Examination of Witnesses (Questions 85-99)
DR MARK
AVERY, MR
SIMON MARSH,
MR MATT
SHARDLOW AND
MR MATTHEW
JACKSON
24 JUNE 2008
Q85 Chairman: Good morning. Welcome.
We are very grateful to you for coming in. You know who we are
and we know who you are, so I will dispense with any introductions
or formalities. I think you are all familiar with this Committee
from previous evidence sessions. Perhaps I could kick off with
a general question. I think you all take the view that Britain
is not going to meet our 2010 target for biodiversity. It was
quite challenging. Is it surprising that that is the case or was
it always likely that we would not meet it?
Dr Avery: You are absolutely right:
it is not surprising. I would have to say, looking back a few
years, that NGOs were amazed that governments signed up to this
target, signed up across the world to a target of slowing biodiversity
loss but in the European Union to halting it. We are not surprised.
It was challenging. What we do is to look at the Government's
intent and actions through the last few years, to judge whether
the UK Government is serious about doing something about biodiversity,
and there we would have to say the picture is mixed. There are
some good things and some things we would like to see a lot more
action on. From the RSPB's point of view, once we get to 2010
and we have not met that fairly challenging target, we believe
that we cannot just leave it and walk away from it. Biodiversity
is important to our quality of life. The maintenance and enhancement
of biodiversity ought to be one of the things by which we judge
whether a nation is civilised and cultured, we would say. We would
like to see something that replaces the 2010 target, maybe going
on to 2020, and that certainly ought to have an element of biodiversity
protection and, we would say, enhancement. In a rich, scientific,
knowledgeable nation like the UK surely creating more biodiversity
to enhance the quality of life of people is something that we
ought to be doing. That is one of the things by which we should
judge ourselves. I do not know whether my colleagues would like
to add something.
Mr Jackson: We thought it was
a very challenging target and any hope of achieving it would have
required buy-in not only from Natural England and Defra but across
the board. It has done a lot in terms of raising the profile,
in terms of setting the scene, but there has not been particular
focus on climate change adaptation and how that interacts with
biodiversity across the board. You will have seen from our submission[9]
that that is one of the things that concerns us greatly about
how we go forward, but the point is made by the RSPB about not
looking at 2010 as the cut-off, particularly given that it seems
increasingly unlikely that the target will be met. I think there
is scope now for looking at what makes a sensible target for going
forwards, and halting the decline and reversing the decline is
where we would put our money.
Mr Shardlow: Invertebrates, which
make up 64% of biodiversity in terms of the species in the UK,
have always been somewhat at the bottom of the list of wildlife
conservation priorities. The BAP process and Convention have thrown
a lot more attention on what is happening to that critically important
part of biodiversity, and that is to be warmly welcomed. In terms
of the follow up, we have been fairly roundly disappointed by
the rather meagre resource that has been put into monitoring and
researching and developing actions for those species and implementing
those actions. There are incredibly good examples, particularly
in terms of birds—and I think of things like stone-curlew
and bittern—where almost inevitable extinctions have been
turned around by focused activity involving partners with funded
resources put towards those ends. In terms of invertebrates, there
are relatively few cases where we can see that adequate effort
has been put in, and for fairly modest resources they could have
made much more progress in terms of halting the decline of quite
a significant number of those species. Thirty-odd per cent of
those species are still declining on the BAP list compared with
only 7% of them which are going up. That is not a result to be
particularly proud of. Our assessment would have to be based on
whether reasonable resources have been put in over that time period
and consecutive ministers have failed to adequately resource the
BAP process.
Q86 Chairman: I do not know whether
you have read the minutes we took last week from Natural England[10]
but frankly I was a bit disappointed. You say that we need more
buy-in from Natural England to achieve 2010 target. That is still
true if you roll the period forward 10 years. It is still just
as important. I was disappointed, to put it mildly, by the responses
we were getting.
Mr Jackson: Yes. I think we would
agree with you. I have only seen a summary, unfortunately, as
I have been away. Particularly on this issue about looking forwards
and thinking about targets, there has been a whole raft of extra
additions, both in terms of BAP habitats and species, but really
they are not adding anything. They are the bits that were missing
in the first place. Particularly for a range of invertebrates,
there was a whole chunk there that was not covered. It is slightly
worrying to hear Natural England saying, "No, we have our
targets and we should not be looking for further targets."
