Nature Recovery Green Paper: Navigating through smoke and mirrors

(C) Eleanor Bentall (rspb-images.com)

Today’s blog is written by Meera Inglis, Policy Officer for External Affairs and Strategy, on why the Nature Recovery Green Paper fails to deliver a plan for nature’s recovery.

  

The UK is in the grip of a nature emergency. The government’s Nature Recovery Green Paper fails to really address the causes of nature’s decline and risks wasting time on unnecessary changes.

  

What is the Nature Recovery Green Paper (a.k.a ‘Green Paper’)?

In 2018, the UK Government set out their 25 Year Environment Plan, which held the genuinely bold ambition to make “ours the first generation to leave that environment in a better state than we found it”. The Green Paper looks specifically at how we can give protections to certain places and species in England.

In this blog post, we look at the some of the proposals that the government has made in the Green Paper and talk about why they are unlikely to help nature recover.

 

What does it say?

A Green Paper (GP), is a discussion document intended to trigger thoughts and ideas, and consequently there are a lot of proposals made in the Nature Recovery Green Paper. Here we are only going to look at the broad, overarching ideas that underpin those proposals.

First of all, it repeatedly talks about ‘simplifying’, ‘streamlining’ and ‘consolidating’ processes, such as how we give places protected status, and how DEFRA’s advisory bodies are organised. Secondly, it says that decisions need to be more driven by science than process. At a glance, neither of these points sound especially unreasonable, but when we think about them a bit more carefully, we can see why the GP’s proposals won’t help nature recover at the pace and scale that we want to see.

 

Do we need to simplify procedures? Would that help to halt nature’s decline?

Currently, different sites and different species in England are given protections that fall into several categories or ‘tiers’ – some have very high levels of protections (e.g. endangered species) while some have much less (for example, it’s possible to build on a Site of Special Scientific Interest if you have the right permissions and surveys undertaken). The UK Government proposes scrapping these tiered systems for sites and species and replacing them with a different set of tiers. The government claims that these will be simpler and easier to understand but, crucially, it doesn’t say that they will offer stronger protections. This leaves the door open to the weakening of the current system. Unless the government is willing to commit to simpler but stronger tiers, it’s very hard to see how the proposed changes would help nature.

There’s also the issue of timing: legislative changes can take years to put in place, but given the pace and extent of nature’s decline, we need changes that will have an impact now, on the ground.

There’s nothing wrong with making systems simpler, if they do indeed help us tackle the nature emergency. But there’s nothing in the GP which talks about the root causes of nature’s decline. As the 2019 State of Nature Report showed, the main drivers of species decline in the UK include, for example, agricultural management, urbanisation and pollution. It’s hard to see how any of these drivers would be reduced by a reorganisation of the tiered system. If they want to pursue these new simpler systems, the government need to come up with a detailed and thoroughly evidenced guidance on how such systems will fit in with new and existing policies such as Environmental Land Management Schemes, Local Nature Recovery Strategies, and Biodiversity Net Gain. At present, we have all these pieces of a jigsaw, but no clarity over how they all fit together.

 

Are we currently being led more by process than science?

The UK Government claims, in the GP, that decisions about site protections are too heavily influenced by legal processes, rather than relying on the best scientific evidence. As a result, one of the proposals is that the Secretary of State for the Environment be put in charge of all site designations, taking much of this job away from the public body, Natural England. The argument is that the Secretary of State will take advice from scientists before making decisions, whereas Natural England has to take longer because it is a large organisation which has to follow standardised processes. The problem is that no evidence is given that Natural England do anything but follow the best science. The current Secretary of State, George Eustice, however, very recently went against the best scientific advice by removing the UK and EU ban on bee-killing pesticides. So, if the UK Government do go ahead with this proposal, any future decisions made by the Secretary of State need to be fully transparent and published alongside the evidence in question. We must avoid decisions being made for political reasons, rather than sound scientific ones.

 

The need for urgent action

The Green Paper was supposed to offer up efficient and effective proposals for how we can drive nature’s recovery across England. However, given the questionable foundations that the proposals are built on, and the lack of a ‘big picture’ which would show how the sites and species proposals fit in with other policies, the GP is very unlikely to help us to become “the first generation to leave the environment in a better state than we found it”.

 

The Nature Recovery Green Paper consultation closed on May 11th, as part of normal procedure, we expect the Government to respond within 12 weeks, but a formal date has not yet been set. Look out for future blogs once their response has been published!

In the meantime, another consultation on Environmental Targets is currently open until June 27. We will be responding to this too as the targets which get set will be most influential for the future of England’s nature policy.

 

Further reading:

Jess Chappell, from the RSPB England Team, has also written a reflection on the Green Paper, which you can find here