the inshore fisheries’.  This is a chance to consider proposals that would work for the whole industry and wider society. Fixed quota allocations could continue for the majority of allocations, but with a time limit of, for example, 10 years. Fishers would have security for the entire period of validity and all legal ambiguity would cease. This would start with a notice period. 

There would also be a one-off reallocation (potentially combined with any additional quota received) to the small-scale fleet to correct for historical injustices. Further, there could be two quota reserves: one for new entrants and one for an incentive-based allocation based on social and environmental criteria. 

This system would protect the security the current FQA system (and individual quota systems used elsewhere) while reforming the system enough to deliver low-impact fishing, economic viability, thriving coastal community, and the other diverse objectives we have. Whatever objective, the ability to pursue it depends on reclaiming ‘our fish’ in the fullest sense and ending the privatisation of fishing quota.

Griffin Carpenter is a Senior Researcher at the New Economics Foundation. The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Bright Blue.

Conservation Conversation

Welcome to Conservation Conversation – Bright Blue’s conservation blog that brings together a broad coalition of voices to consider the domestic and international conservation debate. 

As part of our multi-year conservation project, Bright Blue’s energy and environment research team have established this blog in the lead up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP) 26 in Glasgow and the COP15 Convention on Biological Diversity hosted in China next year. This blog is an opportunity to gather views from people from different professional and political backgrounds to contribute ideas for what the UK could champion at these forthcoming conferences. 

Additionally, if and when the UK leaves the EU, the Government’s signing of new Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) is a chance to encourage the UK Government to enhance environmental standards through them. Domestically, Brexit also presents an opportunity to establish new conservation initiatives through post-Brexit legislation as the UK breaks away from EU frameworks. 

Bright Blue is looking forward to hosting part of this discussion on Conservation Conversation. Keep an eye out for new content via Bright Blue’s twitter feed: @WeAreBrightBlue 

For further information or if you would like to contribute to the blog, please contact Conservation Conversation co-editors Patrick Hall (patrick@brightblue.org.uk) or Alex Griffiths (alexander@brightblue.org.uk)