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