Changes in our social structure, population growth and the astronomical escalation of property prices have combined to create a huge deficiency in the levels of available and affordable housing in the UK, especially in south eastern counties.

In 2005, Gordon Brown announced plans to increase the rate of new house construction from 150,000 to 200,000 per year, but this year he caused an even greater stir by announcing that this provision should be increased further to 240,000 per year and that 3 million new homes should be built by 2020.

In addition to this government policy, the South East Plan, a document produced by the South East Regional Assembly (SERA) in 2006 ‘that sets out changes needed to improve the quality of life in the South East England region’, has requested the provision of 28,900 new homes in the south east each year for the next 20 years.

Unfortunately, despite the recent adjustment of this figure up to 32,000 per year, many groups still believe that the levels of construction suggested by both Gordon Brown and the SERA will fall short of level of development that is actually required.

Signs like this are going to become even more common over the next decade. Image by Adam Burt. Some rights reserved.

Whatever the actual level of house-building needed, what is clear is that these plans are extremely worrying for those of us who are concerned about the natural environment, wildlife conservation and the countryside. The Director of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (South East) Edward Dawson was among the first to express concern over the plans:

‘It is a huge challenge to provide 640,000 new homes in a region where the capacity of the environment is being stretched to the limit. There will be huge pressures on resources and infrastructure, such as water and transport, and large areas of valued countryside, including the internationally important Thames Basin Heaths, are under serious threat. We urge the Government not to accept the proposed increase in numbers.’

In response to concerns such as those voiced by Edward Dawson, the government and SERA have offered some assurances in their plans that new housing will be ‘sustainable’ (whatever that means) and have minimal environmental impact. However, they remain rather vague about the exact form that the new housing provision will take, how its impact on the environment will be minimised and, most importantly, where it is going to be built.

If the concerns of environmental groups’ are to be allayed then, as Stephanie Hilborne, chief executive of The Wildlife Trusts, has said these are the key questions that must be answered:

“In the face of climate change we must build our new homes in the right places and in the right way, we must restore our ecosystems and natural processes at a speed and on a scale we once would have thought impossible. We need to create ‘living’ landscapes to allow people and wildlife the room to adapt to climate change. The Government’s latest housing proposals must lead to a revolution in our approach to new housing development that respects the natural environment and encourages serious investment in habitat restoration and re-creation.”

Perhaps the most important of these key issues is where these new houses are to be built. In the South East the government and SERA believe that as much as 60% of them could be built on brownfield land, which leaves 40% to be accommodated elsewhere – presumably on previously undeveloped (green-field) land.

Notwithstanding the fact that research now indicates that there is not enough brownfield land to meet these requirements, this approach totally glosses over the actual amenity and biodiversity value of the two highly different and vague land classifications being discussed.

While many people naturally assume that green-field land has higher amenity and biodiversity value than previously developed land, and that this difference is even greater in urban areas, this is often not the case. Indeed, as the Environment Agency state in their Position Statement on Brownfield Land Redevelopment, there many brownfield sites in both rural and urban areas that are extremely valuable habitats for people and wildlife:

“Some brownfield and derelict land can represent important wildlife habitat, public green space or a core part of urban green networks. These are important in providing good quality of life, and brownfield reuse must strike an appropriate balance in the interests of sustainable development.”

Much of the previously developed land in urban and rural environments, like this land in Salford, has become rich and diverse habitats for wildlife. Image by Neil Wilkinson. Some rights reserved. 

The natural conclusion of these arguments is therefore that more green-field land will have to be sacrificed for the proposed housing developments, and the future of the British rural landscape will fall into the hands of developers, planners and government agencies who will shoulder the responsibility for deciding which land to use. This conclusion is further reinforced as the government are now attempting to relax planning rules so that developments can be pushed through more rapidly.

For many people this is a very worrying prospect, but despite the fact that the development of some green-field land is now apparently inevitable, I do believe that, with careful planning, this does not have to be the ecological disaster that many people predict it would be. Having said this, for the best strategy to be developed the decision-makers must have a good understanding of what constitutes a ‘valuable’, ‘useful’ or ‘attractive’ habitat and they must know where it occurs.

There are great areas of greenfield land in the countryside that have been stripped of life by 50 years of large-scale, high-intensity agriculture, do not have high amenity value for people and do not offer good habitats for wildlife. If these are the areas selected for the establishment of sympathetically designed, self-contained communities then perhaps the negative impact of these developments could be, at least in part, mitigated for.

