Some good news from South Africa (in stark contrast to the current state of the third Test Match in Cape Town!) is that high profile campaigning by our partner organisation, BirdLife South Africa, has succeeded in saving the Langebaan Lagoon from a proposed port expansion. This Western Cape wetland is the most important site for wading birds in South Africa and is designated as an Important Bird Area and Ramsar site as a result. You can read about the background to the case here.
One of the important species that spend our winter (the South African summer) at Langebaan Lagoon is the sanderling (pictured) – it’s sobering to think that the same birds could have stopped to feed and gather strength for their epic migration on a UK estuary.
The great migration flyways link our planet and for waders like sanderling their ability to make these staggering journeys depends upon the health and survival of coastal wetlands. Port development is but one of the threats these fragile ecosystems face but, to state the obvious, ports are usually on the coast and often close to (or in the middle of) internationally important coastal wetlands. So, it is of little surprise that port development and conservation have often come into conflict.
Here in the UK, the RSPB has put a considerable amount of work into building constructive relations with the ports industry off the back of some bruising encounters in the latter part of the 20th century. And it has borne fruit. The London Gateway container port is set to be built next to the Thames Estuary and Marshes SPA. Like other major port schemes on the Humber and Stour and Orwell estuaries, the predicted damage to intertidal habitat led (via an objections by the RSPB and others) to comprehensive mitigation and compensation measures that enabled the development to proceed alongside effective protection of some of the UK’s most important wildlife sites.
And, yes it is entirely possible a sanderling sunning itself in the South African summer could have visited the Thames on its way south.
But there is a big cloud on the horizon – in the shape of the ports National Policy Statement (NPS). We’re working on our response to the consultation and will be pressing hard to ensure that what is a poor and unsatisfactory document doesn’t risk setting back port policy in the UK to the dark days of a decade or more ago.