Part 3 from the forthcoming book Wildlife in Trust, on the history of the Wildlife Trusts

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WILDLIFE IN TRUST: A HUNDRED YEARS OF NATURE CONSERVATION

biodiversity action planning

The UK Government was among more than 150 countries that signed and later ratified the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity agreed at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in1992. One of the requirements of the Convention was for contracting parties to ‘develop national strategies, plans or programmes for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity’. A Biodiversity Challenge Group (BCG) was established in 1993 by the voluntary sector to influence the UK Government’s response to the Convention. The Wildlife Trusts was one of six organisations making up the Group – the ‘Challenge Six’. The other members were Butterfly Conservation, Friends of the Earth, Plantlife, RSPB and WWF. The BCG’s first report, Biodiversity Challenge – an agenda for conservation in the UK, was launched six weeks ahead of the Government’s response to the convention, published in January 1994. In the run-up to these reports the BCG had argued strongly that yet another bland review document would not suffice. The Group’s tenet was that the conservation of biodiversity was a key test of sustainability and a healthy environment. More particularly there was a need for an agreement on the species and habitats that warranted the most attention and on directing resources at these priorities. The BCG proposed an objective-led planning process with costed targets for a selection of priority species and habitats. It was convinced that there was sufficient information on most of

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these to prepare meaningful plans and believed the process should be embedded into all aspects of Government policy. To show that this was feasible, it cited ‘ambitious but realistic’ targets for the conservation and recovery of around 530 species and 11 habitats as well as comprehensive action plans for two of the species and six of the habitats. When the Government published its response to the convention, Biodiversity – The UK Action Plan (BAP), the BCG welcomed it but argued that it lacked the clear structure of its own report. There were also differences of approach, for example, on the role of the voluntary sector in the delivery of the habitat action plans. But the overall goals and objectives of the Government and the BCG were very similar and both recognised that the aim should be ‘no further net loss of biodiversity’. The Government’s report proposed a UK Biodiversity Action Plan Steering Group to take matters forward, including a range of recommendations that became known as the ‘59 steps’. Importantly, the report committed the Government to produce costed targets for key species and habitats and to produce at least the first tranche of action plans by the end of 1995.

PART III: BIODIVERSITY ACTION PL ANNING

The quality of the individuals involved with the biodiversity process in the Department of the Environment at this stage, from the Minister, John Gummer, through the senior civil servants to the report’s astute author, Roger Bendall, played a major part in the surprisingly good progress that was made after the Department’s initial reticence had been overcome. After all, the process being developed required enormous commitment and energy from all sides. There were refreshingly energetic contributions from most quarters. The collective views of the ‘Challenge Six’ were being coordinated through the BCG and the voluntary sector was now represented on the Government’s UK Steering Group and its four sub-groups taking forward the BAP. Indeed, the majority of the first drafts of the species action plans were produced under contract by the BCG’s members. The Wildlife Trusts were active on the main UK BAP Steering Group and on three of the four sub-groups, particularly in relation to data management and the biodiversity process at the local level. A second, enlarged and revised edition of Biodiversity Challenge – an agenda for conservation in the UK was launched with sir david attenborough in January 1995.

Corncrake - one of the priority species identified by the UK Biodiversity Action Plan

This time it identified targets for 600 species and 35 habitats with comprehensive action plans for 44 plants and animals and six habitats. In an additional chapter it tackled the difficult issue of costing biodiversity. This helped to keep the Steering Group on its toes and to provide a bench-mark against which the Steering Group’s report could be judged. In 1995, the UK BAP Steering Group’s report was finally published in two volumes – Volume 1: Meeting the Rio Challenge and Volume 2: Action Plans. It contained a first tranche of 116 species action plans and 14 habitat action plans and a recommendation for work on a further 286 species and 24 habitats to be completed in the next two to three years. It was a landmark production, not least because it represented a consensus across a very wide range of organisations and institutions. Five months later, the Government formally responded to the Steering Group’s report. It welcomed its findings and supported the call for the remaining species and habitat action plans to be completed within two to three years. Above all, it stamped a Government seal of approval on a restoration, rather than a simply protectionist, agenda for biodiversity conservation. By 2000, there were around 570 species that had either an action plan or statement or were in a grouped statement or a grouped or joint species action plan, together with 94 habitats that had either an action plan or broad habitat statement. The report recognised that each of the species action plans would be implemented by a number of players but it proposed a ‘lead partner’ to drive forward and coordinate delivery in each case. The statutory sector would be lead partners for the

habitat action plans. There was also a less official plan to get ‘champions’ for species from the corporate sector to sponsor some of the more charismatic species. In addition, the Steering Group believed much could be gained by promoting the process at the local level and in particular through the development of local partnerships and Local Biodiversity Action Plans. Once the dust had settled, members of the BCG found themselves as lead partners for a daunting, 187 species action plans. During the preparation of the UK BAP Steering Group’s report, and after its publication, The Wildlife Trusts had, understandably, played a major part in developing the thinking on Local Biodiversity Action Plans. Trusts now became increasingly involved, and in many cases took the lead, in a growing number of local BAP partnerships. In 1996, for example, the Sussex Trust published Vision for the Wildlife of Sussex; a consortium of English Nature, Environment Agency, RSPB and the Trusts published Action for Wildlife in East Anglia – a Guide to Biodiversity in Cambridgeshire, Essex, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk and the Lincolnshire Trust published Nature in Lincolnshire – Towards a Biodiversity Strategy.

Trusts champion local biodiversity planning across the UK

By May 2000, The Wildlife Trusts was lead partner for 23 priority species; nationally focusing on ten of the UK BAP priority habitats; and a key partner in 95 per cent of local biodiversity action plans. It had also been moderately successful in securing corporate ‘champions’. In 1998, for example, the early gentian was among the first of the BAP’s plant species to attract corporate support. Wessex Water agreed to fund The Wildlife Trusts and Plantlife for on-site management advice and vital research and survey work in their region The Wildlife Trusts’ work on five UK BAP priority invertebrate species – southern damselfly, the black bog and narrow-headed ants, a leaf beetle and the mire pill-beetle – was reported in Beauty and the Mini-Beasts, published during Wildlife Week 2000. In its foreword, The Wildlife Trusts’ President, David Bellamy, reminded his audience that if invertebrate species were in decline, then humans were in trouble too. Although the Government’s BAP process was helping, “without further funding, they and a host of others will perish. That’s why The Wildlife Trusts are lobbying for policy changes and appealing for support”.16 Nine years after the Earth Summit in 2001, the BCG assessed progress in Biodiversity Counts – Delivering a Better Quality of Life just prior to the BAP’s first reporting round. The picture was mixed and the report observed “before the publication of BAP, there was no strategy for conserving the UK’s wildlife shared by Government, industry, conservation organisations and the public alike”.17 Now there was. The report called for the biodiversity process to be nurtured and encouraged, particularly at a time when many functions affecting

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Part 3 from the forthcoming book Wildlife in Trust, on the history of the Wildlife Trusts by The Wildlife Trusts - Issuu