Those targets do not cover the habitats and species we have been
talking about, are not particularly ambitious in terms of even
achieving halt. Natural England were rightly proud of the ground
they have made in terms of looking at SSSIs and bringing them
into favourable condition, but you have to remember that the SSSI
series is a very small subset of the habitats that are out there,
and when we talk about getting them into favourable condition
we are really talking about reverting them to the state they were
in (in the 1940s and 1950s in some cases, and the 1970s and 1980s
for some of the later ones) when they were designated. To rest
too much on your laurels at this stage and say they have achieved
an awful lot in terms of driving that target forwards is not going
to be enough, I am afraid, to halt the loss of biodiversity.
Q87 Chairman: Taking about them being
more ambitious and not just halting the loss but reversing it
and achieving enhancement—which seems to me a very reasonable
ambition for a country which is both work prosperous and also
reasonably well informed about these issues—are there other
countries that are affected that are ahead of us? Can you identify
other countries where enhancement is now being achieved?
Dr Avery: One example from which
the UK could learn would be the Netherlands. In terms of habitat
creation and establishing a network of natural sites, of corridors
through the landscape, the Dutch government has committed to spend
quite a lot of money doing that, and they are doing it, so it
is very obvious in the Netherlands. The Netherlands is quite an
engineered landscape, so maybe they are more accustomed to looking
afresh and putting things in place if they want them, but they
are setting up new areas of wetlands and woodlands and they are
connecting areas of existing heathland and woodland by natural
corridors. That is a defined area of policy by the Dutch government.
The UK could have done that too. When John Major and others came
back from the Earth Summit there was a lot of enthusiasm, and
this was under a Conservative administration. The whole of the
Biodiversity Action Plan process was set up with immense enthusiasm
and a lot of leadership from government. That is not a party political
point, because I would say that then Labour ministers, such as
Michael Meacher, carried that process on with equal enthusiasm.
But at that time part of the reason for setting targets and having
plans was that people, industry, some politicians came up to major
conservationists like ourselves and said, "What is it that
you want? You seem to want everything. You need to set priorities."
The Biodiversity Action Plan process allowed government and NGOs,
representing a large slice of the British population, to come
together and define what winning at nature conservation would
look like. That was in terms of setting targets for species but
also for habitats. We would say, looking at progress since that
period, that there has been a lot more progress on meeting species
targets—although that is uneven, in that there has been
more progress in some areas than others—but where we have
really fallen down is in doing what the Dutch have done, which
is recreating habitats, putting back some of the wild areas that
we have lost, in an imaginative way. Certainly, as we look forward
over the next few decades, with climate change everybody is seized
by the fact that species will want to be moving across the landscape.
Where we see species now will not be where they want to live in
20 or 40 years time. If nature is going to respond to climate
change, then we need to do things like create more stepping stones
and more corridors through the landscape. We ought to be doing
that anyway, but we certainly ought to be doing it looking forward
because that will make nature more resilient to the threats that
are piling up in the future.
Mr Shardlow: Another thing to
note from the Dutch approach is that fundamental to their culture
of nature conservation is science and monitoring. It is not viewed—as
it is sometimes in this country—as an afterthought that
will happen if there is a bit of money left at the end or if the
members of the organisations at this end of the table can go out
into the field and do a bit of work for free. There is a lot of
scientific weight behind a lot of the conservation action in the
Netherlands. In terms of the UK, there is a group set up as part
of the process for the Biodiversity Research Advisory Group, which
was set up to establish what the research needs were for biodiversity
delivery in the UK. The wildlife NGOs, as part of the Wildlife
and Countryside Link partnership, were part of that but became
frustrated with the inability in the group not only to tackle
the detail of what was needed in terms of research—looking
at these individual species and habitats, looking at what the
blockages were there for delivery—but also their apparent
inability to influence NERC and other funders to channel the money
towards the research that was necessary. Eventually the Wildlife
and Countryside Link resigned from that group, in protest at its
lack of perceived delivery.
Dr Avery: May I add one more thing:
thinking back to the leadership that was given by John Gummer
and Michael Meacher in the early stages of that process, I do
not think it is unfair to say that that is lacking; that there
is less evident enthusiasm from ministers for the UK or in England
for us to do a great job for biodiversity. It is quite difficult
to imagine a minister making a speech in favour of the dung fly,
which is something John Gummer did very eloquently.
