Ecos 34 3 4 entire ecos

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Winter 2013 issue 34(3/4)

Nature’s middle ground - the new battlegrounds Natural England - no friends in high places?

Development and change - finding a role for wildlife offsets?

ECOS

A REVIEW OF CONSERVATION ECOS is the journal of the British Association of Nature Conservationists

www.banc.org.uk

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013

ecos@easynet.co.uk Editorial

Managing Editor: Rick Minter 07768 748301 ecos@easynet.co.uk

Offsetting or upsetting?

Assistant Editor: Martin Spray Hillside, Aston Bridge Road, Pludds, Ruardean, Glos. GL17 9TZ 01594-861404 Acknowledgements This issue was edited by Rick Minter and Martin Spray.

Cover photo of Somerset badger cull patrol by Owen Newman.

The opinions expressed in ECOS are not necessarily those of BANC Council or of the Editors.

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So, Natural England escaped a sticky end after this year’s triennial review of the agencies, and the Environment Agency will not be empire building at Natural England’s expense.

For wildlife itself and for the great outdoors, what matters is for the relevant agency to pack some punch. But bureaucratic change usually ends in disheartened people and less of them doing the work that matters. We are better off harnessing the strengths and distinctions of these agencies, than risking a messy and prejudiced merger.

A year of grim news for nature was reinforced by the umbrella body Wildlife and Countryside Link. Nature Check, produced by Link, gauges whether government has kept its green promises. Alas, government is failing to deliver on habitat protection, species decline and animal welfare. Its performance is also getting worse on wildlife measures in general according to Nature Check, but progress is apparent on international wildlife trade, whaling, fisheries reform, and responding to Ash dieback. It is vital that government is held to account, but messages of despair must be measured. As authors in this edition note, people have embraced the cause of rewilding this year. It is just one approach to conservation, but it resonates because it offers hope. We must mix in some cheer for wider audiences, as they hear the ‘must do better’ message to government.

Much coverage in this issue relates to the ordinary, undesignated landscape. The land which most of us experience, most of the time. The touchy-feely things about these environments feel real and important to us. Yet these are the places which host the most development, the most change, and are most vulnerable to direct and insidious damage. The work of Local Nature Partnerships, discussed by Tony Whitbread, could achieve more collaboration to care for our unprotected wildlife. Meanwhile the looming agenda to reshape agriculture will have major implications for the wider countryside. Gavin Saunders and Simon Brenman suggest a more holistic approach to UK farming. The challenge they set out is both enlightening and daunting.

President: John Bowers

Chair: Gavin Saunders

Vice-Presidents: Marion Shoard Adrian Phillips

Secretary: Ruth Boogert Treasurer: Jeremy Owen

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ECOS is printed by Severnprint using Cocoon Silk 300gsm cover and Cocoon uncoated 100gsm text paper. Both papers have a 100% recycled content and are FSC certified. The electricity used during printing is generated from renewable sources. The magazine is printed under the SylvaPack environmental print route using no alcohol and processless plates. Severnprint donates to Tree Aid to support tree planting in sub-Saharan Africa.

The conservation sector’s tools for protecting the wider countryside and its wildlife are mostly blunt instruments. For instance, time and again we allow environmental assessment in the planning system to have an easy ride. Ecology consultants even endorse this situation. The EIA process is formulaic. It results in token mitigation.

Whether the impact is from housing, wind turbines or quarries, we do not fully compensate, and our mantra of ‘no net loss’ from development should be more ambitiously set as a requirement for ‘net gain’. So why not entertain biodiversity offsets as a better, supplementary approach in these situations? Mike Townsend looks at the risks if offsets become a permit system, and Joseph Bull looks at the potential, if an offsets scheme is used with care and intelligence. However we set environmental conditions for developers, we must raise the bar.

Geoffrey Wain

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Biodiversity offsets use in the UK: How, Where and When?

Leaping to rash conclusions about biodiversity offsets based on a limited outlook on their use could cause missed opportunities for UK nature conservation.

JOSEPH BULL Recent articles on biodiversity offsetting in the UK have tended towards rather apocalyptic titles such as “A license to trash? Why Biodiversity Offsetting (BO) will be a disaster for the environment”.1 The authors refer to the use of biodiversity offsets in the UK, which are being trialed as part of a two year voluntary pilot scheme. Offsets are also the subject of a recent Green Paper and consultation, and are therefore being seriously considered by policymakers. So, to what degree are the fears of those writing these articles well founded? I argue that, whilst the biodiversity offset approach does have its challenges, which are well documented in the literature, these are not insurmountable, and some of the key concerns raised in the media actually result from a misunderstanding of the approach.

What biodiversity offsets are Biodiversity offset policies essentially require companies to fully compensate for any ‘unavoidable’ ecological impacts they cause through development; for instance, clearing habitat to make way for mineral extraction. To do so, they must create additional equivalent habitat somewhere nearby: by planting a woodland, digging a wetland, restoring degraded native grassland, increasing the productivity of fish spawning habitat, and so forth. The objective of most biodiversity offset schemes is to achieve ‘no net loss’ of biodiversity alongside development.2 Biodiversity offsets shouldn’t be seen in isolation. They are intended to achieve no net loss as part of a ‘mitigation hierarchy’, i.e. any developer must first attempt to Avoid, Minimize and Mitigate any likely ecological impacts. Biodiversity offsets are then a last resort for residual impacts, if and only if those impacts are deemed acceptable by people, policymakers and planners. If the hierarchy is well designed, the requirement to pay for offsets should become an incentive to reduce impacts upon nature in the first place.

Offsetting is not an entirely new idea. Native vegetation offsets have been implemented in parts of Australia for over a decade, and a comparable wetland compensation policy has operated in the US for much longer. In fact, there are over 40 countries that have some kind of compensatory biodiversity mitigation policy in place, and such policies are under development in at least another 20.3 That is not to mention the growing number of large companies that are voluntarily attempting to achieve ‘no net loss’ of biodiversity through a suite of mechanisms, including offsets.4 There is plenty of experience to draw upon.

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This barren area provides an opportunity for habitat restoration and creation under new offset schemes being devised in Uzbekistan. The location is a former natural gas exploration site on the Ustyurt plateau which was created and closed off

by Gazprom, and is on land owned by the state and managed by the Karakalpak regional authorities in NW Uzbekistan.

Photo: Joseph Bull

Biodiversity offsets in England In 2011, using the experience from elsewhere in the world to craft a methodology, Defra launched a biodiversity offset pilot study in England. The pilot is intended to run for two years and explore the use of biodiversity offsets in the planning system, for six counties officially participating in the scheme and a number of complementary public and private sector projects. Biodiversity offsets are not mandatory in these regions, and it is not yet clear whether they would become so under any subsequent offset policy. As a result of the extensive work put into the scheme by local planning authorities and ecologists, the first offset projects have started to come through the official system now. However, counties such as Somerset and companies such as Thameslink, both involved in complementary projects, have made even more tangible progress in developing offset-type mechanisms. The 2013 Green Paper on biodiversity offsetting has made clear that the concept of offsetting is still being taken seriously by policymakers.

The current Defra methodology is consciously highly simplistic, and will require modification and improvement. The pilot has yet to produce numerous examples of offset projects, but as I have often heard Kerry ten Kate (one of the leading experts on biodiversity offsetting) say, countries can take a decade to establish a functioning 3

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offset market. The true motivating philosophy behind biodiversity offsetting in the UK is still unclear, i.e. whether it is intended to allow more transparency in relation to development impacts on nature, to help us realize the true costs of losing wildlife, to prevent development from occurring in certain habitats, to leverage funding for restoration activities, or some other motivation. But the groundwork has been laid from which a robust policy could feasibly be built. One consequence of all this has been a wave of media attention, and the voicing of numerous serious concerns.

Concern in the media A license to trash

The main concern of so many writing about biodiversity offsets is that they will become a “license to destroy”5 or “license to trash”.6 It is common to see comments such as: “[Offsetting] means that if a business or developer wants to build on an area that has protected species on it, they can do so as long as the ecosystem is re-created elsewhere”.1 This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the whole concept of biodiversity offsets. The point is not to allow developers to destroy habitats or kill off species that they would not have been able to otherwise. In fact, this has been stated repeatedly and explicitly throughout the development of the approach in the UK.7 Rather, offsetting is generally intended to provide compensation for losses that would have been permitted, but not compensated for, without the offset policy.

Consequently, it is widely intended for use where biodiversity is currently falling through the cracks in the system, as a way of providing a safety net for species when they wouldn’t otherwise be protected, either in that specific case or in general. So if we implement offsets properly, it would not allow developers to trash our remaining ancient woodlands. It would force them to stop eroding other habitats that are less protected, like certain grasslands. If this has been ignored in some cases, then it is a problem of inappropriate application of the approach, not a problem with the approach per se. This is absolutely not a reason to write off offsetting. It would be like saying that protected areas are a bad approach to conservation in general, because a few unscrupulous regimes have misused them to evict people from their homes.8

An offset site in Victoria, Australia, where farmland is being successfully returned to native grassland, funded by offset policy.

The tract of created native grassland to the left is being extended to the existing farmland on the right. This is an area outside the Melbourne urban growth boundary where a private land holder is converting areas of land to native grassland. The aim is to sell the biodiversity credits obtained (measured in habitat hectares) through the BushBroker mechanism, to compensate for development closer to Melbourne. The State of Victorian oversees biodiversity credit trades.

Photo: Joseph Bull

conservation. You do indeed risk “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” as Woodfield warns10: because in some cases, offsetting can work.

Failure to prevent biodiversity loss

It is true, as has been pointed out in debates, that the approach may not resolve some of the root causes of failure to prevent wildlife loss under the existing planning system, such as deliberate misinterpretation, ineffective enforcement or a lack of monitoring. As a result, there may be cases when the concept of offsetting is abused. Although I personally know very little about the development in question, one example repeatedly put forward by those opposing offsetting involves the nightingales of Lodge Hill. There are arguments on both sides as to whether the proposed habitat creation would be good9 or bad10 overall for nature in the area.

Given that the site to be cleared for thousands of new homes is being considered as a potential SSSI, on account of containing an important nightingale population, I too have yet to be convinced that the development should go ahead. But even if development is inappropriate there, it is wrong, and actually irresponsible, to use one potentially bad example to discredit and demonize an entire approach to 4

Take New South Wales, Australia: since a biodiversity offset policy for native grassland was introduced there less than a decade ago, planning permission approvals for clearing this habitat have apparently dropped by 80%.11 And to date this is not even considered the most successful offset policy in Australia. That is partly because offsetting there is not in principle about “making nature as fungible as everything else”5 or applying the “same process of commodification that has blighted everything else the corporate economy touches”1, as some have speculated. Rather, it is about making development in areas with some conservation value prohibitively expensive through the mitigation hierarchy (i.e. ensuring that damage to nature is not an economic externality), thus pushing development elsewhere and preventing ecological loss in the first place. The perfect biodiversity offset policy in the UK would thus, arguably, be the one in which there were almost no offsets at all – but few who oppose offsetting seem to appreciate this.

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A sense of place

References

Another common concern that has been voiced; and again, I agree; is that no place is like any other. If you create one wetland to replace another one you have filled in just across the road, they will never be the same, no matter what species inhabit them. In the deepest ecological sense, ‘like-for-like’ trading of nature isn’t possible. But to see this as only a risk, and not also an opportunity, is to be blinkered. For instance, one key argument for using offsets in some places is that you could require compensation from many developments that cause relatively minor biodiversity impacts across a landscape, and amalgamate this to create one huge area of new habitat of high conservation value. Where I primarily work, in Uzbekistan, there is a plan to do exactly that: through offsetting, compensation from various oil and gas companies for disparate clearances of native semi-arid grassland (far less than 1% of the total habitat type) will be used to restore habitat in a new nature reserve spanning over 7,000 km2, simultaneously supporting efforts to conserve the critically endangered saiga antelope.12 That isn’t ‘like-for-like’ either, but is it honestly a bad idea?

1. The Ecologist (2013) A license to trash? Why Biodiversity Offsetting (BO) will be a disaster for the environment. The Ecologist, 09/09/2013. Available at: http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_ analysis/2048513/a_license_to_trash_why_biodiversity_offsetting_bo_will_be_a_disaster_for_the_ environment.html 2. Bull, J.W., Suttle, K.B., Gordon, A., Singh, N.J., & Milner-Gulland, E.J. (2013) “Biodiversity offsets in theory and practice”. Oryx, 47(3):369-380.

3. Madsen, B., Carroll, N., Kandy, D. & Bennett, G. (2011) State of Biodiversity Markets Report: Offset and Compensation Programs Worldwide. Forest Trends, Washington, DC, USA. 4. ICMM IUCN (2012) Independent report on biodiversity offsets. The Biodiversity Consultancy; Cambridge, UK. Available at: www.icmm.com/biodiversity-offsets 5. George Monbiot (2012). Biodiversity offsetting will unleash a new spirit of destruction on the land. The Guardian, 07/12/2012. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2012/ dec/07/biodiversity-offsetting-unleash-wildlife-destruction 6. BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) (2013). ‘License to trash’ biodiversity offsetting scheme set back until Autumn. BBC News, 31/07/2013. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scienceenvironment-23502362 7. POST (Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology) (2011). Biodiversity offsetting. POST Note, 369.

Houses of Parliament, London, UK. [available at: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn_369biodiversity-offsetting.pdf] 8. Schmidt-Soltau, K. (2010) Evictions from DRC’s protected areas. Forced Migration Review, 36:23. Available at: http://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/files/FMRdownloads/en/DRCongo/23.pdf 9. Environment Bank Ltd (2012) Biodiversity offsetting to compensate for nightingale habitat loss at Lodge Hill, Kent. Available at: http://www.medway.gov.uk/pdf/EBL%20Lodge%20Hill%20report%20final%20 draft%2013%20nov%2012.pdf 10. Woodfield, D. (2013) Biodiversity offsetting: setting off on the wrong foot? British Wildlife, 25(1): 64-65.

11. Gibbons, P. (2010) The case for biodiversity offsets. Decision Point, 39:2-3. AEDA, Australia. Available at: http://www.aeda.edu.au/docs/Newsletters/DPoint_39.pdf 12. SCA (Saiga Conservation Alliance) (2013). Website at: http://www.saiga-conservation.com/ 13. BBOP (Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme) (2012) Biodiversity Offsets: Principles, Criteria and Indicators. Forest Trends; Washington, DC, USA 14. Burgin, S. (2008) BioBanking: an environmental scientist’s view of the role of biodiversity banking offsets in conservation. Biodiversity and Conservation, 17:807–816.

One issue that requires consideration in the UK, and less so in the Uzbek example, is the requirement for access to nature. I am not suggesting that we use offsets to create large nature reserves in England, and take away the many small patches of habitat that local people enjoy. In practice, as is common with robust offset schemes around the world13 there would be a requirement to create new habitat close to the original development. Such a requirement would either mean that there was an offset that ensured no loss of access to nature for the local community, or, if no suitable offset site could be found nearby, that the developer would not receive planning permission. Having worked a little with local planning authorities in the UK, I consider it highly unfeasible that they would allow a development in say, South Devon, to be compensated for with a tract of wildlife-rich grassland in the Midlands. Nevertheless, opponents seem to genuinely think this is likely: “How is it possible to re-create the value of a village woodland that has been the place of dens and camps for children, if that woodland is offset as part of a forest hundreds of miles away?”.1 I don’t disagree with this sentiment. It’s just that this wouldn’t realistically happen under an offset policy. And to use the example of ‘children playing in dens’ to argue such a point – when child’s play has nothing necessarily to do with the ecological value of an area, and everything to do with its recreational value, which can be very different issues – is misleading.

Joe Bull is a researcher at the Department of Life Sciences, Imperial College London. He also codirects Wild Business Ltd which provides advice on business and biodiversity issues, including the appropriateness of voluntary offset strategies. j.bull10@imperial.ac.uk

Keeping rational In summary: yes, offsetting has its potential flaws, yes, offsetting won’t solve all our problems, and yes, perhaps we should leave the nightingales of Lodge Hill be. But it is remains one very credible way, if used appropriately, in which we can slow the loss of wildlife worldwide. Even some of its more vehement academic critics accept that it shouldn’t be excluded from the conservation toolkit entirely.14 We know what the challenges are with the approach.2 So, rather than shooting biodiversity offsetting down outright, unless we offer a realistic and superior alternative, I suggest we calmly and rationally work out how, where and when it can best be used to benefit UK wildlife.

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Biodiversity offsets an unnecessary evil?

The Government is consulting on the introduction of biodiversity offsets to speed the planning process.1 The notion of biodiversity offsets might offer a reasonable solution to the vexed questions of how to compensate adequately for environmental harm resulting from development. But there are some fundamental flaws both in the concept itself and in the philosophy and accepted assumptions which underpin it.

MIKE TOWNSEND If it is accepted that development is inevitable, necessary or desirable then it seems reasonable to do this in a way which causes no net environmental harm. This is the basis for biodiversity offsetting. By placing a value on the destruction of habitat, developers might be persuaded to avoid or minimise damage in order to avoid the costs of compensatory action. The threat of penalties reinforces the mitigation hierarchy of ‘avoid’, ‘mitigate’, ‘compensate’, allowing offsets to mop up the residual harm and ensure no net loss of biodiversity. However the approach is problematic.

Irreplaceable habitats An immediate problem is faced with irreplaceable habitats – or habitats which cannot be re-created in any meaningful time scale. Ancient woodland falls within this category, but so do other high conservation value habitats that have taken decades or centuries to develop and could only be re-created, if at all, with a similar passage of time. The idea of like-for-like compensatory measures is thus meaningless and we are thrown back on creating something which has a notional equivalent value in ‘biodiversity units’ but no ecological equivalence.

The proposals insist that in these cases, paragraph 118 of the National Planning Policy Framework will provide the assurance needed.2 But at the Woodland Trust, as our case load for ancient woodland under threat shows3 this is circumvented by the catch-all convenient phrase for government and developers…“unless the need for, and benefits of, the development in that location clearly outweigh the loss”.