The key question to consider is therefore whether we can trust the developers to get the decision right and unfortunately, if a recent statement by a spokesman for the National Housing Federation is representative of the current level of ecological understanding among developers, we do indeed have some very difficult times ahead. While attempting to justify plans to develop on the green belt the NHF spokesperson in question stated that, “a lot of what is classified as greenbelt is ugly land or scrubland which doesn’t serve much purpose”.

I think nightingales are one species that would disagree with the National Housing Federation’s perception of scrubland. Image by Petra Karstedt. Some rights reserved.

If, as seems likely, green-field land must be sacrificed for the development of housing then I strongly believe that it is essential for the new developments to be sympathetically designed, self-contained communities and not the soulless, sprawling, mid-density and low quality developments that hang like resource-sapping tumours on the sides of many of our towns and villages.

Developments, such as Poundbury in Dorset or the spectacular Wintles development in Shropshire, show us that it is possible to create high quality and affordable communities that have strong environmental standards and which, rather than destroying wildlife habitats, are sympathetic to wildlife and promote biodiversity on land that was previously of low wildlife value.

If this vision is to be realised the decision-makers must be made to reject their high-density, low-quality strategy that is based on a short-term, quick fix attitude and which will not provide a long term, sustainable solution to our housing crisis.

It is vital that we move beyond the simplistic black-and-white arguments and focus on developing a long-term, sustainable and more targeted strategy to create the new homes that we need within an over-arching plan for the countryside as a whole. This type of approach, which is already being undertaken in other European countries, must only be adopted following an informed public debate and should be founded on good scientific information rather than knee-jerk responses.

Find out more about the SERA South East Plan.

Read more about the Environment Agency’s Position Statement on Brownfield Land Redevelopment.

Read the Wildlife Trusts paper on Brownfield v’s Greenfield.

Get more information about Poundbury and The Wintles developments.

I have had a number of responses to my previous discussion on the wildlife value of allotments. Of these, one encapsulates perfectly the plight of our allotments and the potential loss to wildlife and the local community that can occur when there are increasing and conflicting demands are placed on land on and around allotment sites – especially in urban areas.

The Harthill Allotments in Calderstones Park, Liverpool, are on a small site that comprises just 46 plots, but despite the site’s small size and its proximity to the city centre it has become a rich and highly valued wildlife haven. So unique is the site’s high density of wildlife that Liverpool City Council recognised it as an ‘ecologically important’ site in 2002, one of just two sites from Liverpool’s 23 allotment sites that received such recognition.

Harthill Copse has become home to very many bird, mammal and invertebrate species. Some rights reserved.

Part of the reason for the abundance of wildlife on the Harthill Allotments is that historically, a number of plots on the site have been left uncultivated and three in particular have become so overgrown that they have developed into a small woodland known locally as Harthill Copse.

Harthill Copse is now the focus of a battle between the local residents of Calderstones Park and the Harthill Copse Allotment Committee. The committee, in response to a surge in demand for allotments since 2003, have cleared all of the un-used plots on the site and now intend to clear the copse so that the three plots that it represents can also be put back into cultivation and so that they can ease their waiting list.

The committee would argue, I’m sure, that their job is to provide as many people as possible in the local community with the opportunity of having an allotment. This argument is a valid one for many people and an allotment site that is cultivated at maximum capacity would remain a valuable green-space for a great deal of wildlife. However, an allotment site that is tidy and efficient would not come close to being the wildlife haven that is present on the Harthill site at present and is unlikely to gain recognition as an ‘ecologically important’ urban green-space in the future.

Fighting against the allotment committee are the plot-holders and local residents who want Harthill Copse to be retained and managed like a local nature reserve. They want to plant more native plant species, create a bog garden and install bat, bird and hedgehog boxes. They also want to open the Copse up for the local community to use by providing paths, benches and information boards.

The irony of this situation is that Liverpool City Council have stated in their ‘Open Space Study’ that, ‘Potential exists to increase the nature conservation value of some allotment sites through identifying areas to develop as wildlife habitats’ and the Councillor for the Environment and Heritage also appears to support the plot-holders. Why then are the allotment committee still demanding that the copse be cleared – it can’t be for the £100 a year extra in rent that they will earn form the three plots, so why?