Mr Shardlow: Dung beetle.
Dr Avery: I remember the speech
but not the species! It is still difficult to imagine a minister
doing that and we would be worried that, at a time when economics
are more difficult, providing for biodiversity always comes under
a squeeze. If anything, the way we tend to be looking at biodiversity
in government now is looking at how much use biodiversity is for
us, looking at ecosystem services, carbon storage, flood alleviation.
I am not knocking that—before other committees we have said
how important that is and I think that is a valuable extra reason
for conserving biodiversity—but taken to an extreme, it
leads you to a position where you only value biodiversity that
is of direct benefit to us as people, so you get to a position
where you are saying, "Ask not what Defra will do for biodiversity
because we are still trying to figure out which bits of biodiversity
will do something for us." That is quite a different place
from where we were 15 years ago, and we need a bit of rebalancing
of enthusiasm for the natural world. If the song of the skylark
disappeared from the countryside, we would not be economically
worse off. I could not argue that, but I think the quality of
many people's lives would be significantly reduced. That is a
public good that government should be helping to provide.
Chairman: I am grateful to you for this
reminder. I was a minister at DoE when the Biodiversity Action
Plan was being drafted in 1994, when there were many meetings
with civil servants on exactly that issue.
Q88 Colin Challen: It sounds to me
like biodiversity is now being treated like Greek classics or
Latin, in that it is seen now to be totally superfluous to the
needs of modern society. I am wondering how effective these plans
and strategies can be compared to policy like set-aside. Did that
make a bigger contribution than having these smaller, more discrete
policies on biodiversity? Somebody once said that commerce always
trumps conservation. I think that follows on from your remarks
implying that having these strategies on biodiversity will never
really compete with the sheer pressure of agribusiness. Do you
think they can ever really do the job comprehensively?
Dr Avery: I would first like to
say that I do remember a little bit of Latin or Greek but I would
admit it is not that much use in my life; but biodiversity is
absolutely of value to millions of people's lives. One of the
sad things is that when politicians meet representatives of NGOs,
they are always amazed by how many people support our organisations
but politicians do not want to please those people by their actions
quite enough. We would like to see more action. One way of asking
your question is: Will biodiversity policies do the job on their
own? They will not. We need environmental thinking/sustainability
thinking to be threaded through everything that government does.
All public policies have to take account of the environment and
biodiversity: the planning system, economic systems, fisheries
all need to have green cloak around them if we are going to maintain
biodiversity. But we do need some money and some policies that
are for biodiversity alone, to do the job for biodiversity. There
is not quite enough of that money and there certainly is not funding
for the type of habitat recreation approach that, as I have said,
the Dutch government follow.
Q89 Colin Challen: I am not quite
sure from what you were saying before whether you thought it was
a good or a bad thing. Is harnessing the eco services agenda good
or bad for the biodiversity agenda per se? I get the idea that
in Holland they are successful because they are creating protected
recreated habitats, which could almost, I guess, becomes nature's
tourist attractions for all these different kinds of life, but
the rest of it is simply going to go along the usual pattern for
industrialisation of the countryside.
Dr Avery: We can do much better
than that. Compared with the Dutch, we have much better agri-environment
schemes which are better designed and have more impact. There
is a danger that they are not going to have a big enough impact
and they could be a bit better designed—so they are not
perfect—but they are miles better than, for example, the
Dutch government have put in place. However, we have not put in
place that habitat recreation, and we need to both. The Dutch
have fallen down badly on the farmed landscape, where we are doing
a bit better, but I would say we are falling down badly on recreating
natural habitats, where the Dutch are doing rather better. Surely
we should be doing both. We have to do both if we are going to
have an impact across the range of common species ones.
Mr Shardlow: I interpret your
question, in part, as what use is the BAP process, what use is
planning? A mistake made occasionally is that people look at Biodiversity
Action Plans and think they are a delivery mechanism unto themselves.
They are not. There should be an overarching pulling together
of all sorts of mechanisms, such as set-aside, such as agri-environment
schemes, setting the agenda for each species and habitat of what
that species and habitat requires from the whole suite of delivery
mechanisms we have, and establishing an agreed target amongst
government and NGOs through the BAP partnership that everybody
is working to achieve using the mechanisms that are available.
