Memorandum submitted by The Wildlife Trusts
(CCB 27)
INTRODUCTION
1. The Wildlife Trusts welcome the opportunity
to submit written evidence to the Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs Committee inquiry into the Climate Change Bill.
2. There are 47 local Wildlife Trusts across
the whole of the UK, the Isle of Man and Alderney. We are working
for an environment rich in wildlife for everyone. With 670,000
members, we are the largest UK voluntary organisation dedicated
to conserving the full range of the UKs habitats and species,
whether they be in the countryside, in cities or at sea. 108,000
of our members belong to our junior branch, Wildlife Watch. We
manage 2,200 nature reserves covering more than 80,000 hectares;
we stand up for wildlife; we inspire people about the natural
world and we foster sustainable living.
3. The impact of climate change on habitats
and species in the UK is well documented and has led The Wildlife
Trusts to focus on three key areas of response:
— Adaptation—Ensuring that
the environment has sufficient resilience and wildlife has the
flexibility to adapt to the changes resulting from climate change.
— Reducing emissions—Ensuring
that emissions that contribute to climate change can be reduced
through policy and behaviour change.
— Demonstration—Ensuring
that we reduce the carbon footprint of The Wildlife Trusts and
provide leadership on climate change issues.
4. This submission sets out The Wildlife
Trusts' views in relation to "whether adequate provision
is made within the Bill to address adaptation to climate change",
an area where we have particular expertise and knowledge particularly
in relation to the natural environment.
5. We would be pleased to provide further
information to support statements made in this submission.
GENERAL COMMENTS
6. The Wildlife Trusts welcome the principle
of a Climate Change Bill and the leadership that Government is
showing on climate change. This is the most serious long-term
threat to our environment and it is important that Government
is bold, visionary and urgent in its response.
7. We believe that while the Bill rightly
focuses on reducing emissions of greenhouse gases it needs to
be much stronger and more meaningful on dealing with the consequences
of climate change. This should be driven by the realisation that
we are already locked into at least thirty years of adaptation
to the changes caused by emissions currently in the atmosphere,
and by understanding the consequences, outlined in the Stern Review,
of not taking urgent adaptation measures now.
8. The Wildlife Trusts welcome the reference
to the requirement for the Secretary of State to report on adaptation
measures. However, this measure does not sufficiently reflect
the importance of this aspect of climate change. We believe that
adaptation measures should focus on landscape-scale conservation.
This involves both expanding sites of greatest value for biodiversity
to create more resilient larger areas, together with improving
connectivity by linking and buffering sites. Expanding and enhancing
at a landscape-scale provides species and habitats with the resilience
and flexibility to cope with the changes brought about by climate
change. It also helps to provide more robust functioning ecosystems
that can deliver the essential ecosystem services of flood protection,
aquifer recharge, soil conservation, pollution control and absorption
of carbon dioxide. Adaptation measures are relevant to the marine
as well as the terrestrial environment. The Stern Review is particularly
relevant in this context—the appropriate quote is given
below.
Protecting natural systems could prove particularly
challenging. The impacts of climate change on species and biodiversity
are expected to be harmful for most levels of warming, because
of the limited ability of plants and animals to migrate fast enough
to new areas with suitable climate (Chapter 3). In addition, the
effects of urbanisation, barriers to migration paths, and fragmentation
of the landscape also severely limit species' ability to move.
For those species that can move rapidly in line
with the changing climate, finding new food and suitable living
conditions could prove challenging. Climate change will require
nature conservation efforts to extend out from the current approach
of fixed protected areas. Conservation efforts will increasingly
be required to operate at the landscape scale with larger contiguous
tracts of land that can better accommodate species movement.
Policies for nature protection should be sufficiently
flexible to allow for species' movement across the landscape,
through a variety of measures to reduce the fragmentation of the
landscape and make the intervening countryside more permeable
to wildlife, for example use of wildlife corridors or "biodiversity
islands".
9. We believe that the UK's response to
climate change is a key test of the political parties' environmental
credentials, and forms part of the Green Alliance Green Standard
tests for environmental leadership.[24]
SPECIFIC COMMENTS
10. The Wildlife Trusts believe that the
Climate Change Bill represents a major opportunity to demonstrate
joined-up Government by setting out adaptation measures across
all parts of Government with an influence on land use—key
departments of UK and national government, regional planning,
and the role of local authorities. Urgent action to further this
landscape scale agenda lies particularly within the remit of Defra
and CLG. Policies should work with natural processes to ensure
long-term cost effectiveness and sustainability, such as moving
flood management away from hard defences to more natural solutions,
or regeneration projects such as the Thames Gateway and the Olympics
making a long-term contribution to delivering landscape scale
conservation.
11. We believe that an existing instrument
could be amended to provide a focus for measures to address adaptation
across Government. The duty to "have regard to the conservation
of biological diversity" that applies to all Government Departments
and public bodies in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act (2000)
and Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act (2006) should
be amended to include specific reference to promoting connectivity
and ensuring that wildlife can adapt to climate change. In addition,
the Bill should include a specific duty on the Secretary of State
to ensure a national climate change adaptation strategy is in
place, which includes clear measures for the natural environment.
This duty should extend to regional bodies with a requirement
for regional climate change adaptation strategies to be produced
(these would make up the national strategy), and that these should
be included within regional spatial strategies.
