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Making space for biodiversity

Protecting our finest wildlife sites and saving our threatened species will not be sufficient to halt biodiversity loss. We also need to prevent common and widespread habitats and species becoming rare.

We need to create a more sympathetic and robust countryside so that wildlife can have a chance of responding to climate change. This is in addition to tackling the causes of climate change. We therefore need to build biodiversity considerations into land use policies and programmes. 

At the same time we need to increase access to the quality of life benefits, that biodiversity brings. 

For all of this to happen, we must do the following:

Collect the right information

• Invest in long-term monitoring of health of our biodiversity through surveys and a collation of information by local, regional and national centres
• Research the causes of decline in wildlife, such as woodland birds and butterflies, and how to reverse them             

Implement remedies to deal with causes of environmental damage 

• Introduce reform through the right mix of regulation, state investment, taxes and incentives             

Deliver positive planning to protect and enhance biodiversity

• Develop and implement shared landscape scale visions at a local authority level (100% of UK with agreed landscape scale visions for biodiversity by 2010)
• Identify and safeguard space for biodiversity through the planning system so that no family is more than 300 metres from biodiverse green space of at least 2 hectares by 2010   
• Double the rate of wildlife habitat recreation by 2008          

Improve education and public understanding:

• Ensure that all children have contact with biodiversity and the natural world as an integral part of their school career  

Put sustainable development into practice

• Improve the management of the public estate. Ensure 80% of the public estate (Government and local authority owned land) should have biodiversity management plans or prescriptions by 2008, with 100% in place by 2010
• Promote sustainable land use opportunities that further biodiversity conservation (e.g. responsible recreation and tourism)              

Performance Indicators

• By 2010, the indices for farmland and woodland wild bird populations and for butterflies are showing a positive trend  
• By 2010, all school children have gained experience of biodiversity and the natural world through out-of-classroom learning as an integral part of school education    

The clock is ticking and biodiversity is being lost. The commitment to halting biodiversity loss by 2010 is an ambitious one, but it is vital for our quality of life that we face up to this challenge. 

We need to start delivering all of these actions now.

Last modified: 02 October 2006

Countdown to 2010

• Protecting and enhancing threatened species and habitats
• Protecting our finest wildlife sites
• Making space for biodiversity
• Timeline for action