Mr Jackson: You seem to be asking:
Is there a lot to be gained from a lot of these other mechanisms
that are not necessarily biodiversity driven? There is a lot in
terms of ecosystem services; for instance, a recognition of the
importance they play in their own right, as Mark was saying, is
very useful. It sets a very important message out there, which
is that there are systems that are fragile and on which we depend.
There may be a lot of biodiversity gain which could come from
that sort of approach. On the other hand, set-aside—which
was the example you used—was not intended as a biodiversity
delivery mechanism, which is one of the reasons it has not delivered
in all those its for biodiversity. I think there is quite a lot
of set-aside out there which is not doing an awful lot for wildlife.
Just latching on to other mechanisms, I am afraid, is not enough.
That comes back to what Matt was saying about the fact that you
do need a mechanism which focuses on biodiversity and then goes
out from there and looks at those other agendas—the spatial
planning agenda we have been talking about; the ecosystems services
agenda we have been talking about—and identifies where those
mechanisms can provide for those but also identifies where there
are gaps, where there are things which are not being covered by
those mechanisms, and that hopefully leads us on to looking at
new mechanisms to provide them.
Q90 Colin Challen: Looking at the
needs of priority species and habitats recently added to the priority
list, is enough being done there? Are the resources being made
available?
Mr Shardlow: Each country is charged
with delivery under the BAP process. Essentially, at the UK level,
we have set the new list, we have set the priorities, and they
have been agreed and signed off by ministers in each of the four
countries—which we welcome, obviously. The next step, we
think, has to be looking at those species and habitats and establishing
the new round of targets and how the actions of those species
are going to be set and then delivered. I would describe it as
still a bit slow. We have recently agreed through the England
Biodiversity Group a strategy for taking forward species and habitats,
but, as yet, we do not have, for instance, clear deadlines as
to when targets are going to be set for the new species and new
habitats. They are talking about integrating the needs of species
through habitats—which again we welcome, as long as it is
recognised that that in itself is not going to deliver all the
requirements of the species and, in particular, we can think about
the points we were making earlier about research and monitoring.
You cannot deliver monitoring for a species through a habitat
action plan; there have to be some separate lines of activity
to make sure that we are checking on how that species is progressing
towards the agreed target. That is all to come. I hope that in
the next year or two we will be seeing more action from the Country
Biodiversity Groups and from the relevant statutory agencies towards
developing that. Worryingly, there is still very little talk of
resources being allocated to that process and resources were very
tight during the review process as well. The UK BAP process was
done on a shoestring. Some of the bits towards the end of it would
have been much improved with further rounds of consultation but
there just were not the resources there to do it. Having said
that, we have a good list of BAP species, we have a good list
of BAP habitats, and it is a list that we should all congeal around,
working out where we want to go and how we are going to get there.
Dr Avery: It is a bit unfortunate
that sometimes it seems as though civil servants feel there are
just too many of these threatened species. We would agree that
there are too many of them but it is hardly the species' fault.
I do not know whether members of the Committee remember the film
Amadeus, which is about Mozart, but when Mozart plays a new piece
of music to a sponsor, the criticism he gets is "Too many
notes." We sometimes feel that we are being told that there
are too many priority species, but that is kind of the point.
Biodiversity is diverse and rich, and I am afraid quite a lot
of these species are in trouble. That is not something to sweep
under the carpet or say that one ought to have prioritised it
so that there are only two threatened species. There is a lot
to do, so let us roll our sleeves up and start dealing with this
biodiversity loss.
Q91 Colin Challen: I guess we have
too many people really. That is the other problem. You have all
identified the need for extra funding for biodiversity related
work. To what extent do you think that a reformed CAP might be
the best way of meeting that demand?
Mr Jackson: You alluded to the
fact that there is a lot of competition out there. If we are trading
quotes, my favourite is Mark Twain, who said "The problem
with land is that they do not make it any more" and he has
a point. It is competing resources for a limited amount of land
out there. Biodiversity is going to come under further strain.
You have talked about set-aside and we are seeing that disappearing
now. Some of that may not be of value for wildlife; some of it
is. We are seeing species like woodlark, for instance, being affected
by set-aside coming out now—which is a process that is ongoing.