Missing the point Whilst there are plenty of ways of deriving a value, there is no absolute objective value for the natural environment. Even if one accepts one or other form of environmental valuation, each is, generally, locationally specific and subjective. Not subjective is the sense that ‘it is just a guess’, but in the sense that the valuation is relevant to those who are affected by it.

The idea of biodiversity units is no different. Assessment on the basis of quality, distinctiveness and area is proposed in Defra’s green paper. But this is insufficient to 8

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 capture critical aspects of value which relate to people’s relationship to the habitat or its relationship to other habitats.

In this sense biodiversity offsets misunderstand the nature and use of valuation.

Valuation allows the exchange of different goods thought the medium of a token of exchange (usually money) but it has little meaning in this context. If I have a bag of onions and I want an alarm clock, the ability to sell the onions and use money to buy a clock is a useful mechanism. The equivalence is in value, not in function.

New woodland, for all that it may be of value in other ways, is not ancient woodland and does not represent home habitat to many characteristic ancient woodland species. Even if it were possible to derive equivalence in value, there would be little equivalence in function. The problem is made worse if ‘biodiversity units’ can be substituted across habitat types, so that grassland could be replaced by woodland and vice versa.

The point about environmental valuation is not to create an objective value (money or ‘biodiversity units’) which can then be used for exchange, but to form part of a discursive process of negotiation in which those aspects to which people ascribe value are highlighted.

The government consultation stresses the creation of a market for biodiversity supported by simple metrics to help by removing the need for ‘expensive negotiation’ on a ‘case-by-case’ basis. But it is this negotiation that it is the heart of revealing the value of particular ‘case-by-case’ places. By removing negotiation and resorting to simple metrics the very essence of the process of establishing value is destroyed. Biodiversity offsetting deliberately sets out to circumvent the process of public participation on environmental decisions which is at the heart of Aarhus Convention, to which the UK is a signatory. 4 The suggestion is that small areas of lower quality habitat may be of less importance than large areas of high quality habitat. In strict biodiversity terms this might seem reasonable, but not if this is the only patch of habitat within easy reach of where you live. The valuation approach suggested militates against the small remaining fragments of habitat that may be of critical importance to many communities.

Not a market A market is a place (real or otherwise) that allows buyers and sellers of a good or service to interact in order to facilitate an exchange. In this case the government has decided that it is the owner of the environment and therefore the ‘seller’. Developers of course are the buyer. Those people who might better be regarded as the ‘owners’ of the specific local environment, those with a direct stake in that environment, are removed from the process by the abandonment of ‘expensive’ negotiation.

This is not a market in any sense, it is a permit system. If you want a system which discourages developers from destroying the environment and makes them think again about mitigation then an ‘expensive’ negotiation process sounds a lot more 9

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effective than a presumably inexpensive system of purchased permissions to destroy the environment.

Location, location, location The world is not a fair place. But biodiversity offsets have the capacity to make it less fair. It is often the case that there is a strong correlation between social status and environmental quality. Bluntly, poorer people often have to put up with a poorer environment and a lack of easy access to green space.

If the link between a site and its immediate surrounding is broken by the ability to compensate at considerable distance from a development, then the possibility of greater polarisation of environmental quality becomes real. The proposals call on local authorities to identify areas where offsets are likely to generate the greatest environmental gain. The assumption is that this will extend or strengthen areas which already have significant environmental value.

‘Nicer’ places are enhanced by further environmental improvement - extensions to nature reserves, creation of ‘wilderness’, coastal retreat and so on. Meanwhile, while small areas of green space close to where people live are swallowed by development.

The argument that “allowing offsets to happen anywhere offers the opportunity for creating coherent ecological networks”, exposes a need which should be met, in any case and by other means, while failing to safeguard what is important locally.

We should be creating and managing habitat in order to strengthen that which remains, not funding habitat creation through the destruction of that which needs protecting.

All problems are solvable Biodiversity offsetting panders to the hubristic belief that there must be a solution to every problem that allows us to have what we want without any consequences.

This is the world in which there is such a thing as a free lunch, in which you can have your cake and eat it. The confidence with which the Defra consultation asserts its ability to ‘guarantee’ no net loss of biodiversity is either breath-taking in its naivety or reprehensible in its interpretation of the evidence.

It would be naïve to believe that we can avoid further destruction of habitat without some fundamental shift to our collective worldview - which seems unlikely. Habitat will continue to be lost, but these proposals will make it cheaper and easier for developers. Biodiversity offsets will not protect environmental value let alone lead to an increase in net value, because this is not a meaningful calculation in the way it is proposed.

It is motherhood-and-apple-pie to say that the planning process should be no more burdensome or expensive than is necessary. But it should be as strenuous and exhaustive as required to safeguard the legitimate interests of those affected. This offsetting proposal will by-pass that and become a voucher system for developers than will lead to the loss, not just of valuable and irreplaceable habitat, but of areas that are a fundamental importance to communities.

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The Woodland Trust promotes its message of stringent protection for ancient woodland.

Photo: Woodland Trust Photo Library

Deliberately removing negotiation because it is expensive and inconvenient, violates the principle of public participation in decision making and further erodes any claims the government might make about being the greenest ever.

As part of the Woodland Trust campaign on biodiversity offsetting we said to supporters that we believe that, if offsetting does take place, it should be at a local level - but what does ‘local’ mean to you?

• national • regional • county • within the same city, town or village • within a set distance of the original habitat The clear winners were ‘within a set distance of the original habitat’, followed by ‘within the same city, town or village’. The least popular options were ‘regional’, ‘national’, and ‘county’.

The following are some of the comments from supporters to the campaign: “I value the habitats close to me because they provide a link and preservation of local flora and fauna, and allow me to appreciate and enjoy the versatility of life”.

“The area where I live is extremely heavily populated but we are lucky enough to have open space within a ten minute ride. The loss or reduction of these amenities both to people and wildlife would make me inconsolable”.

“Being in amongst [our local habitat] is calming, enlightening, makes us happy and able to forget (or solve) our problems”.

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 “I value the environments and habitats NEAR ME precisely because they ARE near me”.

“The most important thing for me about the natural environments close to where I live is to be able to take my grandchildren to play in rich, wild (to them), multilayered, diverse, beautiful and memorable places where they can climb trees, dam streams, pick blackberries, make dens and marvel at beetles and butterflies”.

“Through local walks I am strongly aware that I, as a human being, am only part of the natural world”.

“I value EVERYTHING about my environment! That’s what makes it MY environment!

I am sick to death of having to “adjust” and “offset”!!”

“I value the open areas around me which I pass daily. I do not want them to disappear so that all I can see is bricks and concrete”.

References 1. DEFRA (2013) Biodiversity Offsetting in England. Available at: https://consult.defra.gov.uk/biodiversity/ biodiversity_offsetting . [accessed 18/10/13] 2. DCLG (2012) National Planning Policy Framework. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/6077/2116950.pdf . [accessed 18/10/13] 3. Woodland Trust. Woods Under Threat. Available at: http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/EN/CAMPAIGNING/ WOODWATCH/CASE-STUDIES/Pages/examples.aspx . [accessed 18/10/13] 4. European Commission. The Aarhus Convention. Available at http://ec.europa.eu/environment/aarhus/. [accessed 18/10/13]

Mike Townsend is a Senior Adviser at the Woodland Trust. The views expressed in this article are those of the author. miketownsend@wodlandtrust.org.uk

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Local Nature Partnerships – the experience in Sussex Nearly 50 Local Nature Partnerships now operate throughout England. Can these new bodies bring a collective effort to help change the fortunes of our wildlife, and will they embed nature conservation in the actions of their members? Reflecting on experience in Sussex, this article considers the early challenges facing LNPs and considers the tools required to make them a lasting force.

TONY WHITBREAD In 2011 the government published its Natural Environment White Paper (NEWP), something that was broadly welcomed by the environmental Non-Government Organisations (NGOs). It contained a lot of background that the Wildlife Trusts, and others, had been promoting, such as the Lawton report on Britain’s ecological network and the influential National Ecosystem Assessment, and it contained commitments that seemed to be heading in the right direction.

Time will tell whether the broad trajectory set by the NEWP will be maintained, and at present it seems that government policy is not living up to its earlier environmental promise. Nevertheless, one of the commitments made in the NEWP was to encourage the establishment of Local Nature Partnerships (LNPs) around the country. At present, 48 are established with most of England covered at county or similar level, and many LNPs have been in place for a couple of years.

Partnerships in practice The name may be misleading. ‘Local’? Well, they tend to cover areas about the size of a county, so they are not that local, and ‘Nature’? In fact they cover far more than just nature, addressing health and wellbeing issues in relation to the environment for example. But at least the ‘Partnership’ part is right. However, from what I’ve seen they appear to be developing in ways that are appropriate for the area that they aim to cover so, whatever the name, these appear to be good initiatives.

Whilst there are common issues, the experience of developing a LNP is probably different in each area, but I will say a little here about the situation with the Sussex LNP, which I currently chair – just one example, but probably not an unusual one.

To kick-off we attracted a small amount of government funding to run a consultation to see what sort of LNP might be right for Sussex. Around 120 organisations (including many community groups) contributed and there was a great deal of agreement that some form of body to bring the environmental agenda together for the county would be worth while. The Defra aim seemed to be for a strategic body, but local opinion favoured something a little more practical – so linking these two 12

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 full day-jobs. Other organisations, such as Local Authorities and Local Enterprise Partnership, have a duty to collaborate with LNPs; there has been relatively little of this so far although I’m not sure that some LNPs could cope if all LAs and LEPs consulted them on their strategic plans at once.

opposites seemed the first challenge! Even if people were not familiar with the term “ecosystem services”, the wide value of nature and the way it underpins everything appeared to be common currency to most people.

A modern structure for understanding nature?

Following consultation the pre-existing Sussex Biodiversity Partnership developed a bid to become a LNP which was later accepted by Defra in 2010.

Our LNP, and the make-up of its executive committee, therefore follows an ecosystem services structure. So, for example, ‘provisioning services’ are represented by landowners, farmers, forestry groups and the like, while ‘regulating services’ are represented by the Environment Agency, local authorities and others. In practice, however, whatever structure is developed, a sound partnership relies on attracting good people to the table and this is what seems to have happened.

The text books will tell you that a sharp committee should contain 10 or fewer people. The practice in Sussex, however, is that we have a board of over 20, and it is likely to grow! I believe this is a strength not a weakness – it is an “emergence” structure to enable progress towards unpredictable objectives rather than a “governance” structure that drives progress towards predictable ones. This benefits by having more good people in the discussion. See Giles Hutchins’ Nature of Business published by Green Books in 2012 for an excellent discussion on the benefits of emergence approaches.

This structure therefore helps us progress towards unpredictable outcomes. In Sussex one example of this was the establishment of a marine and coastal sub-group. This has brought together pre-existing but disparate groups so people who were working separately are now starting to share information and best practice. We are also in the process of preparing advice notes on planning. Hard-pressed Local Authorities, who may not have environmental expertise, need a quick way in to making sure that the environmental agenda is covered. A LNP advice note, which consists mainly of questions to be answered, should give them a head-start in making sure they live up to their responsibilities. So far most of our activities have been fairly strategic. I am aware, however, that many LNPs have been able to bring several groups together to draw in funding and implement some direct practical projects on the ground.

Nature’s wealth – do we all agree?

Funding and therefore capacity is a major problem probably for all LNPs. So far there is no LNP Officer in Sussex; work is being delivered by those who can fit it in to already 14

As with any partnership, gaining agreement between partners, each representing very different organisations, can be difficult. We will try to overcome this in Sussex by working at a high strategic level rather than by making detailed comments. In practice this should be quite powerful.

NEIL BENNETT

In Sussex the Executive Committee is rather non-traditional. It is formed in such a way as to encourage conversations and interactions to promote the emergence of ideas, thoughts and interactions which will then lead to actions. The strategy is therefore based on ground-up emergence rather than top-down governance. As a consequence the Executive Committee is a large group consisting of individuals working at a high strategic level, who are committed to the LNP vision and aim to generate fruitful interaction.

Funding for capacity is therefore the critical issue for most LNPs, simply having someone on the ground will achieve a great deal. Other tools are improving – such as the LAs and LEPs duty to cooperate. New tools in development should also make a big difference – for instance tools are becoming available to improve the way the value of ecosystem services is incorporated into local economic plans.

The key guiding principle behind the LNP is its vision which is: “to work across all sectors and organisations to secure the healthiest ecological system possible thereby protecting and enhancing the natural environment and all that it gives us”.

This wording is very deliberate and sets the scene for the LNP’s objectives. These are simple yet fundamental: • to deliver growth in natural capital; and • to ensure that Sussex residents share in the benefits provided by healthy, well-functioning ecosystems.

Any advice, statement or response from the LNP will therefore be consistent with these objectives. So, for example, a LNP response to a strategic plan will ask two basic questions: does it deliver growth in natural capital and does it improve the benefits provided by healthy well-functioning ecosystems?

At this point there may be some divergence between LNPs. Most are making the link between the economy and the environment and most are arguing that the 15

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 environment underpins the economy. Many are therefore justifying the environment in terms of its economic benefits. Whilst this may be important in short term discussions, in the long term it is far more important that it is the economy that is re-shaped to better reflect environmental realities. A local economy must deliver growth in natural capital; otherwise it is not delivering “growth” at all.

This line of reasoning is closely aligned to the “Forum for the Future” 5 capitals model. At present growth is traditionally measured in terms of growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – essentially a turnover measure. In practice people do not measure their prosperity in terms of turnover. They may, however, measure it in terms of their stock of capital (crudely – the amount of “stuff” they have). Capital, in turn, falls into 5 categories: natural capital, human capital, social capital, manufactured capital and financial capital. Clearly these are all linked, but they are all reliant on natural capital. So, natural capital has primacy. No growth in natural capital means no growth. In this respect we are still trying to emerge from a recession that has lasted well over 100 years (not merely since 2008).

I am not sure how much the LNPs will engage in these more fundamental discussions.

On the one hand LNPs were set up by government and confirmed by Defra, so would seem to be the government’s creatures. And there also seems to be an unspoken sub-plot that the LNPs should be unlocking development and economic growth by overcoming environmental constraints. On the other hand there has been virtually no guidance on what a LNP should be, no government funding to deliver them (so no ‘carrot’) and government was very clear that it wanted areas to set up bodies that were appropriate to the location. Therefore government should not be surprised if, having promoted the establishment of environmental partnerships, that is exactly what they get. So in my view it should be the other way around – LNPs should be overcoming development and economic constraints in order to unlock growth in natural capital.

Tony Whitbread is Chief Executive of Sussex Wildlife Trust. tonywhitbread@sussexwt.org.uk

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013

Bad(ger)lands It is not Broc who is enigmatic, it is the process by which we try to make a complex situation simple, and cull a species we’ve just given full protection in law.

MARTIN SPRAY Is the badger Britain’s most enigmatic animal, as the subtitle of a recent book suggests?1 Badgerlands, by the journalist Patrick Barkham, provides the focus for this article. Interesting, entertaining, and elusive the badger may be, but it is also the object of considerable hype. I wouldn’t deny that badgers are delightful. When cubs bump into you as they romp, and accept you as part of the furniture, that is glow-time. The tentative emergence of an adult snout from the sett, if you haven’t experienced it before (but for some people the excitement is repeated as often as the snout), is a thrill. Yet, watching an earth for a fox’s sometimes impetuous exit can be just as thrilling, and more precious, perhaps, for being less often experienced.

And I am seldom more amazed by wildlife (the larger sorts) than when watching the actions of grey squirrels…

An equally suitable subtitle for the book could be ‘The twilight world of Britain’s most enigmatic badger-watcher’. Patrick Barkham, writer for The Guardian, is grandson of badger-friend and campaigner, and author of Through the badger gate (1974), Jane Ratcliffe. In spite of this family heritage, the accounts of his first, naive, and (just like mine) unproductive badger watches he amuses us with were very recent events in his life.

Badgerlands has accounts of his observations, and snippets of information on badger natural history and biology. Such snippets occur throughout the book, but this is not a systematic study of badgers, and its title does not indicate that it is a summary of where Britain’s badgers are especially likely to be found. Rather, it is a report of a personal gaining of understanding of what badgers are up to in twenty-first century Britain, of where they stand, of who is interested in them, and of who would be happy – and who relieved but not happy – to watch the last badger expire. It was written in the fetid context of Broc’s dismal implication with bovine tuberculosis.

Food for thought The search for badgerlands takes the author to various parts of the country, some of which are not usually identified with badgers, amongst them Wookey Hole, 16

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Wytham Woods (“home to at least 220 of the best-studied badgers in the world”), a Wolverhampton canal corridor, a wood near Builth Wells, a Cornish garden, and a Bristol back-street. We are shown around sanctuaries, and glimpse something of arch badger defender Brian May (he of Queen). We are shown into parts of the lives of less celebrated badger enthusiasts, and meet a variety of Barkham’s contacts and hosts, some of whom enjoy the animals without bribery, others who tempt badgers with a few peanuts, and others again who provide their animals with banquets of sausage and sandwiches.

Food also features in a sort of interlude in the book. Barkham sits down to lunch with an enthusiastic and knowledgeable naturalist… not to discuss matters of ecological, behavioural, or veterinarian significance: he wants to know what badger tastes like. His host cooks a road-kill. “It was not greasy, and nothing like pork, but it reeked as strongly as rancid venison or a cheap cut from a billy goat of pensionable age.” That is interesting, but not entirely necessary information, exemplifying, I think, how a ‘light’ manner of writing can easily tip into flippancy. For me, it nearly does in some other chapters as well. On the other hand, one might say that it is such details that make the book invitingly lively.

Persecuted and sentimentalised Part of that liveliness is the weaving in of a wider context. We see persecuted badgers in John Clare’s poetry, and badgers sentimentalised in Wind in the Willows.

We are given sobering details of the starkly serious effects on people of outbreaks of bTB, though the implications, and the search for ways out are only sketched.

