Blogs

The decision to veto plans for a massive wind farm on the Isle of Lewis is the best news conservationists, and the island’s residents and visitors, have had for some time.
 
It should scupper for good any thought of destroying this invaluable peat moorland, so important for storing carbon which, had the development gone ahead, would have been released into the atmosphere.
 
An unquantifiable amount of work has gone into fighting this wind farm application. The RSPB has been vociferously against the plan because of damage to the peat and because many birds could have been killed or their nesting and migration stop-over sites destroyed.
 
The Lewis decision is a welcome sign that politicians are recognising the profound importance of peat and its wildlife. Peat hosts a plethora of rare and unusual plants and insects, thriving on this unique, boggy environment.
 
Its bogginess means few humans venture far into it and in turn, that birds like golden eagles, merlin, red and black-throated divers, dunlin and golden plover are largely safe from disturbance. It is a haven, a still wild place of which there are few left in the UK.
 
Peat extraction for gardening and horticulture has taken a huge toll on lowland peatlands although not the blanket bogs of Lewis. The RSPB urges all gardeners to buy peat-free composts and we helped set up an industry-led scheme to speed up the replacement of peat in gardening and horticulture.

The RSPB also wants commercial peat extraction halted on two Cumbrian bogs – Bolton Fell Moss  and Solway Moss. The UK government has been advised by its own wildlife watchdog, Natural England, that both these sites should be restored to benefit wildlife.
 
The Scottish Government yesterday recognised the value of wildlife and the strength of laws protecting it but also the importance of keeping our peat. Scotland’s leaders have shown that keeping our peat is not such a difficult thing to do.

Click here for a full report on the Lewis decision

The company that fitted Ashley Seager's solar panels has gone bust.

The company enabling the RSPB to give access to grants helping householders pay for solar panels is still in business. But government cuts mean it can't guarantee funds for all applicants so this scheme, to harness clean energy from the sun, no longer exists.

Ashley Seager is the Guardian's Economics Correspondent and says government support for offers such as the RSPB's now defunct Going Solar scheme is pathetic. He's right, especially when it's compared with the money being ploughed wastefully into biofuels and the funds that would be needed to build a barrage across the River Severn.

Seager received 50 per cent of the £17,000 cost of his solar panels but the maximum grant available now is a relatively paltry £2,500, and that's if you manage to wade through the application red tape.

On top of that, funds are rationed monthly so, if you do make it into the application home straight, your finishing sprint could be effort wasted if others have beaten you to it. You must then try again at the beginning of the following month, and again and again and so on.

Too few clean energy technologies are ready to roll yet the potential, and enthusiasm, for one of them is being squandered by the government whose provision of resources to fight climate change is still not matching its rhetoric.

Ashley Seager and his family have reduced their electricy use by 92 per cent in a year – a saving of about £500 on top of their carbon cuts. Just imagine the extent of Britain's carbon savings if more of us were able to follow Seager's example.

Read Ashley Seager's account in full

So, the message is getting through at last.

After a plethora of warnings from the UN down for biofuel development to be put on hold, Brussels is finally taking note.

The Guardian reported on Saturday that the European Commission was back-tracking on its demand that 10 per cent of transport fuel be biofuel by 2010 with one official admitting the ‘commission has become a prisoner of this process’.

This reflects poorly on the extent of Brussels’ courage in leading its member states. Nevertheless, bureaucrats have a ready-made get out of jail free card. They admit they could turn a blind eye if individual governments ordered a U-turn on legislation requiring increased biofuel sales. They should do more than that. They should encourage those governments to do so immediately.

Time and again, biofuels have been linked with food shortages and food riots across Africa and elsewhere with one UK newspaper reporting that almost 40 countries were affected.

Biofuel development is also thought to be driving habitat destruction and with it the loss or decline of already rare wildlife. Rainforest, savannah including the precious Cerrado of Brazil, peatlands and grasslands are all being sacrificed at the altar of biofuels. In Britain, energy crops are being grown on former set-aside land – land that 12 months ago was harbouring declining farmland birds.

Gordon Brown wants the dangers of biofuels high on the agenda at the next G8 meeting in June and Chancellor Alistair Darling has reiterated the Prime Minister’s concerns to world leaders.

The RSPB led the barrage of criticism of the UK’s biofuels’ policies closely followed by government scientists, the UN and World Food Programme and other environment and development groups.

Had the government listened then, a U-turn would have been far easier than it is now with the transport fuel requirement – the RTFO - now on the statute book. It’s never too late to say you’re sorry though and it isn’t too late now to scrap this ill-conceived law.

Click here for the Guardian report

The Harapan rainforest, the Indonesian site that has been saved from logging by the RSPB and others, now boasts a number of plant as well as bird experts.

Staff have just benefited from a week of training by three specialists from Kew, whose visit was funded by the UK government's Darwin Initiative, and should now be collecting their very first plant specimens to send back to Kew's dried plant collection.

Amongst the plants found by the Kew scientists, Gemma Bramley, Tim Utteridge and Alison Moore, during their stay at Harapan in Sumatra, was a relative of the Christmas berry, a low growing shrub belonging to Myrsine family.

Also discovered in this once-logged remnant of precious lowland rainforest was a member of the nettle family called Urticeae Poikilospermum, which does not sting and is an endemic plant to Sumatra.