In terms of CAP reform, there is an awful lot that can be done.
At the moment the ELS is fairly welcomed as a stepping stone,
certainly by the farming community, but in terms of what it achieves
for biodiversity, it is not terribly great. It is very broad-brush
and there is a huge overlap with cross compliance, the things
that farmers have to do already for a single farm payment. I think
there is a question mark about how much added-value you get out
of the ELS as a mechanism. In terms of HLS, which is the more
targeted approach, Natural England are going through the exercise
now of targeting their resources. Because of the 2010 target and
because of the SSSI focus, they are having to focus a huge portion
of that resource at achieving that 2010 target. In terms of the
things we have been talking about, in terms of looking to reverse
the decline of biodiversity, in terms of looking at creating what
you could call a permeable countryside, a countryside that species
can move through, there is a huge question there about resource.
There clearly has to be a lot that can come through the CAP process.
Certainly merging the two pillars would be an aspiration we have
long held, in terms of looking at that. Rather than separating
production and the environment and keeping them separate, there
must be a lot to be gained from bringing those together. We have
already seen the benefits of a partial approach to that, in terms
particularly of upland farming and the change from production
subsidies to area payments, et cetera, et cetera, but modulation
was very limited in terms of how far we went. There is a lot more
that could be achieved and the mechanism may be by bringing the
two pillars together. Therefore HLS has to be a mechanism. The
other concern, of course, is about competing uses of the countryside,
and the biofuel agenda has brought that into focus, where you
are looking at adding in yet another use for the countryside which
in many ways may be laudable in terms of what it achieves but
actually is cross-competing with all the other issues: food production
and, in this case, biodiversity. Essentially, if the extra competition
for the use of the countryside continues to increase, the value
we are going to get from the existing CAP is going to become less
and less, so I think we do need to look very seriously at how
we can take that forwards, look at merging the two pillars so
that we can focus on what we are trying to achieve.
Q92 Colin Challen: How optimistic
are you about biodiversity protection in the UK, still less reversing
the existing trends.
Mr Jackson: There was a great
stride forwards with the CROW Act in terms of the protection from
the protected sites, so within protected sites we have come a
huge way forwards. It brought in the ability to deal with third
party damage, for instance, which had not been there. It got rid
of the issue of potentially deliberate neglect, for instance.
If you had a SSSI prior to the CROW Act coming in, you could do
nothing and eventually it would lose a lot of its interest. We
now have positive management. But I would bring you back to that
issue I was talking about, that SSSIs are just a small sample
of the important countryside that is out there protecting our
biodiversity. Some of that has now been covered through things
like the Environmental Impact Assessment Regulations, which are
being applied beyond SSSIs, but we have just had a revision of
the regulations and that has brought in a two hectare threshold;
for instance, in relation to important grassland. They said, "We
don't need to bother about an EIA for anything below a two-hectare
site" but in Derbyshire, for instance, once you come out
of the Peak, 65% of very important grasslands are of less than
two hectares. I am working most of the time in Oxfordshire and
Buckinghamshire, which is essentially farmed out clay with very
important small sites in there. It is a huge proportion of those
sites which will fall below that threshold. So we are doing a
lot on protected sites but we have a long way to go when we come
beyond those protected sites.
Dr Avery: Our take on that would
be very similar. The work on SSSI condition has been pretty good.
I would not say it is perfect, but there has been a great deal
of progress made over the last few years. I think quite a lot
of that has been driven by the fact that there has been a target
and that civil servants and ministers have seen that there is
a challenging target which is achievable but will require quite
a lot of co-ordinated work and action to get close to it. We would
say that the statutory sector and government have done a good
job on that and it is a good advert for setting targets. On rare
species, it would be entirely possible to see lots of progress
in the future, just as we have in the past, partly because NGOs
can do some of the work themselves, particularly with bits of
funding from Natural England. Those tasks are not too tricky.
They are challenging but you can get on and do it. However—and
agriculture is an example—going back to species that are
in the wider countryside, that do not live on protected areas,
that are subject to the impacts that the growing economy puts
on them, then it is difficult to be that optimistic. Farmland
birds have not increased in numbers overall for about a decade.
