Early this afternoon signatures to the Letter to the Future passed the 100,000 mark.
They've now reached over 103,000.
They've been coming in at up to 500 per hour on the back of record numbers of people submitting their Big Garden Birdwatch sightings. It's great to know that not only do you enjoy nature, you want to help us protect it.
Thank you.
The Renewable Fuels Agency today reported that the growing use of unsustainable biofuels will be a disaster for rainforests. It's something the RSPB has been saying for years, and a message in our Letter to the Future campaign.
Since the UK Government put in place its Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation in 2008, it has required a steady increase in the percentage of biofuels sold as part of vehicle fuel on the forecourt. Biofuels include ethanol from sugar cane, corn and wheat, and biodiesel from palm oil.
The theory goes like this: the crops that are made into biofuels soak up carbon as they grow, and so balance out the carbon dioxide released when the fuel is burned. But the practice isn't as neat: once you add the greenhouse gas costs of producing the biofuels into the equation (fertilisers and other fossil-fuel based inputs for production, then the pollution created in distributing them), they are often as bad for the planet as the petrol and diesel they replace in our tanks. Sometimes they're worse.
And what galls the RSPB is that many crops destined to be biofuels are grown on newly-cleared rainforest land. Not only does this knock the global warming impact of such biofuels strongly into the negative, but it destroys priceless wildlife habitat. Consider the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, where the RSPB, Burung Indonesia and BirdLife International have an ambitious project to save and restore a magnificent, wildlife-rich rainforest. When companies clear good forest on Sumatra to establish oil palm plantations, they destroy the last fragments of unique habitat for endangered rainforest species with nowhere else to go.
Back to the Renewable Fuels Agency findings and what you and I can do. The Agency has highlighted today how the biofuels entering the UK fuel stream just can't be guaranteed to be sustainable. At present, companies have to do little more than fill in a form saying they do not know where their fuel comes from. The UK needs tough sustainability standards on biofuels and needs them, fast. Meanwhile, if the Government scheme to increase the biofuel in our fuel stream steadily to 5 percent continues as planned, households will foot a collective bill of an extra £720 million in fuel costs by 2013.
Freeze the amount of biofuels being added to petrol and diesel, says the RSPB, and earmark that £720 million for forest protection instead. Orang utans, gibbons, Sumatran tigers, rare parrots, rainforest frogs would all thank you for it...as would all of us who love nature and simply don't want to burn the rainforest in our tanks.
Read our proposals in full in our Challenge 2010 report on how Government can cut the waste and invest in nature.
Nature, that is.
Over the last few weeks we've had more evidence than ever of the huge popular appeal of birds and other wildlife.
During the heavy snow, we were inundated with calls about redwings and fieldfares and requests for advice on looking after cold, hungry birds. Traffic to our website doubled.
We've just closed our pledge to stop the illegal killing of birds of prey, having accumulated an unprecedented 206,000 pledges over two years. We'll be handing these in at Westminster next Tuesday. The Letter to the Future campaign has only going for four months and we're already approaching 96,000 pledges. We're aiming for a 150,000 by the general election in May.
This weekend we're anticipating a big response to Big Garden Birdwatch, the world's largest wildlife survey. Last year - the survey's 30th anniversary - a whopping 550,000 of you took part, providing us with valuable data about bird population trends. It's a very tall order, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we might even exceed that number this year.
So, we know that you love birds and other wildlife - after all Springwatch, Autumnwatch and Snow Watch attract up to four million viewers.
And yet, despite this overwhelming evidence of how much nature means to people, it still gets a raw deal at the hands of our politicians.
We need to keep on showing them what matters to us by speaking up for nature. You can do so by signing the Letter to the Future and by encouraging friends and family to do so. If you've already signed and you're on Facebook or Twitter, do grab a 'Yes, I love nature' twibbon to display on your page. You can get one here.
If enough of us show our politicians what we really want, we might just make them sit up and listen. And if we can do that, they might just take action to ensure the things we value and love are looked after for the benefit of our children and future generations.
When I wrote about farmers the other day, I'd not caught up with plans for our unprecedented joint policy stance with the Country Land & Business Association (CLA). Together, we're calling for positive environmental benefits from a reformed Common Agricultural Policy.
You can read about this on our News blog here.
With influential alliances like this taking shape, we might yet dare to hope for a brighter future for our lapwings, skylarks and grey partridges.
If we're going to solve the declines of many once common farmland birds, we need to work more closely with more farmers.
Sounds fairly easy when you put it like that.
But, however many times we discuss this - as a few of us did for a couple of hours this afternoon - we seem to make limited progress.
Many farmers remain suspicious of us. They believe we don't understand farming and they see our calls for conservation measures as a threat to their livelihoods. Yet, when we do talk, we regularly find common ground and establish a mutual respect based on each other's knowledge and experience. We understand that farmers need to earn a decent living and many of them like to help wildlife where they can. There are even some farmers who are fans of what we do.
Over recent years, we've worked with thousands of farmers. We offer free bird surveys and land management advice, we run awards highlighting wildlife-friendly farmers and we publicise positive examples of farmland conservation in action. Of course we don't shy away from pointing out the alarming scale of farmland bird declines, but we're clear that farming policies are to blame, rather than indvidual farmers.
Try as we might, reaching beyond a relatively small number of sympathetic farmers remains a huge challenge. If you've got any great ideas on what else we can do, we'd love to hear them.
We're aiming to make our countryside fit for wildlife. But if we don't make more progress more quickly, even more of our fields will end up bereft of 'common' birds such as lapwings, skylarks and grey partridges.
We don't want to see this happen, nor do you.
I'm hoping that a good proportion of farmers don't either.
PS If you're a wildlife-friendly farmer reading this, why not enter our Nature of Farming Award, open until the end of February?