If you've been watching TV this last couple of weeks, I hope you managed to catch our fabulous new TV advert. If not, you can see it here:
The whizzy TV advert kicked off our new campaign 'Giving Nature a Home'
You will see that the big focus for our campaign is to encourage people everywhere - including those in cities with small gardens - to do a bit for nature in their garden. I have been asked whether this means we are moving away from all the work we do with farmers, to concentrate on people in towns.
My loud and insistent response is ABSOLUTELY NOT!
This is just the first phase in a new approach for the RSPB. Our fundamental raison d’être remains the same - helping threatened wildlife flourish alongside and amongst us. We are a small island, under pressure from a growing population, using more resources, needing more places to live and work, and facing big issues like climate change. Currently too much of our wildlife is losing the battle. We need more people to see the trouble our wildlife is in. (If you are any doubt about it, take a look at the State of Nature report published earlier this year by 25 wildlife organisations. The report reveals that 60 per cent of the species studied have declined over recent decades. More than one in ten of all the species assessed are under threat of disappearing from our shores altogether.)
We simply need more people to do something about it, wherever they live.
So this first step is talking to those who may only have a small outdoor space, and may not know that much about nature. But they know they enjoy hearing the dawn chorus, and seeing a butterfly land on a flower - even if they don't know what its called. There's a lot of people like that out there, so encouraging them all to do something adds up to doing a whole lot together.
We then want to encourage those people to look beyond their back garden. Once they have realised why they should help, and how they can help, we will be encouraging them to see the wider countryside, and see how they can help there. Including how they can support the vital work of wildlife-friendly farmers across the UK.
And whilst we are doing that, we will continue to be working with farmers. There's fewer of you than those we are trying to reach with the TV advert, but individually you can each make a bigger difference to the fortunes of the UK's wildlife. Simply because farmland makes up so much of the habitat our wildlife depends on. So we will continue to work just as hard as ever with farmers giving nature a home - both directly through our Advisors, and through our FarmWildlife partnership.
As another TV advert says..... "Because you're worth it"