Environmental Audit CommitteeSupplementary written evidence submitted by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB)
The RSPB is extremely grateful to the Environmental Audit Committee for bringing some much-needed attention to this oft-overlooked area of environmental policy. We are submitting this supplementary evidence in response to the oral evidence session conducted with the UK Government on 9 July 2013.
UK Responsibility for Compliance
1. We were pleased to learn that Defra has written to “those Territories to which CITES has been extended and that have legislation which is classified as not meeting the basic requirements of CITES”, “offering any assistance they might need in order to achieve [compliance] and giving them a longstop date... for when we want to see that in place”. The Minister should be congratulated on this proactive approach towards CITES compliance, which we consider to be exactly the form of action required for all the international environmental agreements to which the UK and the OTs are ascribed.
2. Despite this excellent precedent, unfortunately CITES appears to be the only international environmental agreement where HMG has both conducted a proper strategic assessment of OT compliance and worked to ensure any gaps are filled (most likely because CITES is the only agreement which also contains strong penalties for infractions for which the UK would be liable). Indeed, the RSPB was surprised to read HMG’s response to a series of parliamentary questions answered on 4th September 2013 that “It is the responsibility of the St Helena Government/Cayman Government/British Virgin Islands Government to ensure that [they] meet the requirements of the Convention on Biological Diversity”. This position would appear to directly contradict both HMG’s legal responsibility and the Government’s own 2012 White Paper, in which it said that it was an HMG priority for action to “ensure compliance with the requirements of relevant environmental agreements” (p.46). It is to be hoped that the UK’s legal responsibility for compliance with all international environmental agreements, not just CITES, can therefore be adequately addressed by Defra.
3. Recommendation: Defra should conduct a strategic assessment of compliance with all relevant international environmental agreements, along the lines already implemented for CITES, and then provide proactive technical and policy assistance to OT Governments to remedy any issues identified.
UK Strategy
4. The RSPB was disappointed that Defra made no mention of the UK Overseas Territories Biodiversity Strategy, for which it has lead departmental responsibility, when asked where Defra’s objectives for the OTs could be found. This was particularly surprising given that the JNCC had co-ordinated a review meeting of the Strategy just 6 months ago, but perhaps demonstrates the low political priority that this document is afforded within Defra, and the need for it to be developed into a more concrete strategy with a workplan and objectives. In January 2012, Defra did set out in its departmental paper on the OTs that it would “oversee...where appropriate the strategy’s further elaboration into an implementation plan”. OT Government officials expressed strong support for the creation of an implementation plan at the 2013 review meeting, and it is hoped that this could provide the strategic HMG biodiversity workplan which the OTs so badly need. For instance, such a plan would have contributed to prevent the plant extinction crisis which has apparently just been reached on Pitcairn, where two unique plant species have declined to the very brink of extinction (<5 specimens each) with no off-island populations secured. Indeed, one of the two species, the Pitcairn red berry tree, may now be functionally extinct as it occurs in male and female plants, and the remaining individuals may all be of the same sex.
5. Recommendation: Defra should establish an Implementation Plan with clear objectives for its UK Overseas Territories Biodiversity Strategy so as to ensure strategic on-the-ground action.
6. At present, Defra’s strategy seems to be almost entirely reactive, placing the onus on small OT Governments to make formal applications for assistance. Such a strategy is untenable for small Governments such as Tristan da Cunha or Pitcairn, where overstretched Environment Departments numbering just a few people spend their time fire-fighting pressing issues, and have no opportunity to step back and undertake a strategic assessment of where they need assistance, especially as it is often over such a wide range of areas (from waste management to biosecurity, from biodiversity conservation to fisheries management). There is also anecdotal evidence that OT Governments have been placed under pressure by the FCO to not kick up a fuss or complain to other UK Government Departments that they need more help than they are receiving. Defra therefore must not abdicate responsibility by adopting a reactive strategy, but should instead follow its own excellent CITES example and adopt a proactive partnership approach to working with OT Governments.
UK Government Capacity
7. The HMG response to the EAC’s effective questioning about departmental capacity was very disappointing (Qs. 128–135). The RSPB alone has the same number of full-time dedicated OT environment staff (3) as the entire UK Government (1 in FCO and 2 in JNCC). Defra meanwhile still has no dedicated staff member, and no Defra ministers or civil servants have visited an OT in an official capacity since 2009. Indeed, the Defra official questioned appeared to display an unfortunate lack of understanding of the extent of environmental need in the OTs by intimating that any full-time OT environment official in his Department would spend time “twiddling their thumbs”. The full-time FCO environment lead is far from unoccupied, as the provision of pro-active and effective long-term, technical support to OT Governments is a major endeavour. Moreover within the remit of biodiversity conservation alone, the RSPB has had to make two separate emergency OT interventions to prevent imminent global extinctions since the EAC inquiry begun. It is uncertain whether Defra was aware of the need in either case, and biodiversity conservation is the highest profile environmental policy area for which Defra has OT responsibility. Strategic Defra involvement in other policy areas such as OT water or waste management meanwhile sadly appears almost non-existent.
8. Recommendation: Defra should follow the FCO’s welcome lead and establish full-time dedicated OT environment staff capacity.
9. With regard to the discussion on Governors’ capacity and expertise on environmental issues, the RSPB notes that whilst some Governors have received briefings from expert environmental organisations prior to commencing their roles, this has to date been conducted in a highly ad hoc and inconsistent manner. A systematic approach to environmental training, involving NGOs as well as NDPBs such as RBG Kew, is required.