The way I look at it is this: my daughter has just finished her
first year at university and when I finished my first year at
university (which does not feel that long ago to me) the farmland
bird index was twice the level it is now. In one generation of
our family, the number of common farmland birds in the countryside
has halved. That does not feel like progress. That graph has been
pretty much static for the last 10 years almost. Despite all the
agri-environment schemes and the progress we have made with those—and
there has been real progress—we are not seeing biological
progress yet. I would have said a couple of years ago that we
would see that graph going up over the next few years. I would
now be less confident. We have seen set-aside set to zero, with
nothing put in place to replace it. Set-aside was not an environmental
scheme, but, for once, a policy that was not to do with the environment
had environmental benefits, and we are losing those. There is
not enough money going into agri-environment schemes. The RSPB
would like to see further switching of money from Pillar 1 to
Pillar 2 of the CAP, but just at the moment, because commodity
prices are high, many farmers are not that bothered about agri-environment.
They are considering, when they come out of existing agreements,
whether or not to go into a new agreement. When the price of wheat
is at the moment £130 a tonne, compared with £56 a tonne
a couple of years ago, you look very carefully at agri-environment
schemes. These are voluntary schemes. No farmer has to go into
them. We have put a lot of our hope into a voluntary arrangement.
I am not sure it is going to work as well in the future—and
that goes back to what we said earlier, that economics can trump
ecology. It is difficult to feel optimistic for some of those
widespread species.
Q93 Colin Challen: How well is Natural
England doing in performing its role as a champion of nature?
Mr Shardlow: Could I make a comment
on the CAP, which also links through to that question. The CAP
can fund quite a lot of very important things but there are some
things that it is very poor at funding. It is very poor at funding
research; it is very poor at funding monitoring that is needed.
There are good examples with quite a lot of these species. In
terms of triage, if this was the National Health Service for wildlife,
they are in a critical condition and need much more close attention
and intervention than agri-environment can necessarily provide.
An example might be, for instance, the field cricket, which declined
down to one site. They needed to do some very radical management,
stripping off trees on neighbouring sites to bring them back into
a condition that enabled them to take them into captive breeding
and then reintroduce them on to the other sites. A CAP could not
possibly fund that sort of intensive remedial action to save a
species from extinction. Another issue with delivery through agri-environment
is that some work done by Butterfly Conservation has shown that
the number of visits you have to make to get a successful scheme
for an endangered species is quite high. I think 10 was the number
of visits they needed to make to a landowner, to talk them through
what they needed to do, to hold their hand through the process
of delivering that habitat and delivering the requirements of
those species, and to get it just right, so that it really worked.
There is a resource issue there for Natural England and an expertise
issue. If they are going to be delivering agri-environment schemes
that tackle a whole range of species and habitats in the countryside,
we cannot just throw the money at the farmer and expect the farmer
to know what to do. They need quite a lot of help and assistance,
so there is a resource burden there to make sure that that money
is effective in achieving what it needs to do. You talked about
optimism. One thing that I would be optimistic about is the interest
and the involvement of the public. Memberships of the Wildlife
Trusts and RSPB have been rising significantly over the last 10
years and Buglife, the Invertebrate Conservation Trust, did not
even exist when the Government signed the halting biodiversity
loss targets. The interest from the public in saving biodiversity
continues to rise. As long as that keeps happening, hopefully
we will eventually see changes in other areas of society to match
that concern and that interest. That is where my optimism stems
from. With Natural England's approach, it is still early days,
but it is not so early days that we cannot start to see some trends
coming out. They have been through enormous change (when English
Nature, the Countryside Commission, and the RDS came together).
One thing I notice is that the Nature Conservation area of their
work reflects very much the Wildlife and Countryside Act type
of approach—Nature Conservation as it was back in the 1980s—and
it has not, in my opinion, fully taken on board the biodiversity
agenda which is set out more in the NERC Act—which is slightly
ironic because it is the NERC Act that set up Natural England.
There are elements of the NERC Act, like the biodiversity duty,
where, when you look at Natural England's involvement, for instance,
in giving advice to other statutory bodies and planning authorities,
we do not feel they are currently placing adequate weight within
their advice on the impacts of developments and other issues on
biodiversity of species and habitats compared with their more
traditional role of protecting SSSIs. If we are going to move
towards having a landscape-based approach and delivering biodiversity
across the land, then I think they have to take on a bit more
of a biodiversity-focused remit. They cannot drop protecting SSSIs
or any of the more statutory wildlife and countryside approach,
but they have to take on a more open approach, involving the BAP
process more fundamentally within their core work programme.
