Wales' new Environment Bill could transform nature - but only with your help

Wales, like the rest of the UK, is facing a nature crisis. The State of Nature 2023 Report found that there has been a 20% decline in the average abundance of terrestrial and freshwater species across Wales over the last three decades. One in six species is at risk of being lost from Wales. Only a fraction of our protected areas are in good condition, and less than half of our rivers have good ecological status.

But the Environment (Principles, Governance and Biodiversity Targets)(Wales) Bill, introduced to the Senedd on 2 June, could be a prime opportunity to reverse these trends. The Bill has the potential to set in motion pathways towards a healthier environment, by creating a new governance system to ensure that environmental laws are applied effectively and setting ambitious targets for nature recovery.

However, to realise this potential we are calling for a number of parts of the Bill to be made stronger and clearer.

When the UK left the EU, we lost the impact of the EU Treaties’ core legal environmental principles which applied to all our domestic environmental law and policy; their role was to ensure that law and policy does not harm, and instead benefits the environment. This Bill seeks to address this gap through a requirement for Ministers, Natural Resources Wales, and (in a more limited way) other public bodies, to consider the environmental principles – precaution, prevention, rectification at source and polluter pays - and to integrate environmental protection, when making policy.

However, we are concerned that the Bill limits this requirement to only policy that affects, or could affect the environment. We need this to be strengthened so that the principles and the integration duty apply to all policy making, in line with equivalent requirements elsewhere in the UK.

The Bill provides for establishment of a new body, the Office for Environmental Governance Wales (OEGW), with oversight of the effectiveness and implementation of our environmental laws by all government, including its public bodies. Like its counterparts in England and Northern Ireland (the Office for Environmental Protection (OEP)) and Scotland (Environmental Standards Scotland), the new OEGW will be able to look into issues raised by citizens where the law, or its implementation, is falling short. For example, in recent years the OEP has considered how laws are used to protect and improve our rivers and seas, the effectiveness of protected areas and environmental assessment requirements.

For it to fulfil this critical role, the OEGW must be fully and visibly independent of the Welsh Government, and we think some changes are needed to the Bill to ensure this is the case. There should be an explicit requirement for Ministers to respect the independence of the OEGW and to ensure it is adequately funded, and the Bill should be less prescriptive about the OEGW’s ways of working. The process for appointing members of the OEGW Board should involve a lesser role for Welsh Government and a greater one for the Senedd, reflecting the unique nature of the new body’s role in holding Welsh Government to account.

The enforcement process set out in the Bill for the OEGW includes power being given over to a Review Panel, which will include people from outside of the new body. This approach would undermine the OEGW’s independent governance role and must be changed.

The Bill should also clearly set out a means for members of the public to make representations to the OEGW if they are concerned about the implementation of environmental law or think a public body may be failing to comply.

The Bill creates a framework for setting biodiversity targets, and a requirement for Ministers to make sure the targets are met. This is a great step forward! Legally binding targets should mean the Welsh Government can be held to account for securing the action needed to restore nature in Wales. The Bill does not actually include targets, but it requires them to be set in secondary legislation after this law has been passed – meaning that it will be down to the next Welsh Government and Senedd to do this.

We support this approach, but we think this part of the Bill needs to be strengthened to make sure the urgency of stepping up action for nature is absolutely clear, and to ensure that this commitment endures for future Welsh Governments. To achieve this we are calling for a specific requirement for a target to reverse the decline in species abundance in the next ten years - this would clarify the intention and urgency of the primary legislation from the start. In addition, the Bill should specify that Ministers must set both long-term and short-term targets - establishing long-term aims for biodiversity while ensuring that each subsequent Welsh Government will play its part in achieving them.

Ministers should be confident that the targets set, collectively, will drive meaningful progress to reverse biodiversity loss. And crucially the timeframefor setting the first  group of biodiversity targets must be shortened – currently the Bill allows three years for this, which means targets may not be set until 2029! We're calling for a requirement for targets to be set within 12 months of the Bill becoming law.