Making it clear that he was only a visitor to the badgerlands of Britain’s farmland, Barkham admits that he is a ‘sensory tourist’, pointing out the gulf between those whose livelihood is from working the land, and those for whom it is not.

He stresses that there is quite a long tradition of persecution of badgers in Britain, in the name of sport as well as of pest control. Barkham devotes a chapter to a badger-digging, and the subsequent trial of the diggers. I found the background he sketches here especially interesting: the pride that some diggers and baiters have for their dogs’ ‘courage’, and their sadness at their dogs’ pain; the cruelty to a terrified wild animal, yet at the same time feelings for their fortitude; some – but some others are malevolently sadistic. Then there is the embeddedness of badger digging and torturing in our countryside ‘heritage’, other parts of which many conservationists wish to defend.

A rapidly progressing scheme?

British badgers are said today to be more numerous than at any time in history, and the UK and Irish populations, numerically, are the most important in Europe. “It was not”, wrote Roger Lovegrove in his history of the persecution of Britain’s birds and mammals, Silent Fields, “always thus. For centuries the Badger was hunted mercilessly and it is small wonder sometimes that it survived at all.” Indeed, in the 1840s its extinction here was soberly predicted. With public attitudes mellowing, the badger became a species fully protected in law in 1992, although subsequent breaches of protection have been covered by invoking Crown immunity.

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A badger patrol in Somerset at work to scrutinise and shadow the area’s pilot badger cull.

Photo: Owen Newman

“The national scheme for eradication of bovine tuberculosis is progressing rapidly”, said the Agricultural Notebook in 1958. Alas, in 1971 the badger’s involvement with bTB was indicated, since when it has shown itself as bête noire: the most important British wildlife carrier of bTB. Not the only one, of course, but that is seldom mentioned… In this context, I wonder if a better subtitle for the book might be ‘The twilight world of Britain’s handling of troublesome animals’. It is often maintained that the badger-and-bTB saga is essentially a matter of science, and that science will handle the finding of a means of combatting the disease. If so, it is rum science. The situation (Barkham uses Lord John Krebs’s word), is “mindless”. Not what one usually says of a scientific investigation.

X and Y: as easy as A-B-C? After the trials of the removal of badgers in the past few years, we seem still not to know – let alone know how to predict – the basic consequences of a cull: might it reduce the incidence of TB in cattle; or cause a diaspora of badgers, some infected; might it cause an increase of TB in cattle; or might it cause an inflow of badgers, some infected? There is little sense of agreement on the basis for evaluating such things, let alone of actually agreeing on them.

Barkham, with journalistic efficiency, gives enough detail to make his story clear; and gives enough of each side of the chasm of controversy over the decision to cull/ kill x badgers in a Somerset ‘trial’ area and y in West Gloucestershire. He almost maintains a balance of opinion pro and con. However, the book was published before the trial ran into the slough. x and y turn out to be variables, sampled from 19

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 the populations X and Y. y, for instance, was 708, although the target-y is/was 1,650. Y is/was 3,644, then 3,368, then 2,350. The 708 figure is the number ‘cilled’ during the allowed time, but as (‘tis said) the badgers moved the goal-posts, extra time was played, and as y looks still off-target the game may (as it were) change from soccer to rugby – or perhaps the Eton Wall Game.

X and Y have changed in time, from October 2012 to February to just before the cull began in autumn 2013. It is said this could be because the population in both areas may have fallen from around 8,000 in October 2012 to about 4,000 a year later. Defra has suggested several reasons, but anti-trial campaigners have added to these the thought that, as Dominic Dyer of Care for the Wild put it, “a climate has been created which allows certain individuals to believe they can carry out illegal killing and will not get prosecuted” and a few farmers may have carried out their own personal culls. Without a quite strong reason, a 50% fall in one year looks unusual. But, with or without, this x-and-y business appears to be based on weak methodology. The story is far from finished.

The story is far from simple

Badgerlands is to be recommended because of its humanness, and the clear ease with which it is written. Other sources are needed to provide a natural history of the animal – that is to be expected. It is a pity, however, that some parts of the story Barkham tells are not presented in more detail. For instance, the feeding of wild animals and the changing of their behaviour: this is touched on, and frowned upon a little, but it is not discussed with any thoroughness - yet it would seem to be central to our relationship with ‘the wild’. The same point is, for instance, currently part of the discussion about wild boar in the Forest of Dean. And this leads to a bigger issue.

Can we and should we disentangle animal welfare and nature conservation matters? With the present interest (small and select though it still is) in ‘wilding’, this distinction is something, I think, that needs careful attention. So far, locally, the badger part of the badger-and-bTB story has been largely about the animals, not about their habitats and their ecology. There have been only occasional murmurs about changes in farming itself. For the majority of people who are sympathetic but not involved in anti-cull actions, badgers remain objects of sentimental curiosity. If they are met with, it is usually as fragments at the roadside. Otherwise, I think, they are for many people an occasional entertainment.

References 1. Badgerlands. The twilight world of Britain’s most enigmatic animal, by Patrick Barkham, Granta, 2013, 389 pages, hardback, ISBN 978-1-84708-504-7.

Martin Spray is at spraypludds@hotmail.com

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013

The road to Salamanca Little heart at the 2013 World Wilderness Congress The 10th World Wilderness Congress, WILD 10, was held in October 2013 in Salamanca, Spain. ECOS was given press status to observe the struggles reported by indigenous cultures to hold on to their remaining wild land and their consciousness. The event also revealed a new brand of conservation imperialism from the opportunistic proposals on rewilding across parts of Europe.

PETER TAYLOR Indigenous communities and conservation Rewilding was prominent in the agenda for WILD 10 in Salamanca, but there was also a chance to engage with indigenous peoples and their perception of conservation.

The problem for remaining indigenous cultures is that they occupy the margins, such as non-productive wildland of remnant rain-forests, the Arctic tundra, the deserts and more remote mountains. It is in these margins that a resource-hungry globalised economy is scouring for its last-gasps of oil, gas and essential minerals.

These threatened cultures have now combined as activists under the banner of ICCA (Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas)1 and the first two days of Salamanca were taken up by their meeting with those representatives from government more naturally disposed to help them – the agencies concerned with conservation and wilderness protection. Almost all of the world’s remaining wild places contain indigenous people, but models of ‘protection’ based upon species conservation, or zero-impact concepts of wilderness, are generally not adequate to accommodate them. They came therefore seeking alliances: from East Asia there were representatives from remote islands off the coast of China; communities from remote mountains in the Philippines and Nepal; from Australia came a large delegation from the Kimberley Range in the west; from South America there were representatives from Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador and Guatemala; from North America came many representatives from the Salish reservation in Montana, and along the north-west coast from Mexico to Alaska, where tribal peoples have been reclaiming fishing rights and negotiating protection zones; Africa brought Toureg from the Aire Massif, tribal peoples from the Congo forests, Senegalese fishermen; and Madagascar and Mozambique provided government representatives responsible for indigenous affairs.

The scale of devastation I regard myself as well-informed on environmental issues, but the sheer scale of the invasion faced by indigenous peoples, especially the acceleration in the past 20

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five years, was deeply shocking. Even where their homeland has acquired the status of World Heritage Site, there was little buffer from environmental and social impacts. In some cases, protestors against bulldozers had been murdered.

In all cases, the protests were about loss of ‘home’ and way of life, rather than issues of health or safety (for example in mining), where oddly, their rights might have had more protection. There was little documentation of the health risks of mining uranium, iron ore, copper, gold and coltan, or of the pollution from gas and oil, simply because these peoples were fighting not against pollution, although that was a common threat, but for the survival of a way of life. Universally, they did not want the developed world’s model of development, which all too clearly meant loss of community, loss of young people to cities of crime, prostitution and disease. Inevitably, mining and logging roads brought unmanageable contact, with un-supporting governments that for the most part wanted an end to indigenous cultures and turned a blind-eye to illegal activities.

It was clear also that a new threat was driven by the hunger for renewable energy sources in the form of hydro-schemes, biofuel plantations and arrays of vast wind turbines and their accompanying tracks and infrastructure – the latter now a major intrusion in the wilderness of the Sami people in Lapland. All of these intrusions bring roads and settlements of non-indigenous and often temporary workers.

Indigenous peoples promote respect for their wilderness and their linked culture at the WILD 10 event.

Photo: Jaime Rojo

A two way paradigm shift?

WILD 10 was largely an old-fashioned plenary conference set-up. On the podium listening to these presentations were sympathetic conservationists from the secretariat. The aim was to build an alliance. Here there was an interesting dynamic.

For the most part, representatives of the indigenous cultures were highly articulate, educated and well-able to take on the conservation paradigm with its focus on biodiversity and ecosystem services – there were several presentations showing how this had succeeded and could act as a model for other regions. But the indigenous peoples also had a message for the civilisation that had created ‘conservation’ as a major concern and this, despite the work of ICCA, did not appear to be registering among the concerned conservationists in the Wild10 secretariat. Indeed, as the representative of two million nomadic Iranians pointed out to the rapporteur, his comments on what was needed to turn the whole thing around had not got past the typist – to which the typist responded that she “did not feel comfortable with his phrase”, and that was that! The typist was an experienced member of the conference secretariat. The Iranian had said that nothing short of a revolution in consciousness (in the West) could salvage the global situation!

solution – without a single detailed analysis of the environmental consequences of the supposed mitigation programmes they have unleashed. Perversely, having created the renewables monster, environmental campaign groups now seek funds to reign it in! Green advocates of a nuclear renaissance, such as the recently retired ex-director of Greenpeace, should visit the uranium mines in Australia or Niger, if they could get permission.

Back in 2005, I tried to say something similar in my book Beyond Conservation – with a chapter titled ‘The Healing Forest’ and seeking to bridge the divide between scientific and shamanic perceptions of nature.2 I argued that we need a revolution in our own consciousness. Since then the eerie conviction has grown that ‘conservationists’ are party to the destruction. We do not speak strongly enough from our hearts and too easily collude with the corporatist world-view.

There is also a massive hypocrisy afoot, where environmentalists have created a climate alarmism and then aligned themselves beneficially to what they see as a

Indigenous Nature

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In all of this gloom, there were some bright spots – like the coalition of indigenous peoples along the Pacific coast of Central and North America brokering a marine protected areas system through Mexico and California, led by the Sinkyone Wilderness Alliance. The brightest element being the combination of cultural values with a scientific framework expertly articulated by this coalition, and the receptive ear of the US and Mexican governments. In some of the more developed democracies things have changed. But perhaps not in the UK as it now turns to uranium fuel with help from Chinese state-owned corporations that elsewhere are accelerating the invasion of protected areas.

Indigenous peoples are now central to the management of the remaining wild places of the world – that much is clear. And their values are gradually being respected and honoured in management agreements. But what characterises the indigenous, their perceptions and attitudes toward nature?

The first English use of the word Nature was actually with regard to human nature, not ‘the environment’, and most tribal peoples don’t have a word environment 23

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 in the sense of something separate – for them, nature is ‘home’ or ‘mother’ (The Latin means ‘birth’!). What of our indigenous nature? It is clear we do share something very deep and very human with indigenous peoples, but also clear at this conference that we ‘white’ people (of varying shades), constantly repress the deeper side of ourselves. And we do so because it is politic to do so. I can personally attest to what happens professionally and publically if you do not! It is part of the scientific-econometric paradigm to which the conservation sector has attached its colours.

We can become very passionate about the beauty of wildlife – our award winning television documentaries attest to that. It is not that the heart cannot be engaged in conservation. But it is the inner nature of the heart, the realm of an enquiring and perceptive faculty of inner vision that is suppressed in our culture. And I would argue, deliberately so. It is too scary on many counts, not least of which relates to the nature of the creative power – which indigenous people know how to meet within themselves and acknowledge as real, loving, present and parental. This inner knowledge is relegated by conservation biology to the realm of the subjective, the personal and private category of ‘religion’ – and which many if not most scientists believe is a delusion. That is the dominant political reality, and within that context acceptable ‘religions’ are almost entirely patriarchal and long-divorced from an equally active earthen mother. The indigenous nature, which in Britain we would have shared in pre-Roman times at least, and perhaps as late as the 7th or 8th century Celts, does not separate the creative power from the realms of nature and the realm of human.

This is not a subject for discussion at the Wildlife Trusts, Greenpeace headquarters, the IUCN or the modern crop of nature writers and environmental polemicists. Why the discomfort? On a political level, perhaps because there is a consequence of going inside and meeting the creator…..which is the realisation that humans and this creative power are the same thing.

Then there is the real consequence, and I submit, the real reason for the suppression of all roads to inner knowledge within our education system – and that is as creative beings, we are all actually equal. Indigenous knowledge is not about being equal ‘in the sight of God’ but then legitimately exploitable by men, it is about being equal in community. In that state of consciousness it is simply not possible to exploit your fellow human. Yes, you might have to fight occasionally – people lose consciousness, but such conflict is rare. Peoples who maintain their roots on the land and in community do not exploit each other.

The legacy of empires In this latter respect, the venue of Salamanca was apposite. Here toward the end of the 16th century, Queen Isabella of Spain legitimised the conquest of the American native peoples. She was chided then by Francisco de Vittoria at Salamanca University, seen as the founding father of international law, to respect indigenous people as equal in law and humanity. That equality, he added with a sting, brought with it a responsibility to trade!

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 From that deal evolved the modern development model – first come land-rights, then individual land rights against which the individual can raise money, then sale of properties and then accumulation of property, tythes, taxes, wealth and power. The less smart lose out on the trading floor, become landless and head for the ‘cities’. Actually, vast millions occupy not the cities but the periphery of cities, excluded from the centres of power and wealth, suffering real poverty, which is not the absence of money, but the absence of a sustaining environment. People are cut from their roots, their land, their culture and language – what ICCA calls ‘legacy disruption’.

Everywhere we could look today, the global economic development model has not changed and this exodus from the land continues. We, in the UK, of course, are long-distanced from our own legacy disruption.

Enter, stage right – Rewilding Europe I was not looking forward to the special day on Rewilding Europe. Not since reading glossy brochures extolling the opportunity now presented by ‘abandoned land’ on the margins – in western Spain, Croatia, Romania and Slovakia.4,5 Here could now roam wild cattle, wild horses, bison, boar, many species of deer, and more predators like bear, wolf and lynx. What’s not to like? Is it not a conservationists’ dream?

There on the podium were WWF, Birdlife, The Dutch rewilders with their surplus wild-grazing stock, and the Zoological Society of London – announcing a European rewilder’s network.

I sat through, thinking “This is all smoke and mirrors”. According to Rewilding Europre’s view, Britain’s contribution to rewilding is a dot on the map: Alladale in Scotland. I contributed reluctantly from the floor, not wishing to dent the exuberance: first that I felt alienated by the top-down approach, and second, that the recent British initiatives, publications and explorative debates had been ignored.

We in the UK had over five years of experience networking best-practice on the ground, had conducted four regional seminars, three issues seminars, helped to found a University institute (Wildland Research Institute at Leeds), and written two books, the last entitled Rewilding3 with over 60 contributing authors drawn from across many different projects! Much of this legacy can be found through the documented achievements of a web based network created by BANC, the Wildland Network: www.wildland-network.org. If Rewilding Europe had no idea of all this investment or simply overlooked it, despite their multifarious connections, then what did that say for other countries like Spain and Romania?

It got worse. The ‘network’, for which they have received liberal funding (Dutch and Swedish Lottery), has ‘criteria’ of membership that makes uncomfortable reading.

They are looking for local partners who can see a business opportunity in a large scale enterprise bringing in the charismatic herbivores. It would appear that if you are a nascent Alladale, then apply. If not, ‘we are not interested’. I have to work hard to avoid cynicism when the Zoo mentality is embraced. The ‘spectacle’ does not always sit comfortably with objectives of conservation. But funding can distort objectives now that the pot has some honey in it.

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 How might this all play on the abandoned hills of western Spain, where there are thousands of sad ghost-villages, hardly populated, and then mostly by older people from another paradigm? Who cares, as long as we get the conservation benefits? Wolves are returning. Vultures can thrive again. Natural processes can re-assert themselves.

It is an opportunity lost. Old-thinking conservation sectoralists are now jumping on the rewilding bandwagon as a way of re-invigorating the sector. In their new-found enthusiasm there is a great danger of misreading the political mood and being seen as opportunists exploiting a situation where others are desperately trying to restore broken communities. This is conservation imperialism.

There is a spectrum of rewilding and everyone can learn from all shades. If we are to achieve significant core-areas, as exist in other parts of the world, we need cooperation for buffer zones and corridors – we need a political profile that is inclusive. Not one that appeals only to high-end ecotourism, or the bear hunters.

Enter stage left, The Guardian journalist George Monbiot, as keynote speaker at the larger gathering. He spoke of our long-lost European megafauna – the elephant and rhino, bison, lion and hyena, and their inimitable grazing and browsing pressure “Which no-one in the conservation movement had given a thought to”. Yet the chapter on herbivores in Beyond Conservation, commissioned by BANC, addressed this head-on, and he later in the press conference acknowledged he had been influenced by the book. I reminded him that elephants needed to migrate and in Beyond Conservation we had concluded it was rather impractical.

The future – where does the road go from here?

The prospects for wildlife and wildland in Europe are good. There is a wildlife ‘come-back’, well documented by a Wilder Europe publication (a separate but linked initiative for the conference). Wolf, bear and lynx are recovering, as are most eagles, vultures (three out of four), bison, deer in some places – and the areas under protection are also increasing. Much of this is due to abandonment of land in marginal areas and some to more active legal protection and to successful reintroductions (like the bearded vulture, sea eagle and red kite). And although much of this needs to be seen within the context of past depredation and depletion, there is a good prospect.

On the wider world stage, though, how does Rewilding play? One of the indigenous conservationists commented – ‘we can handle our own ecosystems, it’s your egosystems that cause us the problems’.

