The UK Government has just announced that it is to ban fracking at the surface in protected areas in both England and Wales. This ban will apply to any new and to all existing onshore petroleum licences. The official Government response to a consultation they ran last year can be found here.
The RSPB has been working with NGO partners to call for these protections for vulnerable sites, wildlife and landscapes for some time now. We'd like to say a particular thank you to all the campaigners who signed an eaction asking Amber Rudd to rule out fracking in these areas. Your support helped us achieve today's victory.
We welcome this measure as an important step in safeguarding wildlife from the risks of fracking.
Two years ago, with a coalition of other NGOs, we launched two reports examining the potential risks of fracking in the UK and setting out ten recommendations for improvements to the regulatory regime around fracking. Such a ban was one of our key recommendations and we are pleased to see the UK Government take the sensible step of introducing it. While today's announcement is a step in the right direction, it does not, in our view, go far enough and other improvements to the regulatory regime are needed.
Alongside the regulatory improvements we called for, we also asked to see a compelling case that fracking could be compatible with the UK's carbon budgets and other climate change commitments. We hope that Government will publish as soon as possible a report they have already received from the Committee on Climate Change on the compatibility of fracking and carbon budgets. In the wake of the landmark agreement in Paris last December, and ambitions to limit temperature rises to 1.5 degrees at most, it is more important than ever that we understand whether fracking is compatible with these commitments and the UK's contribution to them.
In Scotland there continues to be a moratorium on fracking and in Northern Ireland a planning presumption against it, and we will continue to monitor those situations and provide any updates on them.
In collaboration with our other Fit to Frack coalition partners, we will soon be publishing a blog reviewing progress against our ten recommendations, so keep an eye out for that on this blog in the next few weeks.
Matt Williams, Assistant Warden, RSPB Snape.