The week before the General Election we held a climate changed themed husting in Exeter. Well attended, the audience engaged in lively conversation with the candidates. Much of the debate centred quite naturally about ways in which we could reduce our carbon emissions and thus stave off the worst excesses of what might lie ahead. This was comfortable ground for all concerned and the policy positions were well rehearsed.
However, momentarily, one question appeared to stump the otherwise talkative party representatives. The question was simple; how will the different parties address the need to adapt climate change? I might be wrong, but I’m not sure the question was fully understood or, alternatively, the candidates were not fully au fait with their party's position on this. Fair enough, you can’t be an expert on everything. And it’s not an issue that gets as much exposure as the debate around carbon emissions. But it's a crucial issue.
Adapting to climate change, put simply, accepts that climate change is happening, predicts the changes it will bring, and plans for these changes. It’s a gloomy business.
Global rises in sea level are putting huge pressure on coastal populations, often in the poorest parts of the world. Whole communities may become “climate migrants” as they are forced to move. How do we respond to this? How do we respond to sea level rise around our own coast. Do we keep building the defences higher and higher at huge expense to an already stretched public purse or do we let the water in and attempt to mange our retreat?
This is just one aspect of climate change adaptation. There are many more. What about the new challenges climate change might bring to our public health services, or the changes it will impose on our farming sector? These are pretty fundamental questions.
For the RSPB one of our many concerns is about how wildlife will adapt to climate change. And more to the point, how we will support those creatures that are likely to find it difficult to adapt.
A few years ago colleagues at the BTO published the “Climate Change Atlas”. It’s a huge tome that details the predicted effects on global rises in temperature on our bird populations. Throughout its hundreds of pages you repeatedly see bird breeding ranges of birds moving north.
Of course, if it were just a simple move you could quite rightly say “so what”? It doesn’t mean that the populations are falling; it just means they are moving? And if you are a birder this is actually really exciting as it means you will see a whole raft of new breeding species such as the recent announcement of purple herons nesting in Kent.
But this completely misses the point. It’s not the birds that can adapt that we are worried about. It’s those that can’t; those that are uniquely associated with one particular habitat type.
In the south west there’s a species that illustrates this well. Dartford warblers, from a low point in the mid 1960s, have gradually been expanding their range in the region in response to the restoration of lowland heathland. Dartford warblers are uniquely associated with this type of habitat in the UK.
But as the climate changes, lowland heath will be put under pressure. The most southerly heaths elsewhere in Europe may change altogether, and in England there’s only limited opportunity for them to either spread naturally or be recreated further north. Because the UK is globally important for this type of habitat, this is a problem. Where can our heath and our Dartford warblers go in the face of climate change?
Well, in the south west there is a unique opportunity for them to move upwards! Fascinatingly it is suggested that our upland moors in the region, Dartmoor, Exmoor and Bodmin will gradually become `lowland’ heaths. Tracking Dartford warblers, there’s already a noticeable colonisation of the lower parts of the moors.
So, these places will become of increasing importance, especially as traditional lowland heath declines across Western Europe. They can become European strongholds for Dartford warblers, and indeed all the other species associated with this habitat.
But, and here’s the huge ‘but’, they will only work for these species if they are managed properly. And this doesn’t mean buying the odd nature reserve here and there. It means working at a landscape scale, on places like Dartmoor, to ensure they work for these birds. It is about making sure that birds have `corridors’ by which they can move from lowland to upland. It is about making sure that once there, they have the room to thrive. In short, it’s about helping them to adapt.
And this approach is at the heart of the new thinking about nature conservation at a landscape level. Dubbed FutureScapes by the RSPB, and Living Landscapes by the Wildlife Trusts, it is about organisations and individuals working together over huge tracts of land to ensure that wildlife has the space to adapt in the face of climate change.
In some ways FutureScapes is a natural evolution of projects we’ve been involved with previously. Indeed a couple of years ago we launched the UK’s first `proto’ FutureScape in Wiltshire in a bold attempt to focus thinking on chalk downland.
But we have ambitious plans for the future. We are looking at places like Purbeck, the Somerset Levels and Moors and the Cornish coast as places that would most immediately benefit from the FutureScapes approach.
Crucially though, if this going to work, we need to find a way to make our work for wildlife significantly more effective. And this is not going to be without it’s challenges.
How do we find more momentum by tackling structural blockages at regional and national levels? In other words, how do we get the various agencies working together? And how do we commit to more effective working relationships with diverse interests? How do we tap the huge resources that people represent – the expertise and knowledge found throughout the various communities that live and breathe theses landscapes?
And finally, how do we ensure our new crop of politicians and decision makers buy in to this approach in the face of scepticism? In short, how do we demonstrate that people care, that people want see our wildlife adapt to the coming changes?
No mean challenge, but we already have over thousands signatures to our Letter to the Future petition. And we are already beginning to see landscape scale wildlife conservation being talked about in the press. With this continued support the challenges of adapting to climate change we hope will become part of the common purpose. . And hopefully, by the next election, we will have seen some real progress, with our leaders equipped to champion this new style of working for a countryside fit for wildlife..