On the road to Salamanca, I thought long about the legacy of empires, including the scientific and the economic. What is now left of the natural world, the wild, in both landscape and community, is rare and threatened. The tragedy at Salamanca is that conservationists still fail to see that they are part of the old empire. When they seek to repair the world, they also seek to place their ego within it. Who amongst us can say we are free of this shadow? But the indigenous people I sat next to had something that emanated in the conference hall, even that they were dressed in 26

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 normal western garb, except the Brazilian Yawanara chief, who unselfconsciously wore his feathered headdress wherever he went! They had a certain joy and a peaceful way that reached somewhere behind my eyes and welled tears whenever they spoke. They were not part of the egosystem. Their legacy was not yet disrupted.

And they were looking for help to maintain the life they knew.

Meanwhile, at close of debate, the secretariat introduced them to the well-known dangers of climate change and alien species invasion. Most of them had not thought too much about these things. But secretariats have an eye on the funding streams for the next event and the boxes to tick along the way. That’s not the road.

Rewilding the human The wild does not have to be an abandoned land, safari-lodged and ring-fenced.

In Romania, shepherding communities co-exist with healthy populations of large carnivores. Certainly, there is a place for core areas with no domestic stock – but in the corridors and buffer zones, there can also be revitalised wildlife-friendly communities. And some of those corridors can come right into the suburbs and cities as was illustrated at WILD 10 by experience from Chicago.6 The road ahead needs to be one of revelation, a Damascean conversion to the values of the heart and human community. Just as we lost the wolf and the bear, we lost a part of our soul, our direction and our dream. We in Britain led the industrial revolution and too easily forget it was built on land clearances, migration to cities, economic exploitation and abject slavery. To now truly go beyond the conservation paradigm is to realise its way of thinking is rooted in an imperial economic and scientific mindset. The remedy is not out of reach – it lies in humble grass-roots initiatives, where people are reconnecting in practical ways to the land, and can rekindle associated crafts, livelihoods, creativity and wisdom.

As conservation professionals we need to listen to the voice of the indigenous peoples – both the communities on abandoned land in Europe, and those further afield still with their legacy intact. There needs to be a two-way flow. The future of European wildlife is not just about species and spectacle, it is about us as humans in a wilder world. If we are to make the landscape wilder, then we need to become wilder to live in harmony with it, and not allow science to separate us from nature.

References 1. Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCA) : www.iccaconsortium.org 2. Taylor P. (2005) Beyond Conservation Earthscan, London.

3. Taylor P. (2011) Rewilding. ECOS writing on wildland and conservation values. www.banc.org.uk 4. A Vision for a Wilder Europe (2013) www.wild10.org 5. Rewilding Europe (2013) www.rewildingeurope.com 6. Chicago Wilderness Project, www.chicagowilderness.org

Peter Taylor is at ethos_uk@onetel.com

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013

Nature blogging – a personal perspective What role can blogs play in debate on nature conservation and how influential might they be in affecting change, both directly and through longer-term diffusion of ideas?

This article takes a personal look at the motivations for blogging and the experience of grappling with nature’s expanding blogosphere.

MILES KING Nattering on nature It’s a little over three years now since I wrote my first blog while at the Grasslands Trust. I had been following Mark Avery’s blog, when he was still Conservation Director at RSPB. I thought to myself “well I can do that” and, always having a lot to say (and thinking far too highly of my own opinions) it felt like a natural step to start writing.

I had a considerable degree of freedom in what I did at the Grasslands Trust, so I was able to develop the blog as part of my job, as opposed to doing it in my spare time. I generally tried to keep to topics relevant to conservation, grasslands and livestock, and consciously used it to promote messages that reflected TGT’s position on issues. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I stuck to the corporate line, because there were very few corporate lines to which I felt obliged to stick. It was a small dynamic organisation, with effectively no membership. The CEO and Trustees were happy with what I was writing, and I was definitely exercising an element of selfcensorship, to make sure they continued to be happy.

It’s always gratifying to have your work noted and referenced (less so when it’s just picked up and not referenced) by others, such as journalists. Partly because it validates what you’re doing, but also gets your messages out to a wider audience and increases your readership. I had a couple of stories used in this way during the first year of blogging – one on hedgerow and grassland destruction in Northern Ireland, which was picked up by George Monbiot in his blog for the Guardian, and another on innovative approaches to reducing nitrogen pollution from farmland, picked up by Louise Gray in the Telegraph. Just as I was writing this article, I discovered to my amazement that my blog was referenced in a Guardian leader article on CAP reform. Ironically the article referred back to my previous ECOS article “Any Room for Scrub” which appeared 12 years ago!

Twitter - who needs it?

Many people don’t like twitter, turn their noses up at it and generally dismiss it as trivial. I think this is partly because of the name, and also due to the presence of celebrities and their followers, hanging on their ever, mostly vacuous, word.

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 The fact that it is also the favourite hangout of politicians and media types, puts many people off - quite understandably. However, it is a great place to publicise your concerns, your campaigns and your views. I have been on twitter since 2009, starting off with The Grasslands Trust, then more recently as myself. Twitter put TGT on the map and gave it public profile in a way that would not have been possible, for example just using a website alone. Bringing together a regularly updated blog, a regularly used Twitter account, and a regularly refreshed website can provide the sort of material that keeps your members or audience interested and engaged. Potentially it can lead to real change through activist engagement with politicians and the media. Although Save Our Trees and subsequently 38 Degrees were successful in using Twitter and social media to garner support for the forestry anti-privatisation campaign, I suspect the use of social media by opponents of the badger cull will turn out to be equally significant in the long run. I would guess probably twice as many people read a blog if I have regularly tweeted about it, compared to one which I haven’t. I use Twitter effectively to publicise my blog posts, and the readership can be substantially amplified if Twitter followers retweet a blog to their own followers.

Does any of this matter, or is it just a vanity project? If I was just writing about what I had for breakfast, or why I think the Great British Bake Off is rubbish, then it would be an indulgent exercise. But most of my posts are intended to do something or spark a reaction. And most of the time the point is to challenge the reader’s, and my own, preconceptions.

The re-wilding debate One issue to which I have returned in my blogs more times than any other is the debate about re-wilding and conservation. I have always been interested in ‘what went before’, and where the wildlife we have in Britain came from. Or at least since I read Oliver Rackham’s magisterial The History of the Countryside in 1987. From then, I was aware that lynx and wolves roamed the British landscape until relatively recent times; and that the landscape was a palimpsest with layers of historic landuse (and abandonment) set atop one another, century after century, millennia on millennia. I was not really that interested in the re-wilding debate when it came up about 10 years ago (despite reading about it in ECOS). I suppose I was too busy trying to make a living as a freelance conservation consultant to have time to think about such things.

After three years at the Grasslands Trust, where the semi-natural state of habitats was what it was all about, my preconceptions were challenged in a refreshing way thanks to an impromptu argument with journalist George Monbiot on Twitter.

George was working on his book Feral and was on the war path against what he sees as the misplaced and craven defeatism of British nature conservation, with a focus on nature subjugated, in thrall to the dominion of man. George was having a go at nature conservation (in his inimitable way) and I was happy to argue with him. We got into quite a heated twitter debate - and this spilled over into many blog posts about the wild and the semi-natural. And it has been incredibly refreshing - I have challenged so many of my own preconceptions, and lazy thinking about 29

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nature and what conservation is actually about. The act of writing has enabled me to step back from my own beliefs and prejudices and forced me to consider which ones are justified and which are received wisdom. I certainly haven’t come round to thinking that everything George proposes is right, indeed writing the blog has given me a practice ground to try out various different ideas and positions. The value of comment is crucial on this practice ground. It is to me always a relief when I have written a post and someone has commented on it. It feels like people are thinking about what I am writing. And to have a commentator who disagrees is even better as that provides an opportunity to have a debate and to test further the ideas. I am lucky not to have attracted any real trolls to my blog, but perhaps having a troll is another badge of honour.

I did not escape unchanged from George’s withering polemic attacks on nature conservation and Mark Fisher’s gimlet like dissection of some of the sacred cows to which we cling. Indeed to some extent it was a liberating process. I had known that Pleistocene Britain supported extinct megafauna, beyond the Holocene losses of aurochsen and elk. What I had not appreciated until this was pointed out to me during these discussions, was the key role of the straight-tusked elephant and the elephant coping-strategies that our native trees and shrubs had developed - which have enabled them to be coppiced and pollarded, for example.

That got me thinking about and writing (not necessarily in that order) about elephants and their role in the ecology of temperate woodlands. It struck me that the Holocene forest, or wildwood as it is romantically labelled, was actually a pale shadow of its former self in previous interglacials. Those megafauna that were the main ecosystem engineers for the entire Pleistocene (interglacials), the elephant, the rhinoceros etc had not returned. Imagine the disturbance they would have created - all forest elephants create permanent tracks (equivalent to woodland rides) and large clearings where they interact socially, called Bai. The straight-tusked was a real giant, nearly twice as big as extant forest elephants.

I had a minor epiphany. For years I had struggled to understand how our species of open habitats (that Fisher and Monbiot decry as pseudo-natural) had survived in the closed temperate forests of the Holocene. Accepting sadly that the seductive lure of Hans Vera’s theory of savannah did not stand up to close scrutiny, it occurred to me that we were looking in the wrong place (or rather time) to find the pre-human origins of open habitats. And in that sense, we were now the elephants, creating clearings, coppicing trees, making lots of muddy wet places where the sun gets in.

Of course human land-use has taken that to an extreme in Britain. But it also means that woodlands left to their own devices, without any disturbance are as artificial as meadows. And people get upset about wild boar damage! Imagine what a rhino would have done...

Future green blogging and social media I increasingly feel that random events have such a profound effect on the future that futurology is a pointless exercise, and just another example of humanity’s hubris.

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NEIL BENNETT

The elephant in the room

That’s not to say I think it’s pointless trying to affect how things are going to change - far from it. I sometimes feel that writing in mildly creative ways is a neat way to influence things, and far less soul destroying than the more formal world of policy proposals, consultations and submissions, which add up to continually banging your head against the metaphorical wall of political indifference, inertia or ignorance.

I will continue to blog for the foreseeable future. I don’t have a huge audience and would like more people to read what I write. As someone who is opinionated and interested in all sorts of different things, I rarely run out of things to say. I do sometimes run out of time or lose the desire to write, if there are many other things happening, or where mental and emotional energy is used elsewhere. The intersection between politics, the environment and the media is an interesting and fluid place, so it’s a good place to go round picking up morsels of information, ideas and opinions.

I predict social media will be increasingly important to the future environment sectors – no magic mirror needed there. It’s difficult to imagine that Facebook, blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter and websites will stay as separate entities for any great length of time. Whatever Social Media morphs into, it will be an ever more effective way for those with a view or a proposal, to engage with the public, specific communities, and organisation’s members, as well as an ever larger thief of time.

Will organisations even have members in the traditional sense in future? Sounds like a good idea for a blog...

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 Miles King has been making trouble in nature conservation for the past 27 years. He has been conservation director of Plantlife, The Grasslands Trust and Buglife. He was partly responsible for the BAP process, for which he partly apologises. miles@milesking.demon.co.uk www.anewnatureblog.wordpress.com

Embracing the green blogosphere Leeds University geography students were asked to follow up Miles King’s perspective, by provided views on how they use blogs and social media in their learning and discussions on nature…

As a student I find environmental blogs incredibly useful for the context of academic research. They enable me to develop and increase my understanding of a specific issue, along with potential arguments and discrepancies, prior to following up published academic literature. It is rare for a blog topic to be on a subject reading list, with journals favouring textbooks. Since participating in a blog as part of an assessed course module I believe there is scope for it to be incorporated into seminars, or even replace them, due to the ability to debate and raise ones issues whilst also simultaneously use facts and figures from other online resources. Perhaps institutes should embrace modern communication systems, as swapping ideas in this way can lead to new research and discoveries.

Richard Hart

As part of the assessment for a module I am studying at university my peers and I have been encouraged to blog and debate about the topics brought up at the recent wildlife conference: Wild10. This has helped us to really engage with the topics covered in the module. Not only this, it has opened up new depths of topics that I personally feel I would have missed by just reading academic literature. However, while they are very useful for the learning and sharing of opinions like this, blogs are often disregarded as a means of referencing scientific work. As they are largely based on the opinion of the writer and not backed up by references they cannot be used as a basis for a scientific report.

Esme Shattock

To me nature is about being outside, experiencing it first hand and not through another IT information screen. One may become addicted to social media, although many people use it but do not become tied to it. I believe it can encourage young people to learn about the basics of nature. I remember first reading about poaching in national geographic and becoming emotive on the subject. Perhaps this realisation of problems, wonders and how to get involved is now found on these social media sites. The official Wild10 youtube video still makes me feel passionate about wilderness in which a journal article never could. However, progress is not going to be entirely made from social media alone and other literature still has important contributions to make.

Richard Hart

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013

Climate change – a rational debate Climate models have not predicted recent years’ static temperature trends but the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports with 95% confidence that humans are the main cause of current global warming. Meanwhile across blogs and the media debate rages on the evidence for climate change and the implications of related policies and expenditure.

Is action in response to climate change a severe environmental impact in itself, creating direct harm to nature and human wellbeing in the name of the precautionary principle, or is mitigation and adaptation to climate change an essential and urgent priority, to aid people and wildlife amidst an all pervading global threat? ECOS sought two contrasting views amongst conservation practitioners in response to the IPCC 5th assessment report (www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5)…

British conservation and climate change: the habitats matter CLIVE HAMBLER As relentlessly as the climate keeps changing, so do predictions of how it will change. First an ice age was the threat. Then we were told the world might warm 6oC by 2100 (delaying the ice age), but now it’s unlikely to warm much more than 2oC. Read the IPCC’s 5th report, with its disturbing internal contradictions, and you may come out less confident of predictions. It’s important to be critical, and consider this: scientists are often wrong, no matter how many of them in one branch of it are saying something. Although paradigm shifts can be painful, we should always open our minds to alternative experts and the latest research.1,2,3,4 The IPCC did some great work - but that does not mean all its work is great. A precautionary approach and a rash of modelling were rational whilst extreme climate changes were quite plausible, but as evidence and understanding has improved, it’s time to damp down those alarms - and focus on habitat restoration.

Despite the IPCC obscuring inconvenient facts, there is very high confidence their favourite global climate models are inadequate.1,5 A great deal of energy was anticipated to enter the Earth system, but this has not warmed the surface since 1998; it may somehow have been lost in space or lost in the ocean (never to trouble anyone but the modellers). The climate probably has low sensitivity to CO21 and high sensitivity to the Sun. Meanwhile, the Met Office’s prediction for UK climate impacts appear biased against low amounts of warming.6 Will revised projections be made for British wildlife, which include the possibilities of cooling in the next decades or centuries?

As a small area with oceanic influence, Britain’s climate prediction was volatile from the start. Maybe warmer, colder, wetter, drier, more ‘extreme’; maybe all of these,

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 in different places and seasons. For what they are worth, the new IPCC regional assessments maps show that some changes may well be undetectable beyond current natural variation.

I suggest that most of ‘our’ wildlife can take substantial climate changes: Britain’s wildlife has been filtered through some 20 ice ages and 20 short, warm interglacials. Which species will gain and lose from climate change? If Britain warms substantively, some of our (few) specialised northern and montane species will be doomed, whilst we gain many continental thermophiles. Many natives will have more space, here and globally. Conversely, cooling threatens some of the globally numerous opportunists that long ago invaded Britain as it was degraded by clearing, coppicing, grazing, burning, draining and building. Increased sea level, and rain, present an opportunity for some species, a challenge to others.

Perhaps the only thing to be confident of in the attempted ‘climate-proofing’ of wildlife is that it should be made even easier for species to cope with climate change.

Species may need big populations (with more genes), and habitat connectivity to move north, south, east, west, up or down. We should be pursuing those goals anyway. In the face of inevitable and natural climate changes, conservation should be business as usual.

Wildlife organisations wallow in controversial models of species’ responses to climate7, driven by risky models of the regional climate, driven by out-of-date, floundering, global models. The natural changes this century might have been harder for wildlife. If your favourite species depended on it, would you worry more about guaranteed loss of food and shelter through habitat loss, or about speculative changes over a hundred years from now - which might actually make its life easier?

Habitat loss is the dominant driver of the high British extinction rate8 with about one species lost per month. Habitat loss is the most fundamental problem: without it, even the greatest estimates of climate change are probably not threatening for most species. So, we should rewild - to restore connectivity and the habitat diversity of mature forest and wetland that will further buffer against any changes.7 Instead, some NGOs claim that climate change is the biggest threat to wildlife. They (and, amazingly, the IPCC WGII AR5 impacts report!) quote profoundly erroneous and alarmist estimates of the numbers of animals that will be killed by fossil fuels; they think ‘committed to extinction by 2050’ means ‘extinct by 2050’ 7,9 and very selectively ignore the inevitable benefits to numerous species.

Climate paranoia has been exploited by developers to make people who care about wildlife destroy it. In Britain we are fragmenting streams with hydro-plants. Wind energy brings industrial scale infrastructure to undeveloped landscapes, including peatlands; wind turbines attract and kill bats, and possibly lethally lure swifts, eagles and harriers.10 We have habitat-burning stoves and power stations, using the most primitive and biologically destructive energy source: woodfuel. We have the depravity of using food for fuel. We have calls for massive pumped storage of 34

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 energy. Some NGOs would even watch with satisfaction as a barrage on the river Severn destroyed one the very best habitats in Britain!

Everyone should be concerned that some of the crazy climate ‘solutions’ have, predictably, increased CO2 emissions. Why do NGOs not favour what engineers and biologists tell them are more effective responses? As no-regrets actions (more particularly against ocean acidification) we should cut wasteful combustion, save fossil carbon for plastics and restore forests.

Some NGOs have lost perspective, and now obsess with preventing climate changes nobody understands. They appear to have emotional and financial conflicts of interest - investments in some actions that might have to be reversed. But if people attempt to ‘protect’ wildlife from possible harm, using ‘climate mitigation’ technologies which cause definite harm, here’s my prediction: a rise in extinctions.

Not the legacy anyone wants - whatever the climate.

