Blogs

It is odd that a respected MPs’ committee has today claimed that badger culling will help curb TB in cattle.
 
The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee says in its report on the role of badgers in transmitting bovine TB, that farmers could be allowed to kill badgers so long as their action meets several conditions.
 
The Committee refers frequently to the need for agreement to a cull from the scientists forming the government-appointed Independent Scientific Group (ISG) who have spent so much time studying possible links between badgers and bovine TB.
 
But they ignore the conclusions of those scientists, published in June 2007, that ‘badger culling can make no meaningful contribution to cattle TB control in Britain’ and that ‘the rising incidence of disease can be reversed, and geographical spread constrained, by the rigid application of cattle-based control measures alone’.
 
The RSPB grazes cattle on many of its nature reserves to stop vegetation becoming too dense for wildlife so we sympathise with farmers whose herds have been infected.
 
But there is still no proof that culling badgers would have stopped those infections or that it will prevent outbreaks in future.
 
Because of that, we will not voluntarily allow badger culling on our land. The ISG says small-scale culling could cause bovine TB to spread while eliminating badgers over a larger area would be both costly and difficult. A widespread cull could also seriously reduce badger numbers, putting at risk their conservation status.
 
The MPs admit in their report that culling badgers alone will not eradicate bovine TB. They are right. Vaccines for badgers and cattle must be developed rapidly to properly tackle the disease. More cattle testing and preventative measures on farms are also important. It is crucial that money is not wasted on other, flawed, means of disease control.

 

This morning came news that managers are regularly working an average of 1.25 hours extra each day, just for the love of it.

If that is true, how can it be that so few senior executives have taken time to recognise the seriousness of climate change and how it will affect their businesses?

The Financial Times reports that a survey for the accountants KPMG found that those in charge have rarely put in place plans to deal with climate change. Few knew of the government’s target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. Presumably, fewer still realise that that figure should be 80 per cent if temperature rise this century is to be kept in reasonable check.

Governments should take the lead in initiating measures and taking action on climate change but business, especially the corporations for which the UK is a major base, must follow close behind.

Charities like the RSPB, WWF and Friends of the Earth can do their campaigning bit but that is small fry compared to the multinational muscle of companies like Shell, Barclays and Volkswagen.

Several times recently firms like these have called on politicians to take the lead, give them a framework within which to cut their emissions while maintaining and increasing their profits.

It will take a great deal of action to make any sort of dent in these companies' shareholder incomes. Excuses won’t do. Shareholders have grandchildren too.

Click here for the FT's KPMG report

And here for how we can cut greenhouse gas emissions

In his speech in Brussels on Thursday evening Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas also said: 'We have very important targets to achieve for renewable energies but we need to be very careful about how and where they are developed. We need to make sure that when promoting biofuels we are not encouraging the destruction of habitats.'

How refreshing to find a politician understanding the issues so clearly and describing them so well. 

Biofuels produce low carbon savings, exacerbate world hunger through removing land from food production and accelerate biodiversity loss through habitat destruction. 

To be fair, many of us, including the RSPB, were a bit slow to realise the full impacts of biofuels so politicians, perhaps, cannot be blamed for being slow on the uptake too. 

But where they can be blamed, and will be blamed, is when having realised the error of their previous views they remain inactive in changing damaging and discredited policies in future. 

Anyone can be wrong – but those who remain inactive once they have realised their previous error are indeed culpable.  When will UK politicians act decisively on this global issue?

London mayoral candidate, Boris Johnson, is sitting tight on his Heathrow-on-Sea bandwagon despite all the howls of protest, voiced most loudly by the RSPB.

Boris, who slated incumbent Ken Livingstone’s green credentials at hustings yesterday, wants Heathrow expansion plans halted and a new airport built in the heavily protected Thames Estuary.

Or at least that’s what he told the Sunday Times this week. Yesterday he decided it was City Airport that should be shifted. Hmmm.

Ken, meanwhile, accused by Boris of incurring criminally high flying bills, says he will not relocate City Airport but close it altogether as part of his drive to cut the capital’s carbon.

He’s promised unpopular measures to achieve this aim but is pacifying voters with hints of an artificial beach on which visitors can soak up the sun's globally warmed rays. 

He’s promised a ban on aviation expansion too, and plans to make Rainham Marshes ‘the biggest bird sanctuary in Europe’. A Thames Estuary airport would devastate those proposals, he says.

Ken is right and Boris should realise that there will be no appeasing those joining the massive protest an estuary airport proposal would spark. The idea has come, and gone, several times in the past two decades and will be shot down again if Mr Johnson doesn’t see sense.