Q94 Dr Turner: Natural England recently
reported that the natural environment is much less rich than it
was 50 years ago, which chimes with your remarks, Dr Avery, that
the number of farmland birds has declined by a half in just a
generation. What do you think is the realistic limit we can place
on attempts to recreate diversity? Is it realistic to expect we
can go back to the halcyon levels of biodiversity of the countryside
enjoyed when I was a tiny boy?
Dr Avery: I do not think we want
to turn the clock back economically but we do want to turn the
clock back a bit ecologically. I think that is entirely possible.
The example I gave of farmland birds having halved in numbers
in a rather short period of time, we could turn that around. I
know we could do that because the RSPB bought an arable farm 10
years ago and we have almost doubled the numbers of farmland birds
on that site and we are producing just as much product and oilseed
rape as that farm produced under its previous management. On that
farm we are basically putting in the agri-environment options
in an intelligent and sensible way. Maybe as an organisation we
have a bit more experience and knowledge about how to do this
really well, but it does show that for farmland birds we can produce
just as much product off that land but almost twice the number
of birds. That gives an example of how we should not set our sights
too low. Some of this can be done and it can be done quite quickly
and it can be done at basically no cost. Not everything we would
like to see can be done at no cost, but in the big scheme of things,
increasing the level of biodiversity in the countryside is not
going to be very expensive.
Q95 Dr Turner: Obviously, we are
concerned with the impact of climate change on the countryside
and on biodiversity. Are you able to give us a view of how much
of our problem is down to agricultural management and how much
of it is long-term climate change impact? Can you disentangle
them?
Dr Avery: I think that would be
fairly easy to do. I cannot give you a figure off the top of my
head because that does come back to the richness of biodiversity
and one would have to look species by species and work out for
each species what were the major reasons for decline or lack of
interest. We could go away and think about that. For different
species the answer would be different. Certainly as we go into
the future, the next few decades are going to have climate change
having a bigger and bigger impact. We can already see that in
the way that species are moving across the landscape. It is very
obvious for many bird species and it will affect the whole of
our biodiversity. That is why we need to understand that process.
We need to work to mitigate the impacts of climate change but
we have to put effort into adaptation. That goes back to recreating
stepping stones in the landscape and corridors through which species
can move. I think we should have been doing that anyway. Even
if climate change were not happening, all those things would be
a good thing to do, and they were almost written into the original
Biodiversity Action Plan, but, since we are living in a changing
climate, it is even more important that we do that and we do it
in a way that will make wildlife and the countryside more resilient.
Mr Jackson: Your question was:
Can we tease out what has happened in terms of up to now for losses?
I think it is pretty clear. I cannot think offhand of a single
species that we have lost that we would put down to climate change.
What has happened to date principally has been the impact of land
use, both agricultural management and development. That is an
issue particularly on places like the South Coast, where now we
have squeezed habitats because the sea is going one way and we
have housing in strips along the coast, et cetera. Infrastructure
development, as well as farmland activities, has caused pretty
much, as far as I am aware, all of the declines in biodiversity
to date. We are expecting to add now, on top of a very fragmented
landscape which has been intensively managed, the pressure of
climate change, and I think we are going to be seeing those losses
coming in to the future.
Mr Shardlow: There are some areas
where climate change over the last 20 years may have been a factor.
For instance, the loss of river flies from chalk rivers may be
to do with changes to weather patterns, for instance. In terms
of the threats, though, it is very hard to disentangle all these
things. In climate change, the big problems that species will
face are the same as the problems they face now: habitat fragmentation,
isolation of patches, inability to disperse, bits of habitat that
are too small. The Biodiversity Partnership has recently produced
a report that I would refer to the Committee called Conserving
Biodiversity in a Changing Climate (Hopkins 2007). In that
it sets out a very good set of criteria/set of principles for
what we think the priorities are. The number one priority within
that document is to conserve existing biodiversity. Unless we
tackle the traditional problems that biodiversity has faced in
terms of managing sites correctly, maintaining species, and making
the countryside more permeable to them, we will not set up a countryside
that is resilient to climate change either.
