I've handed the reins of my blog over to Mark Avery for most of June. Mark's sharing the successes and challenges of saving nature around the world in the run up to the Rio+20 Earth Summit.
This time last year, I drove west through the USA, and near the 100th meridian, soon after I crossed the Missouri river, I started to see a new species of bird beside the road. They were black, occurred in small flocks and had white flashes on their wings. They were lark buntings and I saw them often through several days travel through the grasslands of the prairie.
Only on returning to the UK did I realise that lark buntings had declined dramatically over whatever time period you choose to look at. Historically, the loss of the prairies removed most of their original habitat but over the last 40 years, the lark bunting declined at 6% per annum according to the American Breeding Bird Survey.
If an American birder came to the UK, he or she would see lots of skylarks in most parts of our countryside, and maybe would marvel at their beautiful song and think that all was well with the world. However, if he consulted our Breeding Bird Survey he would find that skylarks have also declined over the last few decades and are one of a list of widespread but formerly much commoner farmland species such as corn buntings, tree sparrows, lapwings and grey partridges which are of conservation concern in the UK, and in many other European countries too.
In the UK, it’s not just many birds which have declined, if we had the same quality of information we would probably be even more shocked at the scale of loss of corn flowers, corn cockles and corn spurreys – plants whose names show that they were once part of the arable farming scene but are now hugely diminished in numbers.
And it’s not just the farmed landscape affected. Woodland butterflies such as wood whites are at much reduced levels and walking through London’s Parks you are far less likely to see a house sparrow than when your parents or grandparents passed that way years ago.
I feel we should be angered by these widespread losses of huge numbers of plants and animals around us. But we will only be upset if we realise that they have occurred. The term ‘shifting baselines’ was coined by the American marine biologist Dan Pauly who pointed out that fisheries managers tend to take a short term view of their stocks and to neglect the much larger declines that have occurred over longer periods of time. It’s only when we have good data that we realise the scale of loss that we have suffered.
Maybe if I had had an American in the car with me he would have been saying ‘Wow! There aren’t many lark buntings here anymore – I remember when this fence line was covered with them.’ And if he came to the UK I could point out fields where skylarks still sing but where they were once so much commoner.
Reductions in numbers of common species and extinctions of rarer ones are two manifestations of biodiversity loss, and two manifestations of unsustainable living. If we can find more sustainable ways of growing our food, harvesting fish and forests, producing our energy then we can at a stroke reduce our impacts on the natural world around us. That’s an aim for the Rio+20 conference.
Not only are our wildlife surveys fun, they’re also hugely important at helping us monitor how wildlife is faring. Take part in Make Your Nature Count this week - spend just one hour counting the birds and the other wildlife that visit your garden or green space and send us your results.
Dr Mark Avery is a former Conservation Director of the RSPB and now is a writer on environmental matters. We’ve asked Mark to write these 20 essays on the run up to the Rio+20 conference. His views are not necessarily those of the RSPB. Mark writes a daily blog about UK nature conservation issues.
Twenty years ago when the world last met in Rio, the UK Prime Minister, John Major, and his Environment Secretary, John Gummer, came back to the UK full of enthusiasm for conserving nature. Let’s hope that the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, and UK Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman, come back equally invigorated this time.
I can remember the impetus given to global nature conservation by the 1992 Earth Summit and UK nature conservation got a shot in the arm too. Suddenly government was focussed on which species to save and how to save them.
Not all of the hopes of 20 years ago have been met, but the UK has a pretty good record on nature conservation and the RSPB has been closely involved with many of those successes.
Bittern numbers reached a UK low point of 11 booming males in 1997 but already by then action was under way to improve the management of some sites that had become less suitable for the species and also to create new reedbed habitat to enable the species to expand to new sites.
Many of us working at the RSPB at the time worried that the bittern might disappear from the UK (again – it went extinct in the UK in the 19th century too) on our watch and that certainly focussed our minds. Research was undertaken to understand better exactly what bitterns needed and EU environment grants helped fund a programme of habitat restoration and creation on a wide range of nature reserves managed by the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts, National Trust and others.
That well-informed and well-implemented recovery programme was very successful. Bitterns have spread out of East Anglia and now regularly nest in Somerset, Lincolnshire and Kent as well as looking as though they will spread further. Now there are over 100 booming males spread across the country and the booming song of the bittern is again becoming a more familiar sound of spring wetlands.
All that collaborative work on bitterns was greatly helped by events in Rio a few years earlier. Nature conservation had risen up the political agenda, politicians made speeches about the moral imperative to protect the life with which we share this planet and some money was forthcoming to implement recovery plans.
For the first time, the UK had a list of species that was agreed between government and nature conservation professional about which species to save and how to go about saving them. The future looked rosier for bluebells, butterflies and bitterns and indeed there have been many conservation successes in recent years based on clever research of threatened species and then determined implementation of the right actions.
UK success stories include the recovery of the large blue butterfly in southwest England, the return of the red kite to the skies of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, the return of the otter to much of England and the restoration of wetlands, heaths, forests and meadows.
In my lifetime the language of nature conservation has become more positive. Yes, there are great challenges facing us, but nature conservation has some great successes under its belt too. Now we talk of restoring, recreating, reintroducing, returning and recovery – the language shows that we can hope to put things back, to replenish and revitalise the natural world. Maybe that was the message of Rio 20 years ago and can be the message of Rio again this month.
Tomorrow I will write about more success stories – global ones in cold places.
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As far as we know Earth is the only place with life in the universe. At any rate, we can be sure that it is the only place ever to have provided a home for Tyrannosaurus rex, passenger pigeons, a beetle called Aglyptinus agathidioides and the golden toad.
Those four species don’t have much in common except they are all extinct.
