Nature Targets on the horizon for Welsh wildlife - and they can’t come soon enough

Published: 13 Mar 2025
Topic: Welsh Government’s promise to bring forward a Bill on Environmental Governance.

In spite of high level domestic and international commitments to address the nature emergency, the worsening plight of Welsh wildlife is well documented: RSPB Cymru’s Birds of Conservation Concern Wales placed 60 of 220 species assessed on the Red List (compared to 27 species in the 2002 assessment), and the State of Nature Wales 2023 reported a 20% decline in average abundance of terrestrial and freshwater species over the last 30 years.

Legally binding biodiversity targets are needed to create ministerial accountability for improving the state of nature – just as ministers are accountable for the delivery of our legal Net Zero target. This will bring biodiversity into stronger focus across government and help to drive action across sectors. A recent Omnibus survey¹, commissioned by RSPB Cymru, indicated strong public support for legal nature recovery targets and for greater action by government to address the nature emergency.

Two recent reports – by Audit Wales and the Senedd Climate Change, Environment and Infrastructure (CCEI) Committee - emphasise the challenges facing biodiversity in Wales, and underline the need to embed clear ambition and accountability for nature’s recovery:

In a review of the impact of the public authorities’ biodiversity duty, Audit Wales found that the nature emergency has not been a high enough priority. While evidence was found of some integration of biodiversity within wider Welsh Government policy, there has been far less national focus on biodiversity than on decarbonisation (an area driven by the legally binding Net Zero target). The review also found the delivery of the duty by public authorities was hampered by financial and resourcing barriers, and that monitoring and enforcement of compliance with the duty is lacking. Furthermore, in the absence of targets for biodiversity, the Welsh Government is unable to assess the overall impact of the duty on biodiversity decline.

Following an inquiry, the CCEI Committee criticised the Government for failing to take action at a pace commensurate with its commitments to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. The Committee’s report made a suite of recommendations aimed at increasing the scale and pace of action under existing initiatives as well as improving the legal drivers for nature restoration through the forthcoming Bill. The Welsh Government’s response was published in March.

The Welsh Government accepted many of the recommendations, and committed to publishing more detail on its approach to the global ’30 by 30’ target, an updated Nature Recovery Action Plan, and a new nature finance strategy; we look forward to engaging with these processes and supporting a clearer focus on stepping up delivery. However, it was disappointing to see that the Government rejected many of the Committee’s recommendations on the new Bill, including for a headline nature recovery target, together with an ambitious timeframe for bringing forward Wales full suite of biodiversity targets via secondary legislation. We expect these to be key points of debate when the Bill reaches the Committee in the coming months.

^1 - The survey was carried out by Beaufort Research Limited. Fieldwork for the survey took place between 3 and 23 March 2025. A total of 1,000 interviews were completed online, with the results being representative of the adult population (aged 16+) in Wales. The survey was conducted around attitudes to wildlife and nature in Wales.