The erosion of our allotment sites and urban green-spaces continues unabated and there are examples like the Harthill Allotments across the whole country. Local decision makers have to meet the needs of many different groups who want to use the land for their own purposes and all too often tidying up, ‘reclamation’ and relocation lead to the loss of habitats that are valuable to local residents and wildlife.

Read more about the campaign on the Save Harthill Copse website.

Read more about the campaign on the Merseyside Biodiversity Group website.

I have just read an excellent article by John Hopkins in the August 2007 edition of British Wildlife. It gives a very well balanced account of the new challenges presented to conservation by climate change and describes how conservation practitioners will have to adapt their management strategies to meet this new threat.

Reading the article brought home to me the scale of the challenges that lie ahead for conservationists, but it also made me realise how poorly equipped we are to meet them, both in terms of our ecological knowledge and in our funding for conservation. I kept thinking, “How much is all of this going to cost and who is going to pay for it?”

The RSPB, who have just released a similar report entitled ‘Climate Change: Wildlife and Adaptation’, believe that there is already a shortfall in funding of £300 million each year for achieving our current conservation objectives. They say that, unless this shortfall is met, we stand little chance of meeting the additional threats from climate change in the future.

We are already struggling to meet the conservation challenges of today, let alone new ones that lie in the future. Image by Tony Wills. Some rights reserved.

It therefore seems that, while the value of to our society of wildlife, biodiversity and a healthy environment are widely accepted, there is growing concern that the level of investment in conservation and conservation biology is far too little to even maintain the status quo, let alone meet the further demands placed on us by newly emerging threats, such as climate change.

I wanted to know how much funding there is for conservation and conservation research in the UK and, more importantly, is it enough to meet the challenges we have to face as conservationists now and in the future? To answer this question, I decided to explore the question of conservation funding: how much there is, where it comes from and where how it gets spent.

As with the fight to slow climate change, the importance that we, as a society, place on wildlife conservation can only really be measured by looking at what we do and at the sacrifices we are willing to make. When people genuinely care about something they are more likely to invest time and money in it, whether as individuals or as a society.

An example of this, at the largest possible scale, is the British Government. They acknowledged the importance of biodiversity conservation on an international stage at the Rio Convention and have done so many times since by endorsing European legislation on the issue, but are they really committed to this cause. Are the government really putting their money where their mouth is or are they just making empty promises?

I decided that the best place to start my assessment of conservation funding would be the 2006 budget. In it Gordon Brown planned to spend £552 billion of tax-payers money, of which £3.5 billion (<1%) was allocated to NERC and the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

Of this money, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) receives a budget of £263 million, of which 4% (£10.6 million) is spent on ‘terrestrial and freshwater science’ and 6% (£16 million) on ‘marine science’. However, a search of the grants they have awarded in the last 16 years reveals that just £1 million a year has gone to projects with the word ‘conservation’ in their title or abstract. This seems to confirm the widely held belief that applied ecological and conservation research projects are hard to get funding for.

The remainder of the government’s ‘environmental’ budget (£3.2 billion) goes to DEFRA, who divide it up between the many agencies that are responsible for the environment, food and rural affairs. In 2006, before the Countryside Agency and English Nature were merged into Natural England, English Nature, the public body responsible for nature and biodiversity conservation in the UK, received 88% of their annual budget from the government, a total of £73 million.

This level of funding is considerably less than the £753 million spent by the Highways Agency in maintaining and developing the road network in the same year and is only marginally more than the cost of a single Eurofighter jet which has an estimated cost of £66 million (the UK has so far bought 144 Eurofighter jets) (see below).

Of their £73 million annual budget, in 2006 English Nature spent 19% (13.9 million) on conservation, 8% (~£6 million) on grants to other bodies and 8% (~£6 million) on maintaining their 222 (92,000 hectares) of National Nature Reserves. Their accounts do not specify how the money for conservation is divided up between the 1,280 Local Nature reserves, 4,000 Sites of Special Scientific Interest, 9 National Parks and 36 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty that are the main focus of their work.

Having determined how much the government is paying for conservation and conservation biological research, I decided to look at how much other conservation organisations are spending.

