Earlier this week at the Lib Dem conference in Brighton, Baroness Kate Parminter spoke about how much she liked coalitions. Clearly, as the party’s environment lead she was proud about what the party had achieved in government but she was also talking about the impact that coalitions can have when people or organisations come together with an agreed purpose. Together they can be mighty.
I agree and have spent much of my working life working in or for coalitions to have positive impact for nature: State of Nature and the Climate Coalition are two good recent examples.
This week, another smaller but perfectly formed coalition was able to celebrate the protection of one of our most important sites for wildlife.
You may have seen the news that an independent Inspector has refused an appeal against two water abstraction licence renewal applications that threatened rare wildlife at Catfield Fen nature reserve, in Norfolk, which the RSPB manages on behalf of Butterfly Conservation.
Butterfly Conservation, Plantlife, and the RSPB worked together as a mini coalition along with Natural England to provide ecological evidence for the Environment Agency's robust defence of its refusals at the Appeal inquiry in Spring this year. Using its expert knowledge of the reserve, the RSPB assisted with the argument that abstraction was having a detrimental impact on the condition of the protected wildlife site.
As I have written previously (see here, here and here), Catfield and its sister site, Sutton Fen, are of international importance and possibly contain the largest number of threatened species in the whole of the UK including some very rare water beetles and plants like the beautiful and delicate Fen Orchid shown here (of which the sites hold more than 90% of the UK population).
While there has been a bit of a reaction from the farming community about this, this is just another example of the big conversation that we need to have as a result of the Brexit vote.
The UK Government is clear that it wants to restore biodiversity in 25 years and has international obligations to do so (through the Convention on Biological Diversity Aichi targets and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals). It will not be possible to realise these commitments unless it starts with the basics of “stopping the rot and protecting the best” places for wildlife. That’s why the Inspector was right to uphold the original decisions from the Environment Agency to reject the water abstraction license applications.
But there is a bigger issue here. We want and need the UK to start “restoring the rest” and that’s why it is essential that Defra clearly writes into its emerging agriculture and landuse plan the ambition to improve the farmed environment.
This will then allow Government to line up the essential tools to drive restoration of our environment.
We are here to help and I hope that we can bring together a big, broad coalition of environment, health, food and farming groups to make the case for an environment, farming and rural development policy that works for people and for nature.
This is an excellent result. I do agree completely with your last paragraph Martin regarding an environment that works for both nature and people. To this end some of the larger farming organisations need to take this message on board and not be so blinkered in their approach. Hopefully this result will emphasise the message to them.
This is a very important result and perhaps illustrates the equally significant point that that our most important wildlife sites that receive the proper legal protection have the most chance of remaining.
Whilst I agree we should be restoring habitats and this should be a one of the key environmental drivers now and in the future I sincerely believe that the best of the rest that currently don't have a legal tag of protection should be given that status. Legal protection such as SSSIs may be even more important in the future with Brexit and suddenly the tier of EU protection disappears. Whilst there appears to be an appetite from the public to maintain and even strengthen environmental protections the vagaries of politics, economics (agri-environment) and pressure from certain sectors means that some of our most important wildlife sites remain vulnerable and invariably certain habitats/species will come under further pressure.
In the State of nature report it mentions protection as a key underpinning principle. Legal protection whilst that isn't full-proof the evidence suggests that protected sites maintain species and are generally better managed than non-protected sites. I think its important that we all work together to achieve results such as Catfield and trumpet this success. Equally, the 50 plus organisations that fed into SoN need to ensure that the best of the rest get the protection they deserve.