References 1. http://www.thegwpf.org/richard-lindzen-understanding-ipcc-climate-assessment/ 2. http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/28/ipcc-diagnosis-permanent-paradigm-paralysis/ 3. http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/global-lukewarming-need-not-be-catastrophic.aspx 4. Bishop Hill Blog http://bishophill.squarespace.com/ 5. Fyfe J. C. et al. (2013). Nature Climate Change, 3, 767-769.

6. http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/9/25/met-office-concedes-the-error.html 7. Hambler, C. & Canney, S. M. (2013). Conservation. 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press.

8. Hambler, C., Henderson, P. A. & Speight, M. R. (2011). Extinction rates, extinction-prone habitats, and indicator groups in Britain and at larger scales. Biological Conservation, 144, 713-721.

9. Hambler, C. (2013). In: http://www.swlg.org.uk/uploads/6/3/3/8/6338077/spwln_final_small.pdf 10. http://wcfn.org/2013/07/01/tip-of-the-iceberg/

Clive Hambler is the co-author of Conservation and an ecologist teaching in the University of Oxford.

He is researching the measurement and reduction of extinction rates. clive.hambler@hertford.ox.ac.uk

Climate change – the nature conservation commitment JENNY HAWLEY Where do we go to find the headline messages of the latest IPCC report? Media coverage of climate change has itself caused much controversy, in terms of the time given to those airing sceptical or dissenting views. Clearly, the media generates debate across a range of viewpoints. Whether this accurately represents the science or proportionately represents the whole range of views (and indeed whether it should) is yet another debate.

Direct from the IPCC itself is the ‘summary for policymakers’, with 36 pages which are no doubt easier to digest than the full report, but still contain a level of 35

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 technical language and statistics which may be off-putting to the lay reader. Most local ‘policymakers’ in my experience are unlikely to dig any deeper than the 19 ‘overarching conclusions’, handily highlighted in coloured boxes and only a few lines each in length – although they’re more likely to get their headline messages from the media or an internal briefing.

There are controversial issues, such as the recent ‘pause’ in global warming highlighted by the media from the latest IPCC report. This has been used by some to discredit the IPCC and to discourage action on climate change; the IPCC members state that the short term ‘pause’ only applies to surface temperatures, not the whole climate, and does not affect long term trends.

On a subject as complex as this, anyone can pick and choose data, and argue about interpretations and political agendas until the cows come home. More certainty around climate change and its impacts would be a wonderful thing. Yet this requires investment in real world data collection and analysis. Wildlife is a key indicator of ecosystem functioning and climate change impacts; yet the changing status of wildlife is an obvious gap in our understanding. Wildlife data collection is often inadequate and chronically underfunded, relying too heavily on the goodwill of volunteers to monitor, record, report and analyse.

Here at Wiltshire Wildlife Trust, how do we respond to the IPCC’s report? Few of us have the time or expertise to decipher the data for ourselves. On face value, the headline messages reinforce our ongoing policy, strategy and practical work, which is already centred around mitigating and adapting to climate change, and working to influence others to do the same: the faster, the better.

So to what extent do the findings – and the debate around them – affect our work? In practice, probably very little. Does that matter? Not really. One of the puzzling things about the climate change debate is that most of the practical mitigation and adaptation measures needed have so many other benefits that they’re worth doing anyway: • Renewable energy: this provides energy security and independence, improves air quality, reduces our reliance on finite fossil fuels and reduces the risks associated with nuclear power; • Energy efficiency: this saves money, reduces pollution and waste, and provides warmer homes in winter; • Applying the waste hierarchy of reusing, reducing and recycling to our water, food, material goods and other ‘natural resources’: this saves money and makes our economy and society more efficient and more sustainable for future generations; • Preserving carbon stores and increasing carbon sequestration in our land, including by protecting and enhancing peatland, woodland, permanent grassland and other undisturbed soils: this brings benefits for biodiversity, soil quality, water resources, air quality, our quality of life and overall ecosystem functioning; 36

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 • Creating networks of high-quality green spaces in and between urban areas: this improves our health and wellbeing, our sense of place and quality of life, encourages wildlife, reduces flood risk and helps us to cope with hot weather; • Reducing fossil-fuel-based inputs and implementing other environmental management in farming practices: this improves soil quality and structure, encourages wildlife, reduces pollution and waste, reduces transport costs and improves the long-term sustainability of the farming economy; In terms of nature conservation, the measures necessary to reverse the decline in biodiversity, such as landscape-scale conservation, can only help in adapting to climate change. Even if the sceptics are right and the IPCC is wrong, then we’re not wasting our time: we know that wildlife is in enough trouble already and we need to implement these measures regardless of who’s right or wrong on climate change.

Wiltshire Wildlife Trust already has projects working with local communities and businesses to reduce waste, grow local food, plant community orchards, generate renewable energy and provide nature-based activities to enhance people’s health and wellbeing. This goes well beyond our traditional role of managing nature reserves for wildlife and public access; it stems from the belief that sustainable living is a vital component of wildlife conservation in the long term. The more that people understand and value the natural world, whether through a walk in the park or buying recycled toilet paper, the greater our chances of securing a sustainable future for wildlife and people.

So our actions in response to climate change are all things that we should be doing anyway to benefit nature, people and the economy. Where the IPCC’s latest report has greatest impact at a local level is where the doubts, debate and reactions make people less motivated to look after nature and minimise their environmental impact.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have the debate; but then we have to redouble our efforts to inspire people to make positive choices.

The barriers to this are much wider than any weaknesses in the IPCC’s models and predictions. They are many of the same barriers that we have faced in nature conservation for years: the triumph of short-term economics over long-term wellbeing; the culture of materialism; the disconnection of people from nature; the political and societal failure to recognise the value of ecosystem services and the irreversible consequences of biodiversity loss.

Yet we know that change can happen quickly when it comes to the crunch, when it becomes more difficult to carry on as we were than to make a change – as the ban on smoking in public places has shown. As the evidence mounts from the IPCC and others, the change needed to tackle global warming cannot come too soon.

Jenny Hawley is Environmental Intelligence Officer at Wiltshire Wildlife Trust. jennyh@wiltshirewildlife.org

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013

Integrating nature and agriculture - towards a new vision The conservation sector in the UK needs to engage more fully with the debate over the future of agriculture in Britain, and to recognise – despite the enormity of the subject the need for our approach to nature, farming and society to become more integrated.

GAVIN SAUNDERS & SIMON BRENMAN Agricultural reform - recognising the challenge

On 2 November 2013, The Guardian editorial began thus: “We need to talk about farming. There’s a lot to talk about. There’s the brilliant green of close-cropped grassland and the tidy hedges of tourist brochure England. And there is the environmental impact of so much human intervention on a landscape. There are the golden grain plains of the east and the value of those regular hectares of weedfree, lifeless barley and the hundreds of cattle it will one day feed. And there’s the cost of finding horse in your burger again. And over the grey Cumbrian fells hovers the question: might the barren landscape be more ecologically diverse with more scrub and fewer sheep?”

This exposition, on a subject which doesn’t normally get a lot of attention from the metropolitan media, was sparked by the launch of a very significant consultation

by Defra on the implementation of CAP reform in England. Much attention in this consultation has been on whether the Secretary of State should allocate the maximum 15% of the £2 billion in CAP spending to Pillar 2 rural development, paving the way for agri-environment spending, in turn, to be secured. There are signs that the full 15% may indeed be earmarked in this way. However, the so-called ‘greening’ measures which could be attached to the remaining 85% spending on direct payments under Pillar 1, look set to be minimal and unambitious, a huge missed opportunity driven by a governmental focus on bureaucratic efficiency rather than a real interest in public value for public money.

If the Pillar 2 allocation battle is won, schemes like Higher Level Stewardship in the new CAP may end up with a budget allocation similar to what they have had to date, which will be good news as far as it goes. But the real war, we would suggest, is not going to be won that way. For all the very great importance those schemes carry, they put wildlife and environment into a conveniently separate box. For those who regard environmental payments as a mere distraction from the real game of maximising agricultural outputs, it is the neatest way of dealing with the issue – a targeted, voluntary, self-contained set of schemes which bracket conservation into a corner.

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 Much energy has been spent in campaigning for the agri-environment provisions we have enjoyed hitherto, and in delivering them on the ground, and all that effort deserves fulsome praise. Schemes like Higher Level Stewardship in England not only deliver a large proportion of the conservation-focused habitat management outside statutory sites, but they provide a bridge between farmers and conservationists.

Bodies like Wildlife Trusts have brokered those schemes for farmers and have provided a positive service to them in the process, countering the impression of farmerbashing which is the easy caricature to lay at conservation’s door. Those schemes have, meanwhile, provided a lifeline of economic support, quite apart from their environmental outcomes, for farms operating at the edge of business viability.

But what about the wider landscape? By playing this game, have conservationists unwittingly fallen into the trap of encouraging a divergence between nature and food?

A diverging agenda For the last half-century nature conservation policy has tended to separate wildlife conservation from food production. Its focus on special sites and the margins of conventionally farmed land has been a necessary rearguard action to protect the best remaining habitats before they are lost. But while conservationists acknowledge that most valued habitats need to be ‘farmed’ in some sense, provided the legislation and agri-environment programmes enable that management, they have not seemed too concerned about what happens to the rest of the farmed countryside. The result is an increasingly stark partition between the majority of farmed land, and the areas ‘reserved’ for different treatment under environmental schemes.

The organic movement promotes farming practices that are sustainable and holistic but it has had to establish a premium market to make these practices affordable. This in turn has created a black and white divergence between those farms prepared to certify themselves as fully organic, and the rest - with the unintended consequence that many sympathetic farmers have been alienated because they don’t quite make the grade.

A huge new opportunity to sell western style meat- and dairy-rich diets to developing global markets and talk of ‘sustainable intensification’, risks exacerbating these divisions further, as the American agri-business lobby seductively tries to suggest that we must farm the good land more intensively, in order to preserve the wild places.

And finally there is a potential risk that the rhetoric of the nature conservation lobby itself, in advocating re-wilding and large-scale habitat restoration (for example in the recent debate over farming in the uplands spurred by journalist George Monbiot’s book Feral), could play into the hands of this separatist agenda, creating an unintended Faustian pact.

Does any of this matter? Is the way we farm the wider countryside something conservationists should care about, or can we continue to just fight for the ‘good bits’, and press for these to be expanded and more joined up, at least in some areas?

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013

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We think it does matter. We think the biggest factor affecting the state of nature in this country is the way we farm the land – all of the land – and the way we farm is currently not working well for society as a whole, not just for wildlife. The trajectory of the current CAP reform proposals will not change the balance substantially, and so this is a critical moment to be asking some fundamental questions.

The crisis in agriculture We believe that we have a crisis in agriculture – in the whole system from field to plate. We challenge the convention that industrial efficiency and a free market should drive farming policy. While conventional measures of agricultural productivity may seem favourable, the current paradigm is bad for biodiversity, and bad for just about everything else – bad at preventing flooding, bad at producing good quality water, bad in inducing a vulnerability to plant disease, bad for livestock health, bad in terms of carbon emissions, often bad in terms of food quality, often bad for the quality of life for many farmers and their families, bad at promoting fair access to food, and bad at improving public health.

Agricultural policy in Britain has been focused on producing more food, more cheaply, but while doing so it has presided over a continuing dissolution of wildlife habitats and species, a massive loss of rural employment (with associated knock on effects on rural society), the break up of family farms, the dilution of mixed patterns of livestock and cropping towards monocultures, increasing problems with nutrient enrichment in our drinking water, a loss of public trust, and twin crises in dietrelated public health and growing food poverty.

The effects of the current farming system on wildlife are clear, from the findings of the recent State of Nature report. Not all the woes of wildlife can be laid at the door of agriculture, but as the major determinant of land use in this country, it is the main factor.

Why has agriculture reached this point? Why does it no longer serve the common good?

What we have seen in farming over recent decades is an over-simplification of systems, in the name of production efficiency (an industrial term), which strips out complexity and loses sight of the human scale. Enlargement of scale, simplification of pattern and genetics, rationalisation of timing, and industrialisation of process, have been pursued allegedly to improve yields, but in truth leading to an ever greater lack of time for farmers and farm workers, a loss of good husbandry skills, a restriction in financial flexibility, and a dearth of social contact. In addition to simplification and scale, the need to maximise yields has driven huge changes in the timings and types of cultivations, and the extended use of agrochemicals.

This relentless over-simplification weakens the resilience of our agricultural landscapes, which require diversity in order to absorb and contain adverse effects of pests, diseases and climatic stress. In nature by contrast, large systems are generally diverse and complex.

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How can we integrate nature better across Englands patchwork quilt landscape?

In human terms, over-simplified and over-scale systems tend to become undemocratic and inhuman, with few participants feeling any satisfying degree of self-determination. Working class experience since the beginning of the industrial revolution has borne this out. As self-determination declines, care and attention to quality tend to decline also. The loss of vitality which follows is a negative feature even in the most organically barren, tightly controlled factory environment. In the open, living landscape it is doubly detrimental.

Though it may seem easy to label this as farmer bashing, it is not. Many farmers are suffering at the hands of this system as much as the land itself, working too hard for too little, suffering depression, losing social contact and a sense of pride, feeding monsters they have no energy to tackle, with no time to challenge or question the pressures being put on them.

This is a criticism of agricultural policy. Policy that serves agri-business rather than agri-culture. Policy that is promoted by lobbyists for the chemical, seed and feed industries, the processors and the supermarkets. Policy that should be challenged 41

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(rather than championed) by the NFU, which has consistently failed to speak for the smaller or more progressive farmer, and is too closely allied to those with vested interests in maintaining the status quo.

The crisis with food Despite the apparent cornucopia of foods in our supermarkets, the quality of average diets in Britain has declined, with more of us eating more processed foods and less fresh food, and losing any sense of what is seasonal, and where food actually comes from. Meanwhile our appetite for meat is fed by devoting an everincreasing proportion of our arable land to the growing of feed for livestock – a hugely inefficient use of space, fertility, water and energy.

While food banks proliferate and diet-related obesity spirals, we throw away huge quantities of food. Tesco has recently reported that it threw away 30,000 tonnes of bagged salad, bread, fruit and other foodstuffs in just the first six months of 2013. Taking food producers, retailers and consumers together, about one third of all the food we produce in the UK is either not harvested, rejected before sale, or binned once it reaches our homes. For us to suggest, as a nation, that we should try and crank up the intensity of primary production from the land, with all the consequences of doing so, without first dealing properly with this extraordinary profligacy, is shameful.

Sustainable intensification Some believe in the concept of sustainable intensification (a land and livestock management model in which agricultural productivity increases whilst use of harmful inputs reduces). The phrase is being used increasingly as a mantra for a somewhat vague notion of ever-greater outputs without all the disbenefits of the current approach, achieved via unspecified technological fixes.

Others see it as simply an oxymoron, regarding any further increase in the amount of food that is wringed out of our farmed landscape as being anathema to any serious notion of sustainability.

In truth, production can be ‘intensified’ in some situations, in some senses. There is a case for genuine sustainable intensification in developing countries, where the intensification needed is about intensified skills, knowledge, husbandry, genetic resources, community involvement, labour, storage facilities and complexity.

And in those areas of farmland in the UK which have been simplified into grass or grain factories, ‘intensifying’ those landscapes by enriching them with more crops, rotations, mixes and methods, together with workers, volunteers, added-value businesses and messy edges, would be a good thing. They could become more intensely alive and more sustainable.

Building a solution Addressing this massive set of issues demands a holistic vision, and an end to narrow perspectives. It demands the courage not to be put off by the fear that questioning 42

Fragmented nature? An isolated habitat on Wiltshire downland.

Photo: Simon Brenman

the juggernaut of agri-business is a sign of naivety in the face of a looming crisis of food security. It demands a dialogue between those who grow things, and those who manage habitats; between conservationists and soil scientists; between environmentalists, food campaigners and public health experts. It demands the preparedness to stop and listen to the ‘quiet few’ amongst the farming community who already know full well how to integrate nature and food. Most of all it demands responsible and far-sighted leadership – the kind of leadership that insists that we pay the real and full costs for the necessities in life.

First of all we need to acknowledge that we have a problem, and we have to acknowledge that current problems are not going to be solved by technological advancements alone. As part of that acceptance process, conservationists have to acknowledge that a continuing separation between mainstream farming and mainstream nature conservation is exacerbating the problem. To move forward successfully we have to start thinking about agriculture as a means by which we can achieve multiple benefits for society rather than a singularly focussed production process.

In addressing the need for integration in terms of nature and agriculture, we need to acknowledge the web of issues surrounding farming, wildlife and wider society which have to be considered holistically: the proportion of food being wasted, the proportion of crops used to feed livestock to feed demand for cheap meat, and the balance in public diets between processed and fresh foods. Conservationists need 43

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 to recognise – and then help others to recognise – that campaigning for a move towards fresh, unprocessed, seasonal food, with less emphasis on meat and dairy, is a conservation issue, not just a public health one.

Thirdly we need to understand the components of ‘good’ agriculture. An integrated agricultural land use would conserve soil biology and structure, building and securing organic matter rather than depleting it. It would encourage farming systems that are complex and diverse, spatially, genetically and temporally (mixed cropping patterns and enterprises, rotations, etc). It would allow pollinators to benefit from diverse nectar sources, while checking pathogens and pests by limiting the amount of any one host or food plant. It would encourage producers to embrace diversity in their seed and breed selection, and to share seed locally to fit genotypes to localities. It would promote a proliferation of people and businesses on the land – a variety of scales and types of business, including specialists and generalists, organic and non-organic, producing both commodities and added value products.

It would create less leaky economic, nutrient and energy cycles, conserving fertility and reducing reliance on fossil fuels, in turn reducing costs and emissions. It would embrace the good sense offered to us by permaculture and the organic movement, without adopting the all-excluding dogmas of those creeds.