The Earth has been through five great extinction events and the one in which T. rex and the other dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago was the last one. Some scientists say that we are in the sixth global extinction event right now – and it’s all down to us.
The passenger pigeon was the commonest bird on Earth in the late 19th century – there were perhaps as many as nine billion of them living in the woodlands of the eastern USA and Canada. Their enormous colonies were harvested, or plundered, and train loads of passenger pigeons made their ways back east to New York, Philadelphia and Washington as cheap food. It seemed inconceivable that such an abundant species could ever be diminished, let alone go extinct, and yet by 1914 there was just one passenger pigeon left; a bird called Martha who lived in Cincinnati Zoo and whose death on 1 September 1914 was global news.
The extinction of Aglyptinus agathidioides was not big news but it did go extinct in the UK. This tiny beetle is only known from being found in a moorhen’s nest in Potter’s Bar in 1912 and despite entomologists looking for it, it has never been seen alive since it was discovered on the day The Titanic sank.
The beautiful golden toad was discovered in the Monteverde cloud forests of Costa Rica in 1966 but has not been seen, despite searches, since 15 May 1989. Its demise is thought to be climate-related; drier conditions may have led to loss of the temporary pools they used for breeding and a greater incidence of fungal diseases.
The loss of a pigeon, a beetle and a toad may not add up to much in themselves but the bigger picture is striking. The IUCN Red Lists chart the number of species threatened with extinction. For birds the figure is around 12% (one in eight of the world’s 10,000 or so bird species) but for other groups, such as amphibians, the figure is much higher (c40%) and for most life on earth (including the beetles) we really don’t have the figures. But for those species we do know well extinction rates are increasing as habitat destruction, over exploitation, introduced species and pollution (including climate change) take their toll.
Considering this is, as far as we know, the only place in the universe where life exists, we aren’t doing a great job of protecting it. It’s not the most uplifting story to tell and it should be nagging away at the minds of those who assemble in Rio in 18 days’ time. But it’s really not all gloomy news and over the next 18 days there will be a series of ‘good news’ stories to lighten the mood!
One species that might not make it to 2020 (the year targeted by governments around the world to stop the loss of wildlife) is the Spoon-billed sandpiper. With your help we can continue to fund a captive breeding programme so we can reintroduce birds to the wild in the future. This work is being undertaken in partnership with the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, Birds Russia, Birdlife International and the BTO and you can help by making a donation today.
I am about to go north to our hut on the Northumberland coast with the family for half term. So, as a special treat over the coming 20 days, guest blogger, and my predecessor, Mark Avery will be sharing his thoughts on the global challenges we face ahead of the Rio+20 Earth summit. I know he'll be watching the outcomes of the summit closely. I also know he'll welcome your questions along the way so please do share your thoughts by commenting on his posts.
Can you remember 1992? In the UK, John Major won a general election, Liverpool won the FA Cup at Wembley and petrol was 40p/l. The European Union had 12 members compared with its current 27, the Bosnian war started and Ireland won the Eurovision Song Contest.
1992 was also a year of global environmental agreements with the first World Oceans Day, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and, in an unprecedented meeting of global leaders in Rio de Janeiro, the agreement of the UN Convention on Biodiversity.
Known now as the ‘Earth Summit’, that Rio meeting kicked off much of the collaborative global action that aims to stem the loss of biodiversity on this planet. This year, world leaders will again assemble in Rio to discuss how we can live sustainably on the planet which we share with millions of other species.
Today’s is the first of 20 short essays on the challenges that we still face in protecting nature on Earth. In the days running up to this year’s Rio+20 summit (20-22 June 2012) I will describe some of the successes and failures of global attempts to stop the loss of biodiversity around us - and that’s the last time we’ll use the word biodiversity, as from now on I’ll talk about species, habitats, wildlife and nature.
If we live unsustainably in our brief stay on this planet then we make future lives more difficult – future human lives as well as those of beetles and tigers. The message that we depend on the natural world, and its future depends on us too, has been accepted by decision makers during the 20 years since the Rio Earth Summit.
World leaders assembling in Rio on 20 June need to be conscious of the facts that whilst there has been some real progress in making human development more sustainable there is much, much more to do. We have reduced the proportion of the world population living in slums and increased the proportion with access to clean drinking water. Although the overall rate of deforestation has slowed we are still chopping down tropical rainforests at an alarming rate. More species are now listed as being threatened with extinction than were in 1992.
It’s easy to be cynical about international meetings and conventions. With over 170 participating governments at Rio in 1992, and similar numbers attending this year, it is a monumental task to get agreement on anything – and yet 1992 did produce agreements which have been enacted by governments within their own boundaries and through international collaboration ever since.
The overall report card on the last 20 years might read ‘Tried hard in some places at some times but needs to do much better’ and this month’s Rio+20 summit is a chance for the world to reenergise attempts to make our lives on this planet truly sustainable.
Over these 20 days we will visit rainforests and oceans, the tropics and the poles, and talk of sparrows and corals, fish and insects. This will be an opportunity to celebrate some of the successes of the past 20 years but also to face up to the size of the challenge ahead. Much has changed since 1992 – not just the price of petrol and Liverpool’s fate in the Cup Final.
20 years ago the original Earth Summit brought to life the idea of thinking globally and acting locally. Here at the RSPB we are convinced that by acting together we can change the world for the better – locally and globally – indeed that big idea is at the heart of Stepping Up for Nature. Mark’s thought provoking blogs should also provoke action and we’ll suggest some steps you can take on the road to Rio.
Dr Mark Avery is a former Conservation Director of the RSPB and now is a writer on environmental matters. We’ve asked Mark to write these 20 essays in the run up to the Rio+20 conference. His views are not necessarily those of the RSPB. Mark writes a daily blog about UK nature conservation issues.