My local Wildlife Trust (Berks, Bucks and Oxon) spends around £1.6 million on conservation each year, while other charities, such as Plantlife (£1.3 million), Butterfly Conservation (£1.5 million) and the Game Conservancy Trust (£3.4 million) all make similar contributions. Above these charities, in a league of their own, are the RSPB, who spend around £50 million, and the National Trust, who spend around £22 million on conservation each year. The spending of these 6 charities in 2006 was therefore over five times greater than the total conservation budget of English Nature (~£80 million compared to English Nature’s £13.9 million conservation budget).

I accept that my highly simplified calculations may overlook some considerable funding sources (local government, lottery and private-sector funding for example), but I feel that I have given a reasonably good indication of the current levels of public funding for conservation and conservation research in the UK. I do not know if this level of funding is a fair reflection of how much we as a society value wildlife conservation (as opposed to roads for example) and I do not know if it will be enough to meet our commitment to conserving our wildlife now and in the future. What I do know, however, is that for the cost of just one of our major road development projects or a single Eurofighter jet the government’s annual nature conservation budget could be doubled or even trebled.

Unfortunately, conservationists cannot decide how this money is spent, but it is essential that we continue striving to translate the unique and widespread public affection for nature and wildlife in the UK into the funding that will be needed if it is to be conserved.

Find out more about British Wildlife Magazine.

Read the RSPB’s ‘Climate Change: Wildlife and Adaptation’ report.

Read the DEFRA Annual Report and Accounts.

Read the Natural England Annual Report.

As the first signs of autumn colour begin to spread through the trees we can now reflect on a summer of extremely mixed emotion for wildlife enthusiasts and conservationists. On a personal level I have had some great experiences this summer, both watching wildlife and during my ecological studies, but summer 2007 will always be one that I look back on with mixed emotions.

The appreciation of wildlife by the British public seemingly continues to grow unchecked, with television series like Springwatch, Nature’s Calendar, Coast and even the One Show giving ever increasing coverage to wildlife and wildlife issues in the UK.

The highlight of the summer for me was a piece on the success of the red kite re-introduction programme on the One Show, which was just one report in a well constructed series that have featured not just British wildlife, but also the issues surrounding its conservation. To see conservation issues receiving this level of coverage in the media gave me a great deal of satisfaction, because if the conservation effort in the UK is to be effective in the face of the long-term and newly emerging threats to our wildlife, it is essential that the public are engaged and enthused about it and are helped to recognise what an uplifting part it can play in all of our lives.

The red kite reintroduction project is one of the UK’s greatest conservation success stories. Image by Thomas Kraft.   Some rights reserved.

Unfortunately, having been so encouraged by the good coverage of conservation issues in the media, I was then, perhaps unsurprisingly, brought crashing back down to earth by a short editorial that I came across quite by accident in one of our national newspapers. I only bought the paper because the plight of some of our wildlife was reported on the front-page, but it was what had been written inside that reminded me of the challenges that people involved in wildlife conservation face if we are to raise the public awareness and the funding that we need if we are to be successful.

The piece, which I will quote for the record in its entirety, was written by someone who is ill-informed and wholly unqualified to write with authority on the subject he has chosen. I acknowledge that the author is entitled to his opinion on any subject, but journalists must recognise that the public often use what they read in the newspapers to form their opinions and that they must therefore take responsibility for what they write.

Here is what Richard Ingrams (satirical ‘journalist’) wrote in his column on Saturday 10^th September 2007. Read it for yourself and make your own mind up, but for my part, as a conservationist, I found it ignorant, irresponsible and belittling of the huge amount of work that is undertaken by the RSPB and other conservation charities to protect British wildlife.

“Used by now to seeing red kites circling menacingly over my house, I was pleased to see a picture of a dead one in yesterday’s Independent. The unfortunate kite was one of 30 introduced into Ireland where until recently the bird was extinct. Some people, it seems, were keen to keep it that way.

Earlier this week there was yet another report about the alarming decrease in this country of a number of familiar small birds such as the house sparrow. There were, however, no corresponding figures about the growing numbers of large birds. Had there been, the kite would have featured high on the list. Introduced into Britain some years ago on the late Paul Getty’s Chilterns estate they are spreading very rapidly all over the country. And the same sort of thing is happening with other even larger birds of prey such as buzzards.

You don’t have to be an ornithologist to work out that the decline of the small bird might have something to do with the increase in the numbers of the large ones, especially when one of them is actually called a sparrowhawk, an indication of its predatory habits.