12. Under the above duties, the following
measures are examples of re-focusing policy within joined up Government
to put adaptation into practice:
— Agri-environment schemes to
support adaptation and mitigation:
Ensuring synergy between the benefits of cross-compliance
and Entry Level stewardship; physical linkage and networking of
environmental measures on the ground; and targeting of Higher
Level Scheme where it delivers greatest benefits in climate change
adaptation.
— Existing site designations should
be recognised as important "nodes" in climate adaptation
networks:
Current protected areas are both refuges from
which plants and animals can move to colonise new areas, and vital
stepping stones in a network where the most sensitive and fastidious
species can survive. Sites of European value remain crucially
important in the international response to climate change adaptation
and existing protection legislation should not be dismantled.
Climate changes gives greater impetus to protect and safeguard
these areas as the building blocks for adaptation.
— Flexibility of how we interpret
current site designation and prioritisation rather than removal
of site based approach;
The plant and animal species within protected
areas may change gradually in response to climate. The intrinsic
features of geology, morphology, land-use history and soil chemistry
remain and are irreplaceable. One set of rare and threatened species
may be replaced by another but SSSIs will remain of very high
conservation value. Existing SSSI protection legislation should
not be dismantled implementation should be more flexible to cope
with change—again, climate change gives stronger impetus
for their protecting.
— Regional and local planning
system should inform spatial patterns of development and landscape
structure within individual developments:
The Bill should ensure all new major development
are more permeable to wildlife. This can be achieved by climate
adaptation opportunity mapping based on current and historical
local data from local records centres and voluntary bodies. Opportunity
maps should be embedded in Regional Spatial Strategies, which
set the vision in context.
— National planning overview should
put sustainability at the heart of planning:
National planning must avoid negative impacts,
for example from transport and waste developments. National Government
should support mapping by facilitating a UK-wide spatial framework
for landscape scale conservation. Government should use incentives
such as Planning Gain Supplement and stimulate or devise new measures
such to promote habitat restoration or ensure that Local Area
Agreements can facilitate this approach.
— Reflecting the duty in funding
and management programmes:
Public bodies and other funding organisations
should embrace large-scale habitat restoration and reflect these
ambitions in their funding programmes. They should manage the
public estate to maintain and enhance biodiversity and its resilience
to climate change. Parks, hospitals and schools can contribute
to landscape scale conservation, and also enhance health and wellbeing.
— Water resource management reflecting
adaptation needs:
Water policy should reflect environmental limits
and habitat enhancement identified through opportunity mapping,
to set it in the context of climate change adaptation.
— Standards for homes and development:
Building standards should track the rapid improvements
in energy efficiency and set ambitious targets for industry and
domestic use In addition they should be designed to allow wildlife
to be "permeable" to wildlife.
— Recreation—corridors for
people and wildlife:
Landscape design in new developments should maximise
connectivity of green infrastructure, both to allow wildlife dispersal
and to encourage walking and cycling (energy-efficient and healthy).
— Inspire local people to improve
their quality of life:
Local authorities should use mechanisms such
as community planning and Local Strategic Partnerships to engage
and inspire local people about landscape-scale conservation. There
is scope for the Government to encourage this through indicators
for Local Area Agreements.
— Build climate adaptation into
social policy:
Promote large-scale habitat schemes and landscape
linkage as adaptation through social policy such as tourism, schools,
outdoor learning provision, preventative healthcare volunteering
schemes and youth work.
The Wildlife Trusts support a massive increase
in use of renewables but these do not need to conflict with our
vision for climate change adaptation if they are delivered at
the right scale and location. Most delays to windfarms and other
large renewable-energy infrastructure projects result from inadequate
environmental statements and mitigation, rather than a slow planning
system.
We welcome the adoption of an ecosystem approach
by Defra, and the updating of Biodiversity Action Plans to reflect
habitat rather than species focus. The delivery of the new approach
should not be compromised by hurried and ill-considered developments
and infrastructure which prevents future joined-up land-use policy.
A realistic assessment of ecosystem services, combined with opportunity
mapping, will help to establish environmental limits, ensuring
that development does not deplete natural resources and processes,
and does not threaten the integrity of future landscape scale
developments.
13. The Wildlife Trusts believe that non-statutory
Local Wildlife Sites have a particularly important role to play
in underpinning connectivity to support adaptation measures and
act as reservoirs of high biodiversity. They should also play
a role in providing an important indicator of the resilience of
the natural environment in monitoring our adaptation response.
In order to do this, Local Wildlife Site systems require statutory
underpinning, with a requirement on Local Authorities to ensure
systems are operating to common standards, building on the guidance
published by Defra in 2006. The Climate Change Bill should include
such measures.
We believe that the reporting measures in the
Bill do not go far enough. We need to see a greater focus on how
Government monitors change and amends policies to bring about
adaptation, rather than simply reporting on progress or failure
to progress:
— Monitoring must cover sufficient
indicators and measures to enable a robust assessment of the effectiveness
of adaptation of both wildlife and people to be made.
— There is a danger that if progress
is not rapid enough or monitoring highlights unexpected changes,
there are no instruments in place that Government can draw upon
immediately to address the situation, leading to delays in responding
to such situations.
The Wildlife Trusts
May 2007
UK action on climate change;
International action on climate change;
Green living;
Natural environment;
Planning;
Environmental tax and subsidies.
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