Defend Nature

Our most important campaign ever?

 I’ve told you a million times that hyperbole is always best avoided. And this blog follows that advice!

On Tuesday an unprecedented partnership (well 100 organisations in the UK and the entire BirdLife International partnership across the European Union, Friends of the Earth, WWF and European Environment Bureau) launched a campaign to defend the laws that protect nature.

This blog has been exploring the role these laws (collectively known as the Nature Directives) are playing in protecting nature’s home and safeguarding threatened wildlife. I will be returning to some of these stories over the coming days and we will be featuring guest blogs from a variety of authors who are directly involved on the front line of nature conservation or have played key roles in helping to create the most effective laws for nature anywhere in the world.

Before I go on – here’s the link to the campaign, a campaign that we believe is our most important yet.

That’s a big claim – but one benefit of a greying beard is I can remember a time before the Nature Directives came in to force (in 1979 with the Birds Directive) – this ended a decade when nature conservation, frankly, spent too much time cataloguing the inexorable loss of nature. The seminal Nature Conservation Review edited by Derek Ratcliffe revealed the catastrophic loss of habitats across the UK, the Nature Conservancy Council reported annually at the loss of and damage to our best wildlife sites (Sites of Special Scientific Interest in GB, Areas of Special Scientific Interest in Northern Ireland) and this was running at a rate of around 10% a year.

It wasn’t just a wake up call – it was a screaming alarm bell.

The Birds Directive (and it’s translation into UK law by means of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act) put the breaks on the losses – and one of the stories we will be telling over the coming weeks is how and why the Birds Directive has been so successful.

Hang on a minute, I hear you ask. If you’re claiming success – why those alarm bells going off so loudly now? Doesn’t the State of Nature project show these laws are failing? And yes the trends are deeply worrying but would have been so much worse without the Nature Directives ... indeed studies show that the most threatened birds have directly benefited from them (a theme that we will return to). Just as I was posting this blog this article appeared in the Guardian reporting on an EU State of Nature report produced for the European Commission and showing that a third of the bird species across the EU are in decline.

One of the most important lessons of the past decades has been that the Directives have been effective when they have been properly implemented – pretty obvious really, but an important point. We don’t need to start again, just implement what we have already.

Bempton Cliffs in Yorkshire - defended as a Special Protection Area (as well as an RSPB Reserve) - failure to safeguard sites at sea threatens the future of Bempton's nesting seabirds when they head off to find food. A good example of the benefits of the Nature Directives and the risks when implementation is poor.

There are some similarities between the dark days for nature in the ‘70s and now. Economic difficulties, the pursuit of recovery and growth, and unrelenting pressure on nature, the places we love and the species that bring them to life; sounds familiar?

The response, back then, was to write progressive laws that protect the best, aim to restore the rest and enable development that can avoid, mitigate or compensate for damage to nature. So that not only is nature defended but the nature of development is improved and enhanced to the benefit of us all.

This is why our campaign matters so much – because the Nature Directives have been effective (and should be more effective) they have attracted criticism and we’ve seen regular attacks designed to undermine them, this isn’t new. But now the Nature Directives are under review and under extreme risk of being weakened and sidelined. Yet their role is as important as ever – that’s why adding your voice to the call to defend nature matters so much – please take the time to follow the link, read a little more and take action.

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