JNCC
10. The official role of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) is to provide evidence, information and advice to the UK Government on nature conservation. The JNCC has had full-time OTs capacity for 5 years, and the RSPB recognises that this team has facilitated valuable environmental mainstreaming processes and other conservation projects in several Territories, established excellent working relations with OT Governments, and provided them with useful support. We are therefore concerned to hear that core funding for this work have recently been substantially reduced, as this can only have a negative impact on the type and level of support that can be provided.
11. However, the RSPB believes that the JNCC has not, to date, effectively fulfilled its role as a technical adviser to the UK Government with regard to OT biodiversity conservation. The JNCC’s current working methodology in relation to OTs is to be responsive solely to the various and changing priorities of OT Governments. Effective partnership-working with OT Governments is vital, but the JNCC seems to have overlooked its responsibility to provide the UK Government with sufficient evidence to enable it to discharge its international responsibilities. Indeed, after five years of biodiversity work, the JNCC still does not know the number of species unique to each of the Territories, nor the total which are at imminent risk of extinction.
12. Furthermore, a recent parliamentary question reveals that the JNCC does not even know the number of terrestrial or marine protected areas in the Territories, a seemingly fundamental piece of conservation knowledge. Without such basic information, JNCC is unable to provide the UK Government with the evidence and advice it requires to enable an overarching strategy. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a strategic work programme in place to address this evidence deficit, as Defra’s Evidence Plan for Biodiversity and Ecosystems Evidence provides only one sentence of detail on the OTs: “Improve the evidence base in UK Overseas Territories to assist in meeting international commitments, in particular the control and management of invasive species (ongoing—medium priority)”. Such vagaries urgently need to be translated into detailed scientific action in a much more concerted manner.
13. Recommendation: Defra should establish an OTs-specific evidence plan and explicitly direct the JNCC to implement a more strategic programme of OT biodiversity evidence-gathering, to include the systematic identification of the most urgently threatened species and habitats in the Territories, and a joint-assessment with OT Governments as to the adequacy of current terrestrial and marine protected area networks..
14. The Committee also discussed policy-making by the JNCC during the evidence session. Due to a chronic lack of capacity within Defra, the JNCC has ended up in a de facto policy-making and small grant-disbursing role with regard to the OTs. For example, stakeholders at the March 2013 review of the OTs Biodiversity Strategy agreed that the JNCC had actually written this document. JNCC also makes spending decisions through its own OT funding lines, and is the most active promoter of the incongruous position that the UK Government should not have any of its own environmental priorities with regard to the OTs (cf. JNCC presentation to CIEEM conference, January 2013). The JNCC’s exclusion of research institutions and civil society from its “OT Research & Training Steering Group” also appears in direct contradiction to HMG’s White Paper commitment to “strengthen co-operation with the non-governmental and scientific communities”.
Transparency
15. The Committee’s focus on this fundamental issue was very welcome. It was therefore disappointing to learn that the FCO could give no examples of practical support it had offered to advance freedom of information. The RSPB would suggest a different approach for the various Territories. Firstly, transparency standards in the uninhabited Territories remain poor. This is an area where immediate UK Government action is both possible and strongly desirable, and freedom of information legislation should be passed in these Territories forthwith. The RSPB recognises that capacity constraints are an issue for the smaller OTs, but notes that the smallest inhabited OT, Pitcairn, has successfully introduced freedom of information legislation. This sets an important precedent for those Territories with less capacity to introduce a proportionate transparency framework, and this is something which the FCO should proactively facilitate. Finally, for those Territories where DfID funds major infrastructure projects, the DfID “Aid Transparency Guarantee” should be extended so as to include coverage of the environmental impacts of aid spending.
16. Recommendation: Freedom of Information legislation should be passed for the uninhabited Territories as soon as practicable, whilst the DfID “Aid Transparency Guarantee” should be extended to incorporate the environmental impacts of that department’s aid spending.
St Helena Airport
17. The St Helena airport is currently being built on a unique habitat: a mini-Namib desert located in the middle of the South Atlantic. The biodiversity of this site remains very poorly known, even to the degree that we do not know exactly which species are there, and which may have recently gone extinct. The RSPB has supported improved access to St Helena, but is gravely concerned that the environmental management of the airport project has, to date, been inadequate. Of particular concern has been the severe delay to the Landscape & Ecology Mitigation Plan (LEMP), which was supposed to begin a year before construction took place so as to allow adequate time to secure sensitive populations and enable adequate mitigation. The DfID official questioned characterised this plan as being “mainly about the visual impacts of the airport”, which belittles the enormous role that this aspect of the project has to play in restoring the biodiversity of this remarkable site. The official stressed that whilst it was “unfortunate that those delays took place, we do have the environmental impact assessment”. Without active mitigation work however to remedy any impacts which an assessment identified, the value of an environmental impact assessment alone is questionable. Finally, the DfID official expressed their full confidence in the opaque structures established to manage the Air Access project. The key concern that the St Helena Government finds itself in an impossible situation where it is both project manager and project regulator was sadly overlooked. In particular, it is interesting to note that it is widely alleged on island that it is the St Helena Government itself, not DfID, which will be financially liable for the cost of any delays or budget overruns. The prospect that environmental management will therefore genuinely be prioritised by SHG when it is under so much pressure from DfID to deliver the project to time and to budget is limited.
18. Recommendations: DfID must establish clear and transparent mechanisms to enable independently verifiable oversight of LEMP implementation and the environmental management of the project, preferably through the establishment of a steering group with a clear Terms of Reference and made up of a majority of independent experts who are not employees of SHG or the companies involved in airport construction or environmental management.
9 September 2013