Yet all these birds of prey are not only protected by EU regulations but they also have the active support of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.The kites, buzzards and sparrowhawks are the ones who are going to get the protection of this powerful and influential charity. Perhaps in future they should make it the RSPBB – the BB standing for big birds.”

The number of levels on which this is wrong is astonishing. To not have found out that red kites are primarily scavengers is a little careless, but to believe that, because a sparrowhawk has that name it follows that it must therefore be responsible for the catastrophic anthropogenic decline in our sparrow populations, shows a level of understanding that many school children would be ashamed of.

Conservationists have spent many decades successfully breaking down some of the public’s misconceptions about wildlife and as a society we are now beginning to recognise and take responsibility for the impacts that we have had on many of our most common and recognisable species. We must continue our efforts to educate and engage with the public and we must not allow a few ill-informed journalists to take us back to where we were 30-40 years ago.

Read the One Show’s red kite story on the BBC website.

Read the original Richard Ingrams column at The Independent.

The sparrowhawk is not responsible for the decline in many of our garden, woodland and farmland bird populations. The time for blaming other animals for what we have done passed a long time ago.

Earlier this year on May 11th came the news that many involved in conservation had feared for a long time: a red squirrel infected with parapoxvirus had been found in Scotland. The finding of this infected animal in the Lockerbie area of the Scottish borders represented a significant defeat for conservation groups who had been, until then successfully, working to prevent the spread of the disease into Scotland and to prevent its movement between the grey and red squirrel populations.

The population of British red squirrels has been retreating northwards for many years as the stronger, more adaptable and disease carrying grey squirrel has spread relentlessly northwards since its initial introduction in southern England.

An invasive alien species – big, robust and perfectly adapted to life in Britain. Image by Gotigersjf. Some rights reserved.

Aside from a few remnant populations in England and Wales, it is now estimated that over 75% of the remaining red squirrels in the UK (approximately 121,000) are in Scotland, an area where the grey squirrel has only recently begun to invade.

With the confirmation that the parapoxvirus has now arrived in both the grey and red Scottish squirrel populations, there are many who will now feel that the extinction of the red squirrel is now an ever more likely outcome.

The decline of the red squirrel is not only due to the spread of the grey, but red squirrel populations made vulnerable by the destruction of their habitat are poorly adapted to compete with their more robust and adaptable north American cousins.

There are habitats, such as coniferous woodlands, where the reds can hold their own against the greys and there are some who believe that in appropriately managed woodland they could live together. Unfortunately, grey squirrels also have another huge advantage over reds and that is that they are not significantly impaired by infection with squirrel parapoxvirus, while the British red squirrel is. This means that, in habitats where red and greys co-exist and where there is also parapoxvirus, the reds are at such a huge competitive disadvantage that, even if they survive the disease, they cannot possibly persist for long.

The question of what should be done is an extremely controversial one. There are many who believe that culling of greys is the answer and millions of pounds are being spent to prevent the spread of grey squirrels into areas where reds remain using rodenticides and traps of numerous types. The problem with this approach is that they can impact on non-target species and there is significant public opinion in support of the grey squirrel, which for many is a nice addition to our urban and rural greenspaces.

As a result, there are many who believe that non-lethal approaches should be adopted. These generally involve interventions that improve the red squirrel’s ability to compete with the grey and range from the introduction of selective food hoppers, from which only the reds can feed, to developing vaccines against the parapoxvirus.

Whatever the approach selected, it now seems that we are fighting a losing battle. There are insufficient funds and manpower available to stem the tide of grey squirrels advancing across the country and it is unclear whether a vaccination strategy can be developed in time.

Are we then resigned to losing the red squirrel? Perhaps we should not worry – our squirrel biodiversity will still read as one species after all, and surely we could just do what they did for red kites and introduce some red squirrels from Europe, where there are still loads of them?

A European red squirrel. Could these animals be used to bolster the British population? Image by Ray Eye, Germany. Some rights reserved.

Unfortunately it’s not that simple. Genetic studies have now shown that the British red squirrel is taxonomically different from the European races and so, while a reintroduction could give us back red squirrels, which would be something, we would still have lost a unique and important part of our natural heritage forever.

For more information about grey squirrels read the new CI-UK Article, ‘The Grey Squirrel in Britain: A Major Threat to Biodiversity’.

Read the original story about the Scottish red squirrel infected with parapoxvirus at the BBC News website.