Just as Kew announced the opening, at its south-west London HQ, of the world’s first gallery dedicated to botanical art, another door was pushed ajar by the completion of the scientists’ mission to train Harapan staff in identifying and recording the plants around them.

For not only will their discoveries, the first batch of which is expected back any day, add to the many reasons for saving Harapan from the loggers. They will also add to Kew’s already impressive Herbarium – its store of dried plant specimens from across the globe.

About 30 staff at Harapan now have some knowledge of the Harapan’s plantlife and six of those passed the Kew training course with distinctions. Part of their time will be spent collecting plant specimens, pressing them and sending them on to Kew Gardens and Indonesia’s own Bogor Herbarium.

Kew believes that Harapan has become an important resource for rainforest plants because so much of the island’s vegetation has gone. That makes the work of Burung Indonesia, BirdLife and the RSPB itself extraordinarily important.

We have raised just over half of the £2 million the RSPB is contributing to Harapan’s running costs over the next 50 years.

Click here to find out more about this ground breaking project

And here for details of the Darwin Initiative

Badgers in Wales are over a barrel, or will soon be facing two barrels, at uncomfortably close quarters.

The Welsh Assembly’s decision to cull large numbers of this protected species in a hopeless attempt to control bovine TB, was announced yesterday, despite ministers not knowing how much it will cost, how or where they will do it or how many they will kill.
 
Environment Secretary Hilary Benn is soon to decide whether to allow a badger cull in England, a move that will not work either.
 
Instead, culling badgers could well increase TB in cattle, because infected animals escaping the massacre will take it away with them into areas they would otherwise never have ventured.
 
The money and time spent researching badgers and TB has shown how the disease should be controlled and this does not involve a cull. A vaccine for TB in badgers is years away and its development is a more rational use of public money.
 
And if fences were erected to keep badgers away from livestock and their feed, the chances of badgers infecting cattle or cattle infecting badgers would be vastly reduced.
 
Mr Benn has been delaying his decision for some months. He knows that a mass of scientific evidence shows that badger culling is not the answer to controlling bovine TB. He must stick to his guns now, not point them at badgers, and accelerate work to find vaccines.

It has taken 12 years for the government to grant water voles protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act.

Numbers of water voles, a creature made famous for its starring role as Ratty in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, have dropped by nearly 90 per cent in just 20 years. According to yesterday’s Guardian, the water vole has suffered one of the fastest declines of any UK mammal.

The angel shark, spiny seahorse and short-snouted seahorse are amongst other species being given extra protection under the Act, after suffering years of over-fishing, pollution and disturbance.

Their futures should be made even more secure when the government publishes its long-awaited plans for marine protection legislation this Thursday. Or will they?

There are many species that live in, next to, or rely on the sea – about 50 per cent of UK wildlife in fact, a staggering statistic. Yet protection for these plants and animals, including corals, fish and of course seabirds, has been piecemeal at best. At worst, there has been none.

The Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981 allowed for the creation of marine nature reserves but only three have been designated in 27 years - around Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel, Skomer Island off the Pembrokeshire coast and Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland. 

These sites have can only be created if all objections are overcome. They rarely are, leaving our fish over-fished, our seas over-developed and all marine interests including business and conservationists clashing over what should be allowed where, and when.

More than three years ago, an RSPB report showed how a proper planning system for the sea could help end conflict between wildlife interests and sea-dependent industry. It said that marine planning could be costly but that the long-term gains, including more productive fisheries and cuts in bureaucracy, would outweigh any disadvantages.

This sort of system is protecting the wildlife of the Great Barrier Reef, Florida Keys and the Cayman Islands yet despite these precedents, we fear the Draft Marine Bill will not be up to the job.

It is likely to propose the creation of Marine Protection Zones but there is no guarantee that the very many sites critical to the future of the UK’s breeding seabirds will be safe from development or other pressures. More likely will be a re-branding of the Wildlife and Countryside Act together with all of its weaknesses.

The first MP to propose better protection for marine wildlife was John Randall in a private members bill in 2001. More than seven years on, that wildlife remains highly vulnerable. Let’s hope our sea life does not have to wait as long as Ratty.

Energy firm E.ON yesterday became a most unlikely participant in the campaign to drill sense into government energy policy.

Ministers have so far rejected efforts to persuade them to wait until developers can store the emissions from coal-fired power plants before giving permission for construction of these plants.

Coal is the dirtiest fuel there is and many of us thought we had moved on from the coal era, even if business secretary John Hutton would have us move into the nuclear zone instead.

Mr Hutton wants both in fact. He thinks generating energy from coal and nuclear is a good way of combating climate change.

E.ON has called for the government to delay its decision on its controversial Kingsnorth coal-fired power station until the company knows where it stands on future requirements to use carbon capture and storage technology.

The building of coal-fired plants has been halted in Canada, New Zealand and California until this technology is up and running.

The RSPB yesterday warned Mr Hutton that the industry was losing confidence in his flagging energy policies and we won’t have been the first to say so.

Coal should be left on the back burner until we can safely store the huge amount of emissions released from its use. This is the reassurance Mr Hutton must give, both to industry and to those who fear the effects of climate change.

The RSPB's statement is here