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 the growing global demand for food. And it is true that an integrated, genuinely sustainable farming system will not produce ever more food. We can only rebalance our approach to agriculture if we address the question of what we want from our countryside, what we eat, how much we need, and how we avoid wasting or destroying what the land gives us. But we must not succumb to a panic-inducing cry that future food security demands that we abuse the land even more.

Gavin Saunders runs a consultancy and co-manages a social enterprise in Somerset gavinsaunders@btinternet.com, www.gavinsaunders.com.

Simon Brenman is Director of Regional Programmes for the South West Wildlife Trusts simon.brenman@swwt.org.uk.

The views expressed here are those of the authors.

Fourthly we need to recognise and encourage ‘good’ when we see it. This means creating an environment where good practice and innovation are noticed and rewarded. We need to notice those quiet, committed farmers who are unusual only in that they do not accept the status quo, and have the personal and professional ingredients to farm at a human yet effective scale, caring for the land and also yielding a good, but sustainable harvest.

This argument draws attention to a cultural blind spot which has affected some parts of British conservation for decades – the lack of acknowledgement of the soil as a conservation issue. Yes, nature conservationists bemoan soil that gets washed off the fields into the rivers, for the effects it has downstream. And yes, we recognise that the degradation and erosion of soil is a bad thing. But we’ve tended perhaps to see soil conservation as the concern only of those whose business is growing things. Actually, the abundance and trophic complexity of biodiversity in the soil is a massive iceberg beneath the surface, with direct links between above and below-ground wildlife. We tend to concern ourselves only with the biodiversity we can see.

The conventional farming lobby’s response to this type of argument is to dismiss it for failing to offer a way for society to produce the food it needs, and meet 44

NEIL BENNETT

Conservationists need to expand their consciousness of what is really good for biodiversity. We need to look for the actual and potential diversity in swards where more forbs and weedy species are encouraged, in arable fields where cropping patterns and crop choices complement the needs of pollinators, beneficial insects and birds, and in soils where home-grown organic matter is seen as a precious resource, with the effervescence of soil biodiversity it carries. None of this should or need be at the expense of semi-natural habitat, but is an inescapable partner to it.

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Assessing the Cardigan Bay bottlenose dolphin SACs Cardigan Bay in Wales and adjacent waters are important for marine wildlife and have various areas designated as special areas of conservation (SACs). Here we consider the extent to which bottlenose dolphin SACs can be said to be effective.

MARK PETER SIMMONDS, MICK GREEN, VICKI JAMES, SONJA EISFELD & ROB LOTT Sites for cetaceans In the late 1980s, Cardigan Bay became the focus of efforts to improve marine protection using the EU Habitats Directive (94/43/EEC) to designate Special Areas of Conservation (SACs).1 By 2003, three UK sites had been identified as candidate sites for the bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus, including two in Welsh waters.

However, writing in ECOS in 20062, Green expressed some scepticism about the effectiveness of these measures. More recently, Hoyt3 noted that “the idea that whales, dolphins and porpoises need protected habitat is fairly new, even among MPA practitioners… [but] In general the more that is learned about cetaceans, the more it becomes evident that populations of some species favour or return regularly to familiar places… which may be called home ranges, breeding or feeding grounds”.

Eighteen cetacean species have been recorded in Welsh waters and several exhibit a high degree of residency, including the bottlenose dolphin.A,4 By 2003, one SAC (centred off the coast of New Quay in Ceredigion) had been designated for them and, since then, they have also been included as a feature that requires ˆ a’r Sarnau SAC (see map). There is a further SAC management in the Pen Llyn designated for bottlenose dolphins in UK waters and this is in the Moray Firth in Scotland.

Harbour porpoises, Phocoena phocoena, are also relatively common in Welsh waters. Like the bottlenose dolphins, they also qualify for the establishment of SACs, but at the time of writing only one marine SAC in Northern Ireland has been proposed in the UK as a candidate site for them. Porpoise calving and nursing occurs in Cardigan Bay. de Boer5 reported that 22% of sighting of porpoises from Bardsey Island were of mother-calf pairs. There is a also a third species that has recently been shown to exhibit site-fidelity in Welsh waters: the Risso’s dolphin, Grampus griseus. Risso’s dolphins however do not currently qualify for the designation of SACs under the Habitats Directive. Other regularly encountered species include the short-beaked common dolphin, Delphinus delphis, and the minke whale, Balaenoptera acutorostrata.D 46

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The promise of law The Habitats Directive is the ‘‘cornerstone of the EU’s biodiversity policy’’6 and was intended to establish a network of Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) across the EU, known collectively as Natura 2000. In addition, EU member states are also required to guarantee the strict protection of all species within their natural range that are listed on the Directive’s Annex IV and this includes all cetaceans.

As soon as a Natura site is designated, particular obligations apply. Member States are required to establish the necessary conservation measures, involving appropriate management plans which correspond to the ecological requirements of the habitats and species present on the sites and are also required to take appropriate steps to avoid the deterioration of natural habitats and habitats of species, and the significant disturbance of species for which areas have been designated.

Wales currently has sevenn marine SACs. The Cardigan Bay SAC site was proposed in 1995 and, two years later, the site was submitted to the European Commission for consideration. Some moderation followed and new features for management were added. On 7 December 2004, the European Commission formally adopted the UK list of Special Areas of Conservation, including the Welsh proposals. The SAC stretches from Ceibwr Bay in Pembrokeshire, to Aberarth in Ceredigion, extending almost 20 km from the coast and covering about 1000 km2 of sea. It includes bottlenose dolphins as a ‘primary feature’ and its management scheme, in place since 2001, aims to manage activities taking place within and near the SAC in order to protect the dolphins and their habitat from any adverse effects that human activities may have on them. The management scheme was expanded in 2008 to include: sandbanks which are slightly covered by sea water all the time; reefs; submerged or partially submerged sea caves; the grey seal (Halichoerus grypus); the sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus); and the river lamprey (Lampetra fluviatilis). ˆ a’r Sarnau SAC covers the Lleyn Peninsula and the Sarnau reefs as well The Pen Llyn as the large estuaries along the coast of Meirionnydd and north Ceredigion and is situated just north of the Cardigan Bay SAC. In this SAC bottlenose dolphins is only 47

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one of a number of ‘qualifying features’, the SAC’s primary features are reefs and ˆ a’r Sarnau management plan is still in the process of being estuaries. The Pen Llyn updated to show what actions the additional features, including the bottlenose dolphins, might require for their conservation.

Issues at sea The Habitats Directive does not prohibit development adjacent to or even within the designated sites. However, any plan or project not directly connected with or necessary to the management of the site, but likely to have a significant effect thereon, either individually or in combination with other plans or projects, is subject to an ‘Appropriate Assessment’ (AA) of its implications for the site in view of the site’s conservation objectives. One test of the effectiveness of the SACs will be whether these AAs are being conducted and the extent to which they are positively affecting conservation. Whilst the Directive does not define what constitutes a plan or project, a preliminary ruling by the ECJA suggests that the terms ‘plan’ or ‘project’ should be interpreted broadly, not restrictively.

More recently, a UK High CourtB decision reinforced this interpretation and that any action that could potentially have an impact should be considered a plan or project and an AA initiated.

The Directive also states that a plan or project can be carried out for imperative reasons of overriding public interest even if the assessment of the implications for the site was negative. However, the Member States have to take all compensatory measures necessary to ensure that the overall coherence of Natura 2000 is protected.

The notion of “imperative reasons of overriding public interest” is vague as are the “compensatory measures” required of the national authorities.

The grounds upon which development activities may be permitted in cetacean SACs remain uncertain. Nevertheless, certain key industrial activities have been identified within the Guidelines for the designation and management of specially protected marine areas7 for which supervision will be required when carried out in proximity to or within SACs. These include ecotourism activities, oil and gas exploitation, active military and civilian sonar use, vessel-based noise and acoustic by-catch mitigation devices. Accordingly, the development of localised guidelines to address such activities may be considered an important aspect of SAC management on the part of the Member States.

Cetaceans in Cardigan Bay can be expected to be affected by the same general issues as those encountered elsewhere in Europe and beyond. The management plan for the Cardigan Bay SAC defined areas of concern relating to the bottlenose dolphins as: waterborne disturbance, collision, pollution from artificial or toxic materials, prey depletion, bycatch and noise pollution.8 There are a number of sources for further information about threats to cetaceans including Bejder et al.(2006)9, Weilgart (2007)10, and Steckenreuter et al. (2012).11 Particular issues in the Cardigan Bay region are discussed in the paragraphs below, in no particular order.

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Bottlenose dolphins in Cardigan Bay Photo: Sonja Eisfeld/WDC

Marine Renewable Energy

Since 2000, the UK Government has conducted three rounds of offshore wind farm licensing for projects in waters around England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; the first wave and tidal energy leasing round was in 2010. Until quite recently, offshore wind farms were mainly constructed in near-shore waters, within approximately 5km of the coast and now very large developments are planned further off the coast and in deeper waters.12 Currently there are three operational marine wind farms to the north of Wales. Since 2010, plans for six further wind farms have been initiated, three of which are in the Round 3 Zone in the Bristol Channel off the South Wales coast (the extensive Atlantic Array proposal was shelved by RWE npower as this article went to press), and three off the north Wales coast, two of which are in the Irish Sea Round 3 Zone. A wave energy site is currently in construction in Pembrokeshire, 5 km offshore from St. Anne’s Head, and is expected to be in operation in late 2012. This will use an ‘overtopping device’; holding ‘captured’ water in a reservoir above sea level before being released through low-head turbines. Plans for the Severn Barrage in the Bristol Channel were withdrawn in 2010 due to the high cost involved, along with environmental impacts on internationally important nature conservation sites.13 Tidal current devices may be held in place by various methods including seabed anchoring, a gravity-base or driven piles or via mooring lines.14, 15 One tidal energy site has been generating power since 2003 in the Bristol Channel and Tidal Energy Limited currently have plans for two tidal sites off Pembrokeshire. One was approved in 2008 in Ramsey Sound and plans for the second off St David’s Head were announced in 2012.16 The potential 49

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impacts of marine renewable developments on cetaceans have been considered in Wright et al17, Simmonds and Brown18, Dolman and Simmonds19, Simmonds et al 20, and Wilson et al 2 1 and also in the report from the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee22. The UK’s 2009 Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) of Offshore Energy commented that “In general, marine mammals show the highest sensitivity to acoustic disturbance by noise generated by offshore wind farms and by hydrocarbon exploration and production activities”.23 Scallop dredging

Low level scallop dredging has been carried out in Cardigan Bay for many years (Green, pers. obs.). This changed in more recent times seemingly following closures in other areas and by 2006 up to 60 scallop dredgers were reported operating in the Bay at any one time, including within the boundaries of the Cardigan Bay SAC. Many changes to this fishery followed and, in 2009, the Scallop Orders were reviewed and the Welsh Assembly Government realised they would have to undertake consultations. The fishery was closed for the second half of 2009 and a complaint was made to Europe by a consortium of non-governmental organisations. This focused on the lack of an AA in issuing Scalloping Licenses.

In 2010, the fishery was partially reopened with a significant part of the Bay declared off limits to the fishery but remarkably a sizeable part of the SAC itself left open and this continues to be the case. No AA has been conducted. In April 2012, two fishing boat owners and a skipper were fined a total of £29,000 for scallop-dredging inside that part of the Cardigan Bay SAC that remains closed to such activity.

The potential threat from scallop dredging to cetaceans has been much debated.

An opinion from CEFAS in 2009 concluded that under the “current technical conservation measures in place” there was no risk to the Bay’s bottlenose dolphins.

However, a fleet of 60 dredgers plying the waters of the Bay might reasonably be expected to cause much noise disturbance and also affect the dolphins’ food chain.

In 2013, Bangor University is proposing ‘research dredging’ to establish whether intensive scalloping can take place more widely within the SAC.

A view to Bardsey Island with bottlenose dolphins in foreground.

Photo: Sonja Eisfeld/WDC

Slipways. All licensees are provided with a copy of a code of conduct designed to give members of the public information about how to act in the vicinity of cetaceans to avoid disturbing them. Ceredigion County Council has monitored compliance with their Code since 1994.27 The latest report 28 showed that of 494 boat encounters examined for compliance, this was found to be generally high (95% at one site).

The associated public awareness programme was also assessed to be working well at the key site of New Quay. Most cases of non-compliance involved vessels moving too fast when close to dolphins, with speed and motor boats the main offenders.

The report concluded that compliance with the code significantly reduced the incidence of negative response behaviours in the dolphins.

Oil and Gas development

The UK Government has been issuing licences for oil and gas exploration since 1964.24 The environmental effects associated with exploration activity, construction, production and transport of equipment, materials and products are potentially many.25,26 In the early 1980s, oil and gas exploration moved into the UK’s inshore waters and during the twelth licensing round, licences were issued for a company to drill in waters adjacent to Bardsey leading to a complaint to Europe. However, in 2012, licensing was reopened in this area but not adjacent to the Cardigan Bay SAC. Boat Disturbance

The Cardigan Bay Website calls on boat users to follow the ‘Marine Codec’ and it also calls for action on marine litter which ‘may choke’ marine mammals.24 The Ceredigion County Council requires (as a ‘Heritage Coast’ initiative rather than one relating directly to the SAC) the licensing of all personal craft launched from Council 50

Waste Discharge

There is a discharge from a shell-fish factory into the SAC at New Quay and this had been suggested as both a concern and a possible source of enrichment. 29

Cetacean status A metric that might be used to assess effectiveness is whether the local bottlenose dolphin population is being maintained at favourable conservation status (FCS); which is when a population is being maintained on a long-term basis, its natural range is not being, and is not likely to be, reduced and there is sufficient habitat to support it in the long term.

Over 300 bottlenose dolphins are known to be using Cardigan Bay, around 200 in any one year, with numbers increasing throughout the summer and reaching a peak 51

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 in late September and October.30 The bottlenose dolphin is the next most frequently recorded species (after the harbour porpoise), with a predominantly coastal distribution, although low densities have been recorded offshore, particularly in St George’s Channel and the southwest sector of the study area.31 The main concentrations of sightings were southern Cardigan Bay but with moderately high sighting rates extending north into Tremadog Bay, although the species also occurs off the north coast of Wales, particularly north and east of Anglesey. In summer, the dolphins occur mainly in small groups near the coast, centred upon Cardigan Bay, dispersing more widely and generally northwards, where they may form very large groups in winter. However, the species can be seen at any time of the year throughout Welsh coastal waters. No fundamental change in distribution has been observed since 1990 and bottlenose dolphins breed throughout their Welsh range, with calves observed in most months of the year. Only small numbers have been recorded stranded.27 Recent data suggest lower numbers in both the Cardigan Bay SAC and the whole of the Bay during 2011 than most previous years.32 Results from an open population model indicate that the probability of emigration from Cardigan Bay, and the probability that animals will stay out of the site, have increased. This suggests that fewer dolphins are currently using Cardigan Bay. The Sea Watch Foundation also concludes that increased activity off North Wales in summer includes individuals previously showing a strong site fidelity to Cardigan Bay, and supports the markrecapture results showing that fewer dolphins may now be using Cardigan Bay. However, they also report that the area of the Cardigan Bay SAC in particular has seen increased levels of residency, and remains important for mothers and young calves, exhibiting a reasonably healthy birth rate (5.75% for a closed population model and 7.73% for an open population model).

So, the status of the bottlenose dolphin population is currently equivocal with neither a precipitous decline nor an increase apparent. The core area (i.e. the SAC) remains important for the population, although the possible movement of some part of the population away highlights the need for careful ongoing monitoring.

Other conservation-related activities The controls on scallop dredging and limitation of the spread of oil and gas development into at least one of the dolphin SACs would seem likely to be beneficial to the dolphins. However, it is unclear why the latter industry is prohibited from the ˆ a’r Cardigan Bay site but has recently potentially been allowed into the Pen Llyn Sarnau SAC. This may be because the licensing authority takes the view that as the dolphins are only a qualifying feature. More positively, the process of assessment of potential threats to the dolphins followed in the Cardigan Bay management plan has significant potential to assist in the wise management of the SAC. Conservation Actions focused on other SAC features may be beneficial to the dolphins by helping to maintain habitat quality and prey. In addition, we believe that the advent of the SACs has helped to generate relevant research funds and note there is a legal requirement to report on status of features to the European Commission every six years.28 52

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 Public outreach and educational activities may also have benefits for the dolphins and the SAC website is a potentially important educational initiative. The various ‘dolphin centres’ in Cardigan Bay may also have been encouraged by the presence of the SAC. The Cardigan Bay Code of Conduct and efforts to measure its implementation – even given that this was originally introduced as a Heritage Coast initiative – may also have been encouraged by the SAC. In this regard, the absence of a SAC officer for Cardigan Bay for a period of time may have undermined the initiative.

Conclusions and recommendations There is some evidence that the Cardigan Bay SACs have been useful to dolphin conservation, principally by providing a mechanism to challenge developments.

However, the designation still does not appear to provide any incentive to developers to avoid the area in the first place and pressures are mounting. In theory – and in the absence of other designations further to the recent decision by the Welsh government to hold off on designating other marine conservation zones - they could become more important.

Apparent SAC failings, include the question of how precisely they relate to development within and adjacent to the areas that they define. The status of the bottlenose dolphin as a qualifying feature only in the northern SAC does not seem to imbue it with any direct protection, but this may improve when the management plan for this site is updated.

SACs in the UK can generally be graded as IUCN Category VI management areas33; this means that they are protected areas with sustainable use of natural resources aimed at conserving natural resources alongside “low level non-industrial use of natural resources compatible with nature conservation”. Hoyt29 has already queried whether this low level of protection can be expected in the longer term to be effective.D In the case of Cardigan Bay, these sites are also relatively small and any assessment of their effectiveness is of limited help to the assessment of other types of MPAs. SACs, however, are not universally IUCN Category VI and in fact can even function, due to their generally small size, as IUCN Category I highly protected zones within a larger MPA framework or network.