The estuary boasts as much protection as any site in Europe because of its value to wild birds, and Boris would be foolish if he were to ignore this. And if he cares not a jot for wildlife he must surely bear in mind the terrible consequences of just a handful of the estuary’s 200,000 birds flying straight into an aircraft’s engine.

Don’t go there Boris, if you want to be Mayor for long.

Click here for the RSPB's reaction to Boris's Big Idea

 

Almost 90 per cent of people in Europe believe loss of wildlife is a serious problem, according to a poll.

Extinction rates are now 100 times higher than the natural level and the Climatic Atlas of European Breeding Birds, published last month by BirdLife, predicts that global warming will cause many species to lose the space they need and rely on.

In a speech last night, Stavros Dimas, the EU’s environment commissioner, acknowledged this warning and called for wildlife conservation to move to the top of the political agenda.

It’s a good call and one that his European colleagues should heed. The UK’s own politicians must do so too.

Late last year, the RSPB revealed its hopes of buying three-quarters of Wallasea Island in Essex and turning it into a huge wetland. The project is our biggest, most ambitious and most costly in the UK but will be worth it if we raise the £12 million we need.

Its aim is to create space into which wildlife can move. The species we are thinking of are those being forced away from current strongholds because those habitats are becoming warmer, wetter or dryer. They are creatures that will struggle to hang on if they have no-where else to go.

At the time, Graham Wynne, the RSPB’s Chief Executive, described the project as one to create a ‘supermarket for birds’, ‘a true wilderness’.

And so it will be but many more supermarkets will be needed. One, on the east coast, albeit a large one, is not going to do the trick.

If the government builds a barrage across the Severn, European law means ministers must replace the estuary’s lost wetlands with a new and equally good site. That amount of space alone will be difficult to find with saltmarshes and mudflats disappearing at a rate of 100 hectares every year. Finding other new areas the size of Wallasea will be close to impossible.

The answer is not just to buy up more land but to make land outside of nature reserves more wildlife-friendly. That means more hedges and ponds on farmland and the replacement of the benefits of lost set-aside.

It means the protection of heathlands threatened by housing developments and improvements in forestry management to stop woodlands falling barren.

It also means turning new areas into stepping-stones between old and deteriorating strongholds, and new, pre-adapted areas like Wallasea. But most of all it means buy-in from all government departments so that all of their policies include measures to help wildlife cope.

Commissioner Dimas is surprised that wildlife protection is not higher up the political agenda. The UK government must make it so if it really wants to be the world’s leader on action to tackle climate change.

More here on what Commissioner Dimas said

And read about our plans for Wallasea here

 

 

The Indian government has a big job on its hands.

It is accused today of ‘overseeing’ the decline of tigers. Another iconic creature, the vulture, is also on the brink of extinction and the government is now under pressure to do more to help.

Three species of vulture have crashed in number by 99 per cent in the last 15 years. Yes, 99 per cent – they are close to oblivion. A paper being published soon will detail even greater declines more recently. India is a hair’s breadth away from a national catastrophe. These birds are crucial to the health and wellbeing of millions of its people.

Vultures clean carcasses quicker and better than anything else. That used to mean that farmers could leave the bodies of dead livestock on carcass dumps knowing they would be cleared within hours, assured that there was no risk of disease from the remnants of putrid flesh, confident that the bone collectors and leather tanners dependent on those carcasses for their livelihoods were safe.

It doesn’t mean that any more. Too few vultures mean carcass cleaning is being left to dogs and rats, both of which have soared in number. The risk of rabies and other disease has vastly increased. Those who used to rely on clean bones and sparkling hides can do so no more.

The Parsi community, which uses sky burials to dispose of its dead, is in trouble too. Vultures would consume bodies placed for that purpose on top of Towers of Silence. Those bodies fester now because the vultures don’t come. Other means of disposal are out of the question because the Parsis believe those methods pollute sacred land and water.

Manufacture of the livestock drug diclofenac, which is responsible for the vultures’ demise, is now banned in India, Pakistan and Nepal. But there are still thousands, perhaps millions, of rural area where diclofenac is still on sale.

A replacement, meloxicam, is just as good a treatment and causes no harm to vultures.

The challenge for the Indian government is to ensure meloxicam is available just as readily as diclofenac, at the same price to farmers and in the same quantities. Without this, and without this quickly, India will lose its vultures for good.

Read more about the vulture crisis here

And the Guardian's report on the tigers' plight here

Ballet, theatre, art and history are to be taken to teenagers to enrich their lives and open the door to creative careers, the government has announced today.

Youngsters will be encouraged to attend the opera and learn to play a musical instrument. The plan is that they should have five hours of culture a week.