Q96 Dr Turner: Defra has spoken on
these issues. Some would say, "It's about time too"
because most of the things they are suggesting should have been
done a long time ago. Having said that, what do you feel about
Defra's guidance on habitat recreation and so on? Have you any
confidence that their guidance is likely to be acted upon?
Dr Avery: We would encourage them
to act on it. As we have said already, the whole area of habitat
recreation is the area in which we have seen very little progress
over the last decade, even though there were targets and plans
in place to do it. The fact that there was not a pot of money
set aside into which people could tap to do that work was one
of the reasons why it did not get done. It always looked expensive
and nobody said they had the budget to do it. Finding the resources
and putting the resources in the right place so that that action
can be taken has to be part of the way forward. It is something
that we should be doing. Defra should be encouraged to do it.
The fact that the minister for biodiversity is also the minister
for climate adaptation perhaps means that we have more of an opportunity
there to push those things forward together than we would have
done in the past. Let us hope so.
Mr Shardlow: If there is one urgent
reason for creating habitat it has to be sea-level rise, which
threatens to destroy quite a large area of natural habitats. The
Broads themselves, probably the finest lowland wetland we have
in the United Kingdom is threatened with climate change. When
the sea comes to the Norfolk Broads it will cause several national
extinctions of species. Where are we setting back the habitats?
Where are we creating the habitats around the coastline that enable
a more dynamic and natural process to happen? The answer is that
it is very localised. There are only a few examples where this
is happening. We can look at a few cases, most of them involving
the RSPB and The Wildlife Trusts, where there are small managed
retreats, but who is creating the freshwater habitats behind that
to replace the freshwater habitats that we are likely to lose
in the next 20 or 30 years?
Q97 Dr Turner: Of course it is very
nice that Defra has identified the problem and issued guidance
but, as we all know, Defra is a very cash-strapped department.
Do you feel that the resources that Defra can put into this are
adequate?
Mr Jackson: No is a very simple
answer to that. Talking about Natural England and what they have
achieved so far—and they have been right at the sharp end
of the lack of resource that Defra have: the whole single farm
payment issue landed neatly in the lap of Natural England as soon
as they arrived—in some ways it is quite impressive that
they have achieved what they have to date. In terms of going forwards,
we are back where we were when we looked at the 2010 target and
it being bought into. The reaction was, "That's great, but
it is going to need buy-in across the board," and I think
that is still where we are at. Defra cannot do it on their own;
they need the resources and the respect of the rest of the Civil
Service. Basically, they need buy-in across government for those
sorts of targets, to have any hope of achieving them.
Q98 Dr Turner: Of course there are
several cans of worms involved in your answer, and I think we
had better not go there.
Dr Avery: Could I say something
on Natural England. Are they doing a good job? They are doing
quite a good job. I think the RSPB was very worried when Natural
England was set up that they might not act as champion for nature
and biodiversity because of the much wider remit that Natural
England have. I would say that that fear is now dispelled. Our
worry about Natural England is not their way of looking at the
world and where they are coming from and what they want to do;
it is whether they have the resources, whether they have been
given sufficient resources by Defra. Clearly this year they are
on a standstill budget but have to find £5 million of efficiency
savings. They are losing, I think, 200 staff, and that would be
a huge impact on any organisation. If we are going to do a better
job on biodiversity, if we are going to do things like recreate
habitats, then organisations like Natural England need the resources
to go out and spend money and create a better countryside. I think
we would be fairly confident that they could do that well if given
more resources. They have gone through teething problems, but
teething problems that have been imposed on them by their parent
department to some extent because of cuts in funding.
Q99 Dr Turner: The Climate Change
Bill has a proposal that will require an amendment to develop
an adaptation programme which addresses the need to have a strategy
to direct and enforce biodiversity adaptation. Do you think this
is going to work? What is your view on these provisions?
Dr Avery: I think it is a good
start. It shows that government is beginning to think about these
things. To some extent we have covered this ground, but the things
that need to be done are fairly straightforward but they need
resources. It is good that more thought is being given to them
but more resources need to be given to them if we are to see any
real progress on the ground.
9 See Ev 36. Back
10
See Ev 10. Back
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