Green2 commented that there is little that could be seen in terms of additional protection within the SACs compared to the wider sea area, however, the bottlenose dolphins continue to use the sites, including for breeding purposes. Whilst a core sub-population of bottlenose dolphins seems to remain faithful to Cardigan Bay, potential explanations for the wider changes in distribution include changes in prey availability and/or increased anthropogenic disturbance. We agree with the recommendation from the Sea Watch Foundation that in order to assess whether this is the start of a negative trend, further monitoring over a number of years encompassing the entire field season from at least April until October is needed.

The Welsh Government is entrusted with an exceptional richness of marine biodiversity to protect and have waters where many MPAs (in the form of SACs) are now in place. Provisions that are intended to protect bottlenose dolphins may 53

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 help other cetaceans in these waters, including Risso’s dolphins. However, there is also unprecedented industrial development happening in Welsh waters with unclear consequences for cetaceans and other fauna. Future research in this region relating to all the local cetacean populations, and the threats that they face, will be essential to underpin their conservation and so will developing appropriate constraints on activities that may threaten them or displace them from core habitat areas. This means that the SAC management regimes need to be comprehensive, precautionary and adhered to.

References and notes A. Landelijke Vereniging tot Behoud van de Waddenzee, Nederlandse Vereniging tot Bescherming van Vogels v. Staatssecretaris van Landbouw, Natuurbeheer en Visserij, Case C-127/02 B. R (on the application of Akester and Melanaphy) v Defra & Wightlink Limited (Wightlink) C. There is a Ceredigion Code of Conduct for boat users and also a Cardigan Bay Code.

D. N.B. Our understanding is that the protection of the dolphin population for which any SAC has been established extends to the population’s full range (see 92/43/EEC and discussion in Green et al., 2012).

1. Green, M. and Simmonds, M. 2003. Cardigan Bay and its conservation importance. Natur Cymru 7: 36-40.

2. Green M. 2006. SACs of Promise? – Marine SAC protection. ECOS 27/2.

3. Hoyt, E. 2011. Marine Protected Areas for Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises: A world handbook for cetacean habitat conservation and planning. Earthscan/Taylor & Francis, London and New York. 464 pp.

4. Baines M.E. and Evans P.G.H. 2012 Atlas of the marine mammals of Wales . CCW Marine Monitoring Report No. 68. 2nd edition.

5. de Boer, M., Morgan Jenks, M., Taylor, M. And Simmonds M. 2002. The small cetaceans of Cardigan Bay. British Wildlife, April 2002: 246-254.

6. European Commission. 2010. Guidance document: Wind energy developments and Natura 2000. October 2010. http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/natura2000/ management/docs/Wind_farms.pdf 7. CEC, 2007. Commission of the European Community (CEC). 2007. Guidelines for the establishment of the Natura 2000 network in the marine environment. European Commission DG Environment.

8. CBSAC, 2008. Cardigan Bay Special Area of Concervation Management Scheme. 2008. http://www. cardiganbaysac.org.uk/pdf%20files/Cardigan_Bay_SAC_Management_Scheme_2008.pdf Last visited 14/5/2012 9. Bejder, L., Samuels, A., Whitehead, H., Gales, N., Mann, J., Connor, R., Heithaus, M., Watson-Capps, J. J., Flaherty, C. and Krützen, M. 2006. Decline in relative abundance of bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp) exposed to long-term disturbance. Conservation Biology. 20(6): 1791-1798.

10. Weilgart, L.S. 2007. The impacts of anthropogenic ocean noise on cetaceans and implications for management. Canadian Journal of Zoology: 85(11): 1091-1116.

11. Steckenreuter, A, Möller, L., Harcourt, R. 2012. How does Australia’s largest dolphin-watching industry affect the behaviour of a small and resident population of Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins? Journal of Environmental Management 97: 14 - 21.

12. Simmonds, M.P. and Brown, V.C. 2010. Is there a conflict between cetacean conservation and marine renewable-energy developments? Wildlife Research, 2010, 37, 688–694.

13. Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). 2010. Severn Tidal Power Feasibility Study: Conclusions and Summary Report. Available at http://www.decc.gov.uk/assets/decc/What%20we%20 do/UK%20energy%20supply/Energy%20mix/Renewable%20energy/severn-tp/621-severn-tidal-powerfeasibility-study-conclusions-a.pdf July 2012 14. Wright, D., Brown, V., Simmonds, M.P. 2009. A Review of Developing Marine Renewable Technologies.

Paper submitted to the Scientific Committee of the IWC. IWC/SC/61/E6.

15. EMEC, 2012. European Marine Energy Centre. http://www.emec.org.uk/tidal_devices.asp Last visited 16/5/2012.

16. Tidal Energy Limited. 2012. http://www.tidalenergyltd.com/?p=1112. Last visited 17/5/2012.

17. Wright, D., Brown, V., Simmonds, M.P. 2009. A Review of Developing Marine Renewable Technologies.

Paper submitted to the Scientific Committee of the IWC. IWC/SC/61/E6.

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 18. Simmonds, M.P., Brown, V.C., Eisfeld, D., and Lott, R. 2010. Marine Renewable Energy Developments: benefits versus concerns. Paper submitted to the Scientific Committee of the IWC. SC/62/E8.

19. Dolman, S. J. and Simmonds, M. P. 2010. Towards best environmental practice for cetacean conservation in developing Scotland’s marine renewable energy. Marine Policy, 34, 1021–1027.

20. Simmonds, M.P. and Brown, V.C. 2010. Is there a conflict between cetacean conservation and marine renewable-energy developments? Wildlife Research, 2010, 37, 688–694.

21. Wilson, J. C., Elliott , M., Cutts, N. D., Mander, L., Mendão, V., Perez-Dominguez, R., Phelps, A. 2010.

Coastal and Offshore Wind Energy Generation: Is It Environmentally Benign? Energies 3: 1383-1422.

22. House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee. 2012. The Future of Marine Renewables in the UK Eleventh Report of Session 2010–12. Volume I. Available at http://www.publications.parliament.uk/ pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmenergy/1624/1624.pdf. Last visited 17/5/2012.

23. DECC. 2009. Offshore energy strategic environmental assessment. Department of Energy and Climate Change.

Available at http://www.offshore-sea.org.uk/site/scripts/news_article.php?newsID=39 Last visited 17/5/2012.

24. Green M and Simmonds M. 2008. Riding the Waves – Lessons from Campaigning on oil and gas. ECOS 29(3/4) 25. Neff, J. M., Rabalais, N. N. and Boesch D. F. 1987. Offshore oil and gas development activities potentially causing long-term effects. Pages 149-174. In D F Boesch & N N Rabalais (Eds) Long Term Environmental Effects of Offshore Oil and Gas Development, Elsiever, London.

26. JLOGEC. 1995. Polluting the Offshore Environment. Newtown. Available at: http://www.savecardiganbay. org.uk/word/oil_gaspollution.doc. Last visited 17/5/2012.

27. CCC 2012. Ceredigion County Council website: http://www.ceredigion.gov.uk/index.cfm?articleid=9025 Last visited 10/5/2012.

28. Allan L., Green M. and Kelsall K. 2010. Bottlenose dolphins and boat traffic on the Ceredigion Coast, West Wales, 2008 and 2009. Ceredigion County Council.

29. Dermody, N. 2012. Cardigan Bay bottlenose dolphins ‘learn factory whelk waste times for food’ BBC News website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-mid-wales-18020502. Last visited 17/5/2012.

30. Cardigan Bay Website, 2012 http://www.cardiganbaysac.org.uk/?page_id=72 Last visited 7/5/2012.

31. Baines M.E. and Evans P.G.H. 2012 Atlas of the marine mammals of Wales . CCW Marine Monitoring Report No. 68. 2nd edition.

32. Veneruso, G. and Evans, P.G.H. 2012. Bottlenose Dolphin and Harbour Porpoise Monitoring in Cardigan Bay and Pen Llyn ˆ a’r Sarnau Special Areas of Conservation. CCW Monitoring Report No. 95. 66pp 33. Hoyt, E. 2011. Marine Protected Areas for Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises: A world handbook for cetacean habitat conservation and planning. Earthscan/Taylor & Francis, London and New York. 464 pp

Mark Peter Simmonds is Senior Associate Marine Scientist at the Humane Society International. mark.simmonds@sciencegyre.co.uk Mick Green is Director of Ecology Matters Trust.

Vicki James, Sonja Eisfeld and Rob Lott are with Whale and Dolphin Conservation.

Thanks to Sarah Dolman and Erich Hoyt for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Diolch yn fawr.

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Whither Natural England?

With Natural England’s role endorsed by the Triennial Review, what can now be expected from the agency? Does Defra’s intention to draw all its component bodies closer under ‘one business’ and apply further systematic cuts, mean NE’s scope and independence is fast- eroding?

MARK JULY The cost-benefit of agency merger does not stack up and Natural England (NE) and The Environment Agency (EA) will stay as separate agencies, but work more in tandem and give up functions to core Defra - so concludes Defra’s Triennial Review.

For around half a million pounds of staff and consultancy time this exercise has revealed little that wasn’t pretty obvious, but has determined the right outcome, and those who counselled against merger deserve thanks. Will NE now be able to concentrate on its own priorities and push ahead with its mandate? If only we could be so optimistic. To my mind, only with constant vigilance and influential support for a strong, properly-resourced statutory nature conservation body will NE consolidate its legacy, meet its purpose and rise to its potential in the years ahead.

There are significant factors holding it back which are outlined here.

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 so ultimately they are only undertaken centrally. NE has already volunteered much to sacrifice in this regard, and moving to ‘one size fits all’ government systems is not without drawbacks, but the intention to replace NE’s own website with the gov. uk channel would be a serious loss of its shop window, pushing it into obscurity.

Defra governance reflects wider Civil Service Reforms and its ‘Strategic Alignment Programme’, underway since June 2013, aspires to greater alignment, cohesion and consistency in forward planning and reporting of resource use across the 23 network bodies, seeking to tie together their operations as “one business”. While there are certain advantages from integration, such as in environmental monitoring, the diversity of the network derives from the range and complexity of the subject matter, and it is not hard to imagine how a top down, overarching diktat could dilute the network bodies, especially the bigger operators including Natural England. This process is one to watch and shape if opportunities permit. A slow absorption and take-over of NE must be resisted.

As well as reducing running costs the aims include shifting activity wholesale outside government (e.g. more services done through charities and NGOs), more boughtin services rather than in-house, extra flexibility in all things and especially ways of working. Constantly shifting ground will be the daily work experience for Defra employees, so please bear with them, but proffer ideas and innovations that would help nature conservation and fit the above, and they may be seized upon!

Defra’s world view and ambitions

Protector and regulator or facilitator?

“Enhancing the environment and biodiversity to improve Quality of Life” was one of the three Coalition priorities set for Defra in its 2012-2015 Business Plan, on a par with farming and the green economy. Since Owen Patterson took charge as Minister in September 2012 the central purpose of Defra is to boost “sustainable economic growth “with four recast priorities, of which “improving the environment” covers many subjects including flood risk.

Defra’s business plan concentrates on discarding, slimming or speeding up regulation and it’s to be hoped that the expectations on NE to satisfy the Defra aim to “make it simpler and quicker to comply (as a developer) with the Habitats and Birds Directives” does not sell the Natura 2000 sites or protected species short. Much NE effort is going into streamlining its licensing and planning advice functions, summarised in an October 2013 Improvement Plan. The regulation of potentially damaging operations on SSSIs through the notice and consent procedures underpins site condition but does not feature in this plan. Perhaps all is dandy and doesn’t need improvement, but with more than 26,000 SSSI owners and occupiers, involving 8.1% of England’s land surface, this is a puzzle, and cause for concern. Some information in NE’s Annual Report on the regulatory performance for SSSI safeguard is overdue.

The ongoing reduction in funding to Defra is forcing rigorous assessment of where its interventions can best achieve its priorities, and at lower cost. Defra spent 20% less in FY 2012/13 than 2010/11 and lost 12.6 % of its workforce between these dates. This downward trajectory will gather pace whilst the reach of cuts excludes the protected Departments (NHS, Education and DFID). This choice needs to be vigorously contested, unless there’s a rethink on the mega future projects like HS2, Trident renewal and the like. In consequence the Defra network (core Defra, its Executive Agencies, and Non Departmental Public Bodies such as Natural England) will need to severely reduce or curtail some of its current activities to be able to live within its expected funding. Until Ministerial priorities change, state nature and landscape conservation, and countryside access, can expect even less to operate, outside of farmer payment channels. To flourish it will need to prove it fosters more economic growth than it quells.

The funding squeeze is driving the rationalisation of ‘back office’ services and functions for Defra network bodies, such as finance, IT, procurement and estates, 56

It’s gratifying that Defra still uses the condition of SSSIs and the Farmland Birds index as 2 of 9 indicators for its environment work area, though both have a very big corner to turn. However, only 2 of its 29 top level actions in the 13/14 Business Plan might further nature conservation: the creation of the first English Marine Conservation Zones, and action to improve the utility and accessibility of environmental guidance, with a pilot for nature conservation guidance. The Biodiversity 2020 Strategy for England has scant prominence in corporate must do’s.

Defra is formally backing processes for translating natural capital and biodiversity offsetting concepts into delivery. These are such important matters to get right for 57

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nature conservation that NE leadership, facilitation and expertise is vital. Despite NE’s recent marginalisation as a policy adviser, it must show its mettle.

The Triennial Review steer In passing the test of independence as separate agencies, NE and EA have been asked to make their officially good governance even more robust, transparent and squared with Government’s wishes, and to join up on delivery of the agencies’ “related objectives”.

It’s depressing that the main message to both agencies is that they must embrace and foster the growth promotion game if they want to survive. This could entail a lot of chasing of proof that their activities generate more income, outputs, profits, jobs and thereby compete with time for their fundamental priorities. Who is speaking out to defend the agencies’ relevance for the actual tasks which Parliament set them or get behind their Corporate Plans? Yes, more integration and innovation can come good, and the drive for exponential efficiency gains is both bugbear and performance incentive for ever more multi-tasking public servants, but if the agencies’ top management lacks wisdom and employs the wrong criteria and measurements, these principles can become sorry ends in themselves.

Further NE and EA support services will pass to core Defra to favour “front line resources”. The agencies are to business plan together, share data, skills and expertise, seek more savings everywhere and pool what can be pooled, offload what can be picked up by private and voluntary sectors, advance more lighttouch regulation, reform all that’s desirable in ways of working to benefit business - especially land management businesses – whose representatives’ disingenuous gripes about duplication and conflicting advice have been heeded - and speak with one voice on land-use planning advice. Coverage of themes for jointly championing the state of the natural environment is conspicuously lacking. Nor is there any stocktake for how well NE has measured up to the founding rationale of the Haskins report that made the case for its creation less than 10 years ago. Evaluation of its fitness for that purpose is a missed opportunity.

This is the broad flavour of 13 conclusions from the Triennial Review (www.gov.uk/ government/publications). The main topics for integration are land management services in the round, the enabling of key players’ environmental practice in land-use planning, and advising as statutory consultees on planning casework. Farmers and developers have the ear of government and thus had most effect on the integration 58

NEIL BENNETT

There have been several initiatives to foster joint working models between the agencies and their predecessors, as long ago as the early 1990s. All achieved modest and patchy benefits, but did not have the continuity or top-level backing for them to stick. However, close and productive working has been the norm in specific areas such as the Asset Management Planning cycle for the Water Companies’ expenditure, with big returns, albeit hidden to most. This review holds NE and EA leadership to account to come up with a plan to implement the review’s conclusions and expects Defra to oversee, so perhaps the results will last longer and reach further.

priorities, though many NGOs had a look-in. BANC members’ understanding of what the agencies face is important too, so if there’s a chance to comment on the delivery plan for the review, your opinions should get through.

There are hints that NE-owned National Nature Reserves won’t be sold off, but the track record and professional expertise of NE Site Managers gets no credit. Tenure switches are welcomed and of course, more non- Exchequer money to run them is seen as better…

NE devotes about 37% of its net annual expenditure to the deployment of RDPE payments to landowners (£ 457m in FY 13/14, £468m in FY 12/13). The reform of UK CAP delivery from 2014-2020 is underway, which will entail inter-alia revisions to agri-environment schemes’ administration. The review expects that the schemes will be administered yet more cheaply, notwithstanding significant savings made to date, and this could certainly compromise results on the ground, especially for sites requiring tailored solutions. Many agree there’s a continuing need for critical attention to payment schemes’ ecological quality outcomes, and for a consensus with NE across the nature conservation bodies and the farming sector on what 59

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 is required, but that gets no prompt here. Might innovations include bolstering high quality scheme outcomes with new funds from development planning via the Community Infrastructure Levy and biodiversity offsets? One can hope.

NE’s Corporate line, achievements and positioning Tough times as they are for Natural England, with another internal reorganisation and downsizing in train, it is galling how the latest Annual Report describes the ‘success’ of meeting the full resource cuts asked of it and the apparent zeal for more. The saving of £8m in FY 12/13 from the previous year (and £26m since 2010) is a report ‘Highlight’. In FY 12/13 Defra gave NE £189m (93% of its gross income) for everything other than farm payments; in FY 13/14 it is £162m. Perhaps behind the scenes NE is arguing that critical standards and conservation priorities must be defended or is putting up a fight for future financial settlements …but there’s no inference here. The business will adapt and accommodate and all will be rosy.

Justifying this apparent complacency could be the FY 12/13 results that 23 of the 25 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from the 2012-2015 Corporate Plan were met or nearly so, whilst the budget and workforce further shrunk. On the face of it impressive, so what’s to worry about cumulative cuts, with far fewer experienced senior staff and more temporary and contract positions? If NE is so successful yet with a quarter the staff of three years ago, might the perception be there’s still flabby areas of work to lose? As NE influence shrinks for any element of its activities, a running tally should be on the record. Such facts would allow comparisons of current capability with what was being done in the recent past, for example the scale of NE’s Local BAP inputs, the farm visit time that made sure Agreements were spot on, the scope of the Species Recovery Programme…, otherwise it’s all too likely that future plans will enshrine the present embattled situation, just as each generation accepts an ecological baseline poorer than the last.

