Last month we celebrated the Government’s announcement of their intention to set a legally binding target for species abundance by 2030 in the Environment Bill. However, when the amendment was laid this month it left a lot to be desired. The weakly worded target includes no set date for the Government to halt the decline of wildlife, merely requiring the decline to slow down by 2030.
The changes to the draft law lack the ambition to genuinely halt the decline of nature by 2030 as backed by the Prime Minister in the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature and in the G7 environment communique. It also falls short of commitments made by the Environment Secretary, Rt Hon George Eustice MP, in a speech at Delamere Forest less than a month ago, when he recognised that the UK is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world and committed to introduce a “legally binding target for species abundance for 2030, aiming to halt the decline of nature”.
With a 68% decline in the past thirty years, The Common Toad is one of the many species we could lose without an ambitious commitment to halt nature's decline. Photo credit: Paul Turner (rspb-images.com)
Beccy Speight, CEO of the RSPB, said: “No ifs or buts. Nature in the UK is in deep trouble and that’s an ongoing and growing disaster for both people and wildlife. We have a once in a generation opportunity to start to fix this through a strong Environment Bill for England. Prevaricating and weak wording in the proposed amendment will fail all of us. We need a strong, clear amendment that will provide the legal backbone to halt the decline of nature by 2030 and we need to strengthen the protection of species and the most important places for wildlife to make that possible on the ground. Either we want to do this or we don’t, in one of the most nature depleted countries in the world – and the Prime Minister has said many times on a global stage that we do want to do it. So let’s do it.”
A coalition of over 60 environment groups, including ourselves, have been campaigning for a legally-binding ‘State of Nature’ target to halt nature’s decline by 2030, with a petition to the Prime Minister already reaching more than 190,000 signatures, backed by environment, mental health and international development charities. Such a commitment, in law, to start to restore nature by 2030, is essential to guarantee the extensive action needed across government to meet the PM’s Leaders Pledge for Nature and 2050 Net Zero targets.
There were high hopes that if England became the first country with an ambitious target to halt nature’s decline, the Government would be setting a world-leading example that others would follow. Environmentalists had expected that such a ‘Net Zero target for nature’ in England would lead to other countries committing to similar legal deadlines to halt nature’s decline, as was the case with the legally-binding Net Zero deadline for emissions under the Climate Change Act. But the target proposed by government is not a world-leading Net Zero for nature, it is a nod to nature needing help, without the legal power to halt its decline.
We will continue to call on the Government not to abandon this major opportunity for global leadership on our nature and climate crises during our G7 and COP26 host year and ahead of the pivotal global nature negotiations under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. We urge the Government to rewrite the amendment to the Bill with a firm 2030 target to halt nature’s decline.
The organisations which make up 'State of Nature' coalition.