Airports and roads on the journey to sustainable development

I've handed the reins of my blog over to Mark Avery for most of June. Mark's sharing the successes and challenges of saving nature around the world in the run up to the Rio+20 Earth Summit. 

At the forthcoming Rio+20 conference, delegates will talk about economic growth, increasing development and producing more food. Driven by a growing population and growing expectations of standards of living we look for ways to get more from the planet. That inevitably puts pressure on undeveloped areas, fish stocks, water resources, rainforests and everything else. However, we are stuck with one small planet, we can’t build an extension, and so our aspirations need to be met on planet Earth.

Looking down on southern England from a plane the landscape appears full of houses, factories and roads, the coast is built up, the towns almost seem to run one into the other as an endless stream of built development and the few wilder places stick out and draw the eye. I once looked down on the New Forest and thought how small, puny and hemmed in it appeared from the air, but maybe someone else would have seen it as a vast waste of space.

There will always be conflicts between people who want an area developed and those who want it protected, and it will always be tempting to portray such conflicts as being between progress and conservatism, jobs and the environment, wealth-makers and bunny-huggers, and there will always be some truth in such stark characterisations, but not all the truth.

The campaign that the RSPB ran in 2002-3, which prevented an airport being built on the North Kent Marshes led to the RSPB working with local businesses, wildfowlers, the aviation industry, airlines and local residents because of their fears about the cost, safety, necessity, practicality and environmental impact of any such development.

Was this a victory of nature over progress – I really don’t think so? If an airport had been built at Cliffe, High Halstow or nearby we would have lost an irreplaceable internationally important wildlife site for ever and gained an expensive, dangerous, polluting and uneconomic airport.  Who would have won from that outcome?  It felt very much like a victory for common sense.

The idea of an airport in this area keeps returning and there will be other future threats too, no doubt.   

Across the world, BirdLife international partner organisations are trying to resolve conflicts which might destroy wildlife sites, often with help from RSPB experts, and they are having remarkable success at helping governments, developers and local people find sensible outcomes.

In Poland, the BirdLife International partner, OTOP, helped adjust the route of the E67 (a road from Prague to Helsinki) so that it did not destroy primeval forests and pristine marshes which were the homes to wolves, lynx, lesser-spotted eagles and cranes. The finalised route was shorter, cheaper, quicker to build and quicker to travel – and left the area’s wildlife almost unaffected. 

Malgorzata Górska from OTOP awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize, the world's top prize for grassroots activists, but another outcome was that OTOP’s voice in Poland has been strengthened because of the constructive but determined part it played in delivering an outcome that satisfied almost everyone (you never do please everyone).

The idea of an airport in the Thames Estuary has been catapulted back to prominence by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who has his own proposal – referred to as ‘Boris Island’. And more recently by Norman Foster unveiling his vision for a four runway airport on the Isle of Grain in North Kent. Any Thames Estuary airport would cause immense damage to the wildlife and environment in the area, which includes some wonderful RSPB Nature Reserves including: Cliffe Pools, Northward Hill, Rainham Marshes, West Canvey Marshes, Vange Marshes, and Shorne Marshes. Step up for nature today and help us get the message across to the Secretary of State for Transport Justine Greening.

Dr Mark Avery is a former Conservation Director of the RSPB and now is a writer on environmental matters. We’ve asked Mark to write these 20 essays on the run up to the Rio+20 conference.  His views are not necessarily those of the RSPB.  Mark writes a daily blog about UK nature conservation issues.