There is nothing in the 10 pilot schemes, costing a total of £10 million, to enrich children’s lives by promoting the natural world, however, which is a shame.

There is ample evidence to show that contact with nature boosts wellbeing. Richard Mabey has written a book about it. The government is incorporating spaces for wildlife and other green places in its Thames Gateway developments, to improve quality of life for those living and working there.

There is more to education than what you know. Growing up is also about appreciating the world around you – its beauty, its importance, sometimes its wildness, sometimes its emptiness.

Those appreciating none of this will not care to look after nature or the countryside. Those knowing nothing of it will think nothing of concreting over the countryside, bulldozing a fine landscape for a new road or even building a 10-mile barrage over the Severn Estuary.

Our future depends more on our stewardship of the natural world than on the extent of our experience of man-made culture. Appreciation of the natural beauty of geology, plants and animals is a fundamental test of our development.

• More on the government's plans

• The Real World Learning initiative in which the RSPB is a major partner.

The operators of Kent’s favourite, airline LyddAir, are urging the ‘silent majority’ keen to see Lydd Airport granted its wish for a brand spanking new terminal, longer runway and lots of big and shiny new planes, to voice its fears that those plans could be rejected.

 

One sympathetic donor has funded a local paper ad from Lydd Airport appealing to decision makers not to forget how many jobs will be created, how local transport will improve and just how quiet those new planes will be - so quiet in fact that none of the 120,000 birds using the area will notice them.

 

The decision on Lydd’s plans was put off until at least April by Shepway council last month just, coincidentally, as more than 60 bird species head to the RSPB’s adjacent Dungeness reserve to breed.

It’s a good job those planes won’t be airborne, because many of those birds could just as easily head straight into the aircrafts’ engines.

 

Birdstrike is just one of the dangers being posed by Lydd’s expansion plans. Amongst others are the disturbance the development will cause local people who would like to know exactly which planes have suddenly become so mute.

 

Work at Dungeness could also be curbed which means the success of Dungeness in luring rarer bird species, and hosting unusual plant and insect life, could be reversed. And that’s not to mention the massive increase in carbon emissions so many more flights will cause.

 

So come on Shepway. It’s time to wave aside this nonsense from the Airport and throw out its ludicrous airport proposal. There is no silent majority – newspaper polls have proved that; there are no such things as quiet plans, no matter how modern.

 

This is a golden opportunity to do what your residents want and what the government is so blatantly failing to do – put the people first and do your bit to tackle climate change.

Read more about our campaign here

Ministers in Scotland are ‘minded to refuse’ an application to build a 181-turbine on the Isle of Lewis in north Scotland, according to a leaked letter.

This development would cause huge environmental damage – endangering many bird species and considerably damaging the moorland’s peat, which stores significant amounts of carbon.

The Western Isles Council, which strongly supports the proposal, wants First Minister Alex Salmond to intervene and waive the plan through. This is against the views of the people the council represents; a poll on the Stornoway Gazette website showed 82 per cent of respondents did not want the wind farm.

The Scottish TUC, Scottish CBI and others claim that refusal of the Lewis application will jeopardise the future of the island’s economy and Scotland’s energy and climate change policies. 

But the Executive has thoroughly analysed the evidence and is acting in accordance with EU law. The conclusions outlined in last week’s letter are in line with ministers’ own environmental and energy policies.

The letter concludes that the development would have ‘a serious detrimental impact on the integrity of the Lewis Peatlands SPA’.  SPAs (Special Protection Areas) are Europe’s most important areas for birdlife and European law requires that these areas be given stringent protection.

This is the critical point. Damaging developments are allowed only on SPAs where there is no alternative and where there is over-riding public need.  This same European legislation helped the Scottish government ensure ship-to-ship oil transfers in the Firth of Forth were better controlled – it is good to see ministers applying it again.

By law, governments are required to look at alternative solutions to SPA development proposals and the Scottish Executive rightly says there are other sites for the Lewis wind farm. It makes it clear that Scotland’s renewable energy targets are not at risk from the rejection of this development. It also explodes the myth that refusal will deny the island an interconnector link to the mainland.

Scottish ministers have promised that renewables will not be permitted at any cost. Developing the Lewis Peatlands SPA is too high a price to pay because it would cause untold damage to wildlife. The Executive’s letter recognises this. Any change of heart now would seem hugely irrational.

There are lessons to be learned from this debacle. The costs to all involved have been high and the issue has been a frustrating distraction from more useful efforts to tackle climate change. 

More responsible developers have taken advice, planned and received consents for projects to avoid sensitive sites. UK administrations must now state firmly that protected sites are not up for sale.

Read more about the threat facing the Lewis peatlands here