To counter this misreading of the stresses and shortcomings in NE’s achievements, outcome KPIs need to feature more, and have more weight than output KPIs. Indicators of progress or failure for NE in addressing key national issues for nature conservation need to stand out more from short-term process indicators, such as SSSIs fully meeting their conservation objectives to be in favourable condition (currently only 37.5% by area and not expected to increase much anytime soon), threatened species status changes and genuine net gains in priority habitat quality and extent. In Annual Reports, along with the story of successes, we should expect hard facts and honesty about nature conservation assets and trends, and be told why Natural England is unable to play the part it should, or aspires.

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 NE’s role in future CAP delivery through the Rural Development Programme (RDP) Schemes is judged to be a “key risk” to NE’s operation and as such will continue to dominate the organisation’s attention and resources. There’s a likelihood that further functions and discretionary powers and duties may be removed or quietly dissipated, such as AONBs and science and evidence, whilst resources gravitate to the ERDP work area. In that event, ensuring the quality and rigour of agrienvironment schemes’ planning and delivery, and the right monitoring of their effects and results, will be even more important.

The obvious pun on my title, ‘wither NE’, will fit the circumstances unless the organisation’s standing, means and resolve is boosted and the resource drain blocked. The £44.2 m cut in Defra grant between FY10/11 and FY 14/15 may well be rolled forward unless protest and argument is manifest. All who think the Government’s essential role in conservation in England since 1949 must continue via a strong and well-resourced independent agency should let it be known to your MP and others who can best influence Defra ministers and the Cabinet. NE needs all the help it can get. Equally, NE’s leaders, its new Executive Directors and muted nonExecutive Board members must ensure NE’s statutory mission has as much tangible support as they can muster.

References Defra Environment Agency (EA) and Natural England(NE) Triennial Review Dec 2012- June 13 https://www.gov. uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/209382/triennial-rev-ea-ne.pdf Defra Annual Report and Accounts 2012-13 Jul7 2013 The Stationery Office HC 40 http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/hc1314/hc00/0040/0040.pdf Defra home page www.gov.uk 12 Nov 2013 https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-environment-food-rural-affairs/about Natural England Annual Report and Accounts April 1 2012-March 31 2013

Mark July worked for the Government nature conservation bodies in England from 1975 to 2011 and is still greatly bothered how things turn out! mark.july27@binternet.com

KPIs that may dispel concerns around the pressures to get ever slicker and ease back on quality include things like customer feedback surveys, when an average of 91% are ‘satisfied’. Such is the last year’s sample result for farmers, developers and local authorities. Perhaps unsurprising when agri-environment systems and payments are as user-friendly and uncontested as they are for most (now operating on 70% of farmland), and given that 97% of NE’s 28,484 formal consultations had a response to deadline, and only generated objections on environmental grounds on 0.7%.

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Book Reviews

A STING IN THE TALE Dave Goulson Jonathan Cape, 2013, 288 pages £16.99 Hbk, ISBN 9780224096898 Dave Goulson has dedicated his career to understanding and supporting members of the diverse and frequently threatened family of bumblebees. A Sting in the Tale takes the reader on a journey through the world of the bumblebee, from the hibernation of queen bumblebees through winter underground, to how bees use smelly footprints to avoid wasting energy visiting flowers freshly stripped of nectar by other insects.

Goulson uses autobiographical details liberally to bring the human elements of 62

ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 bumblebee research and conservation to life, introducing an array of human and non-human characters who help make bumblebees better understood.

Throughout the text, you have a sense of a deep personal dedication to bumblebees on the part of Goulson, whose interest began at an early age when he attempted to rescue chilled queens by placing them in the oven to warm up. The resulting toasted insects led to further research and more successful revival using syrup on a spoon. This anecdote leads into a brief discourse about insect metabolism and the impressive warming skills of a bumblebee nest placed in a deep freeze. Goulson contextualises his own journey of becoming a biologist and conservationist by describing major discoveries about insects and their anatomy and life history, name checking the key research groups, and dating the discoveries made. There is unfortunately no bibliography for the interested reader to follow up directly, but these clues should make it possible for the major papers to be located.

The first and last chapters of the book are about the re-introduction of the short haired bumblebee, last seen in the UK in 1988. Goulson discusses the peaks and troughs of working on a high-profile conservation project that released the first queens of the species back into the UK in 2012, only to be hit by one of the wettest summers in recent years. The importance of such flagship species for other species is emphasised by the spontaneous reappearance of several rare species to Dungeness and Romney Marshes following local efforts to replant and maintain wild flower meadows, with support from land owners who had previously not realised

that they hosted such interesting and threatened species. During the same period, Goulson also started up the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, which has done much to raise the profile of bumblebees and other insect pollinators in the media and with the public.

The book gives the reader a lively view on the reality of research, and the fact that Goulson is still engaged in conservation work gives the text life and immediacy.

The author demonstrates that although much has been achieved, there is still a lot more to do. Importantly, he encourages people to get involved and make a difference.

Emily Adams

WORDS OF RE-ENCHANTMENT Storytelling, Myth and Ecological Desire Anthony Nanson Awen Publications, 2011, 208 pages Pbk £9.99 ISBN 978-1906900151 The worlds of storytelling and of nature conservation do not sit as happily together as you might imagine. They tend to collide somewhere around the kids’ activities at environmental events, often with North American tales of Coyote and friends, or with Grimm’s rather dark offerings. But stories can have a great deal more to offer the worlds of nature conservation and land management than children’s entertainment: for example as a means of exploring our deep connections with the land, at an ancestral and deeply creative level.

Anthony Nanson’s collection of essays is written from the personal experience of someone who not only explores the oral storytelling tradition, but who deeply

cares about the fortunes of nature.

Nanson explores the various threads between storytelling as an art, and the organic, messy and complex themes behind ecology and the natural world.

The definition of ‘ecology’ varies in this book between scientific interconnection, sustainability of resources, and climate change disaster.

Forcing stories to specifically focus on environmental messages, rather than characters, is a difficult craft. The conclusions and morals of such stories are often crudely drawn, and in many senses they miss the point – of interconnectedness. So, we work the traditional tales we find as they are, to provoke awareness, understanding and action of people and environment, with a touch of chaos and magic thrown in for good measure. The use of stories in this way is explored through Nanson’s writings, and I found these essays to be most useful.

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ECOS 34(3/4) 2013 conservation. The focus is on UK practice and experience, but overseas examples are often used to offer wider perspectives.

This second edition has useful components on many topical matters which influence approaches to UK conservation, including reintroductions, rewilding, restoration, offsetting, ecosystem services, economic methods, attitudes and social values.

Early sections cover philosophy and ethics, extinction rates, population and human consumption effects, wider threats to wildlife, and priorities for conservation.

I have to confess that for me, the analysis of the craft of storytelling does not bear too bright a light. Unpicking the fabric of magical story, and dissecting creatures of fantasy and imagination, can make for uncomfortable reading. I am unsure about the term ‘eco- bardism’ as proposed in this book: although the basis of ‘eco-bardism’ appears to be protest against neo-liberalism based as much in the arts as in the sciences, which is to be applauded, why give a sub-division of storytelling a label? Why not just let the stories speak?

But there is some profound honesty here in Nanson’s observations, the courage to explore, and some gems of inspiration. Telling the story of a species that became extinct is, sadly, as much part of our folklore as Little Red Riding Hood. Perhaps those tellers, like myself, who are striving to strengthen the environmental aspects of our stories would do well to consider more contemporary, fact-based, and genuinely scary tales of the natural world in our story-bag.

Lisa Schneidau

CONSERVATION Clive Hambler and Susan M. Canney Cambridge University Press, 2013 (second edition), 416 pages £27.99 Pbk ISBN 9780521181686 Apart from its lack of references to ECOS material, it is hard to fault this updated text book from the Cambridge stable. The text is straightforward and crisply written, supplemented by useful lists, case studies, and tables. The book lacks opinions and resists any dogma, so throughout its pages the information is succinct and acts as a primer on all 64

strands of conservation policy, practice, and theory, as well as the social and economic context.

If there is one hint of opinion, it relates to use of the dreaded B-word, and certainly appeals to this reviewer: “One of the values of the word ‘biodiversity’ is that it covers genes and ecosystems as well as species, and ‘diversity’ has great political appeal. However, serious problems arise when people assume that diversity is always desirable for conservation.

Furthermore, some damaging activities are claimed to benefit ‘biodiversity’, even when just a few common species gain. We prefer to us the term ‘wildlife’ when possible”. I am heartened to see this reference to the shortcomings and sloppy use of biodiversity - a distracting word which has become so invasive in dialogue amongst wildlife and conservation practitioners.

The book is truly comprehensive in its treatment of theory and practice in

The practical factors required for site management and site monitoring are set out in two helpful chapters, and the section on management of species makes useful points on conservation genetics, and approaches to in situ methods and ex situ methods including seed banks, botanic gardens, zoos and private collections. A final strength of the book is the probing and questioning of the meaning of ‘semi-natural’. The strong chapter on ‘semi natural habitats and traditional cultural landscapes’ implicitly recognises that conservation priorities are often informed by cultural judgements and by long-evolved practices in land management, as much as scientific weighting and rigour.

Overall, this is a wise overview of the current world of nature conservation. It will appeal to all those who recognise the subject is truly multi-disciplinary.

Wendy Neville

EYES OF THE WILD Journeys of Transformation with the Animal Powers Eleanor O’Hanlon Earth Books, 2013, 266 pages Pbk £14.99 ISBN 978-1-84694-957-9

The book’s cover image comes from a petroglyph on the coastal rocks of Kodiak Island, Alaska, on the ancestral lands of the Alitak people. Ancient and indigenous cultures’ perspectives on their animal neighbours and animal spirits accompany each part of the book, as the author mixes field researchers’ reports, her own intense observation, and shamanic journey in her accounts of whales, wolves, bears and wild horses. Each creature has its own extended part of the overall book, as Eleanor O’Hanlon blends science and story, field biology and local tradition to immerse the reader in the rawness of life for these animals, and the raw emotions of people who study and live alongside them.

In the Book of Horse we are transported to the Ghost Forest, east of the Canadian Rockies, beside the Stoney Nakoda First Nation people’s land. Here we watch the wild horses and ride amongst them with the author and her experienced guide. We 65

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are told of riding behaviours which will calm the strong-willed stallions in view. The horses are technically feral but that should not de-value the experience of learning from these animals, at one with their home habitat. “The wild horses are our sacred places” a Stoney Nakoda member reflects to the author, explaining how he regards the authentic relationships of life. Deep in the forest the author’s guide explains the bonds and relationships within the herd. We see how the horses connect to their ecosystem. They have evolved darker colours to aid concealment. They protect themselves from wolves and pumas by remaining still in the woodland shadows, as the deer do. This is an adaptation from wild horses’ more instilled flight behaviour which evolved in the rangeland habitats they more commonly occupied across North America. Back to a more grim reality, the Ghost Forest itself is threatened. The demands for logging could now destroy this special place, and the freedom of these re-wilded horses.

scientists have rescued and released orphaned wolf cubs, amidst the gross culling of wolves by Russian hunters.

The author meets a biologist who learnt to live alongside wolves, respecting their space and behaviours, allowing himself to sleep in the open nearby but undisturbed: “After some time, they let me take deer meat for myself from their kills – once they had eaten themselves.

Those wolves were my teachers. Before I lived with them, I had been trying to analyze animal behaviour even though I didn’t know enough to understand what the behaviour was really about.”

In the Book of Wolf, O’Hanlon starts in the Georgian Caucasus where local

Geoffrey Wain

Through her journeys and the powerful connections with the people and animals she encounters, Eleanor O’Hanlon shows how to find an inner freedom if we meet the natural world on its own terms. Eyes of the Wild is a rare and wonderful book.

Its treatment of nature is holistic. The author will take you deeper into wild places on many levels.

Wilder by Design? (1) Managing Landscape Change and Future Ecologies 15-16 May 2014, Sheffield Hallam University Seminar supported by British Ecological Society; IUFRO; the Landscape Conservation Forum; and Sheffield Hallam University.

Professor Ian Rotherham and colleagues are organising a 2-day seminar in May 2014, which will explore critical issues around wilding or re-wilding, landscape and ecological history, on nature and heritage conservation. The event will raise questions such as if we are to ‘wild’ the landscape, then where should this be, how can we maximise the benefits and how do we tackle issues of animal welfare, carrying capacity, changing wildlife, and the impact on cultural heritage? The 2014 seminar will develop ideas and set the scene for the 3-day international conference exploring the themes of ‘Wilder by Design’ in greater depth on 9 to 11 September 2015.

Speakers confirmed for 2014 include: Peter Taylor, Ken Smith (Peak District NPA), Professor Chris Thomas FRS (University of York), Dr Steve Carver (WRI, University of Leeds), Dr Jamie Lorimer (Oxford University), Dr Jan Woudstra (University of Sheffield), Sir Charles Burrell Bt (Knepp Estate), Richard Scott (Landlife), Ted Green MBE (Ancient Tree Forum), Dr Lois Mansfield (University of Cumbria), Professor Ian Rotherham (Sheffield Hallam University), Natural England contributors and an Expert Panel.

The 2-day seminar at Sheffield Hallam University will begin with presentations from late morning and a field visit by coach on 15 May to a site in the Peak District. On 16 May, there will be a full day of presentations with opportunity to view displays and posters to add to the discussion.

Booking form: http://www.ukeconet.org/event/wilder-by-design/ Offers of displays and posters are still welcome.

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BACK COPIES OF ECOS The following back copies are available for purchase. Costs range from £8.30 (inc p&p) for issues from the current and previous year’s volume, to £5.30 for older issues.

Up to date prices and order forms for back copies are available at www.banc org.uk.

www.banc.org.uk BANC inspires innovation

o 34(2)

State of Nature; Rewilding; disease and culling

o 34(1)

Conservation & enterprise, Welsh agency change

2014 Our thanks go to all readers and members for your continued support and interest.

Recent feedback on ECOS has helped our thinking on ways we could offer the publication in print and digital forms in coming years. We are not making immediate changes for 2014, but options will be in place for 2015 for those who would like a colour version of ECOS on their computer or tablet screen.

Amongst our coverage for 2014 we are preparing material on the following topics:

Farming, food and nature How can nature be better integrated with new incentives in farming and measures to deliver local food production? We will look at the emerging policy debates as agriculture enters a new shake-up, and we’ll feature examples from the conservation and farming sectors which offer new ways forward.

Nature encounters - engagement and access People are engaging with wildlife and greenspace in different ways and for various reasons. And the experiences are real, tangible and virtual. We will be looking at traditional and novel ways in which people encounter the natural world and learn from it. Our theme edition will cover access in all its meanings, as we consider latest ideas on the motivations and benefits from communing with nature.

Communal nature?

Beyond the concerns at selling-off public woodlands, there is growing interest in protecting and influencing land through communal structures. We will examine ways in which organisations and communities are helping nature through novel measures, from share systems to communal management and ownership. What difference can these approaches make to safeguarding nature in future, and how might priorities and values differ in the way land is managed?

Please get in touch if you have ideas to offer on these themes, or if you’d like to suggest any other future coverage. Your input is greatly valued. ecos@easynet.co.uk

o 33 (2)

Defending land-use planning; Development pressures in middle England; Forestry Panel review;

o 33 (1)

Lynx, Badgers, Bees & Beavers;

Do we need new groups? o 32 (3/4) The Woodland Edge essays from the wildwood

o 32 (2)

White Paper review, Ecosystem Assessment verdicts, Red Tape rebuff

o 32 (1)

Public Forests Campaign, Big Society, Beavers, Big Birds

o 31 (3/4) Lawton Report, Big Society, Nature

President:

John Bowers

Vice-Presidents: Marion Shoard

Adrian Phillips

Chair:

Gavin Saunders

Secretary:

Ruth Boogert

Treasurer:

Jeremy Owen

Other Members of Council: Emily Adams Mathew Frith Steve Head

in Austerity

o 31 (2)

Strategies for boar, big cats, dog owners, & wild goats

Lisa Schneidau

o 31 (1)

Natural aliens; climate resilience; tips for the recession

Scott West

Alison Parfitt Peter Taylor

o 30 (3/4) Ecological skills; Getting started

in conservation

o 30 (2) Nature at our service? o 30 (1) 30 years back – and forward o 29 (3/4) New nature – old creatures o 29 (2) Nature’s tonic o 29 (1) Walking the talk in conservation o 28 (3/4) Climate Change adaptation –

helping nature cope

o 28(2) o 28(1) o 27(3/4) o 27(2)

Nature’s Id

o 27(1) o 26(3/4)

Species reintroductions

Loving Nature?

Accepting the wild?

Shores and seas – the push for protection Aliens in control

ECOS & BANC - keep in touch on the web www.banc.org.uk

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in conservation.

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Editorial 1. Offsetting or upsetting? Geoffrey Wain

Feature Articles Winter 2013 issue 34(3/4) www.banc.org.uk

2. Biodiversity offsets’ use in the UK: How, Where and When?

Joseph Bull 8. Biodiversity offsets - an unnecessary evil? Mike Townsend 13. Local Nature Partnerships – the experience in Sussex.

Tony Whitbread 17. Bad(ger)lands. Martin Spray 21. The road to Salamanca. Little heart at the 2013 World Wilderness Congress. Peter Taylor 28. Nature blogging – a personal perspective. Miles King 33. British conservation and climate change: the habitats matter.

Clive Hambler 35. Climate change - a nature conservation commitment. Jenny Hawley 38. Integrating nature and agriculture - towards a new vision.

Gavin Saunders & Simon Brenman 46. Assessing the Cardigan Bay bottlenose dolphin SACs. Mark Peter Simmonds et al 56. Whither Natural England? Mark July

Book Reviews A Sting in the Tail Words of Re-enchantment Conservation Eyes of the Wild

2013 British Association of Nature Conservationists.

ISSN 0143-9073.

Graphic Design and Artwork by Featherstone Design Cheltenham.

Printed by Severnprint Ltd, Gloucester.