Wildscapes

Wildscapes put your questions to Professor Sir John Lawton, author of Making Space for Nature and Chairman of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust. We had some fantastic queries, ranging from requests for gardening tips, to using biodiversity to off-set carbon emissions.  Here are the answer that you’ve been waiting for. Thanks to all of you who submitted!

1. How can we balance the need for new housing with need to restore large areas of England for the preservation of wildlife? (from @dragonflyPR)

Over large parts of England land for housing is not a problem, and is not a constraint on nature conservation. But there are parts of England, particularly, for example, in SE England where housing needs pose a real threat, and it’s not just the houses themselves – it’s all the infrastructure and pressures on water-supply and so on. There are three things say things to say about this. The first is that there is a desperate need for more houses, and those of us who are lucky enough to have a house must never to forget that. Second, this is a classic land-use ‘conflict’ that only the planning system (see question 9) can resolve, and the present government is going great harm to the planning system. And third, there are many things that society has to do anyway that will also help deliver more, bigger, better and joined up areas for nature. Think about restoring habitats to help deliver clean drinking water (it’s about 60 times cheaper to restore eroded upland bogs for example than it is to build a water treatment works to take peat and humic acids out of the water). Or think about ‘green infrastructure’ for flood control, creating new wetlands. A great deal of evidence exists that access to high-quality green space has profound, positive benefits for peoples’ physical and mental health, and so on.  And finally, housing is just one pressure on land in this small, overcrowded island. Land for agriculture is another major challenge, but you didn’t ask that so we won’t go there.

 2. How do you suggest we gain widespread support for landscape scale conservation, from the public, local authorities, developers and the commercial sector? (From Marina Wood via email)

Interestingly there is much more support than you might think. There are indeed many who don’t ‘get it’, but one of the heartening things about chairing the Nature Improvement Area competition is the huge amount of interest it has generated, not just from ‘the usual suspects’ like Wildlife Trusts, but from local authorities, farmers, water utility companies, developers, and so on. We received 76 outline bids from all over England, covering an average area of about 50,000 ha each! There will only be twelve winners, but the enthusiasm generated even in many unsuccessful bids means that more, bigger, better and joined up nature conservation will be delivered in many parts of England. Almost without exception the bidders saw delivering better conservation in their area as being good for wildlife and for people, and several explicitly said that this aim was not an impediment to development, it was essential for development. So keep pegging away at the arguments whenever you get the opportunity. We are winning hearts and minds all the time.

 3. I would like to do more for wildlife in our garden but more natural planting always seems so untidy. Any tips to help me find a compromise? From @rachelwortley) 

As it happens I’m also a very keen gardener, and have been for over 40 years. And I agree; a wild, natural garden can look a real mess. It depends of course how big your garden is, and you don’t say; you can get away with leaving wild corners much more easily if you have plenty of space. I’ve never been fortunate enough to own a really big garden, and I like the garden to be tidy. So over the years, in the five gardens I’ve owned I’ve variously included a small pond; fruit- and berry-bearing bushes and trees; a succession of plants flowering over the maximum seasons; a small rough bit of meadow instead of lawn; nesting boxes; compost heaps; a wood-pile, and so on. Remember, a good supply of nectar-rich flowers (mostly non-native) over 9 months of the year, for example, can be much better for bees and butterflies than ‘the countryside’, which can be fairly barren. I do use pesticides, but very sparingly; for example I am willing to use spot treatment herbicides on the ‘wrong’ plants in my current little meadow, but I virtually never use insecticides. Let nature be most of the time. So garden ‘naturally’ in a way that feels and looks right, without being either too formal (I hate formal gardens, and decking drives me mad), or too wild. And remember, a garden is a very personal thing. In the end do what feels right for you.

4. Will HS2 really have a negative impact on UK Wildlife, surely its better than widening motorways endlessly? (From Jon Lewney via Facebook )

Now here’s a difficult question, and one that I have to confess I have not personally researched as much as I should have done. There is no right and simple answer to HS2. It basically depends on what social scientists refer to as your ‘world view’ or your ‘value systems’, so that ‘the facts’ can be interpreted in totally different ways by perfectly reasonable people with their own (to them) perfectly reasonable world views. My world view is that climate change is the overwhelmingly important environmental issue of the day and for the next 50 years, so that we have to find ways of reducing the impact of travel on carbon-dioxide emissions. Why? Because the path society is on in terms of inevitable climate-change under ‘business as usual’ poses a huge threat to the natural world, far far worse than anything HS2 will do. It will just do it more slowly. My understanding is that HS2 is a lower carbon solution to the need we all have for travel (for leisure or for economic reasons). Widening motor ways is a madness to allow more and more traffic, because road transport is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Internal air-flights are another way of frying the planet. So HS2 I am told will allow more people to travel more quickly with less green-house gas emissions. If those sums turn out to be wrong, I will be willing to rethink. Yes HS2 poses a threat to wonderful landscapes, and to protected areas. Clever engineering must be used to reduce (if not eliminate) the downside (which I freely admit exists). But in the climate-change battle there may not be a free lunch. Some tough choices lie ahead, and this is one of them.

5. Do you believe there is a synergy between game shooting and the conservation movement?  (From Adam Metcalf via Facebook)

Yes, but not always. I happen to be an Honorary Member of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust, and there is no doubt that on balance this organisation and its members have been a force for good in conservation in intensively farmed lowland landscapes. They do excellent basic research on the conservation needs of declining species such as grey partridges and brown hares, on the risks of water pollution to game fish such as brown trout, and so on, and in all cases they come up with practical solutions for their conservation (admittedly so their members can hunt and fish, which is not something I personally want to do, but if there is a surplus in these populations to hunt, I’m not against others hunting providing they obey the law). Wildfowling is another good example. I have no desire to shot ducks and geese, but wildfowlers have been a force for good in conserving coastal and inland wetlands. But there are downsides. Many (but not all) grouse-moor owners in particular continue to flout the law and kill birds of prey, particularly hen harriers and peregrines. They deny it, but the evidence is unequivocal. So we need to be careful not to generalise; like all things in life it’s a complex issue, but in many places and for many species hunting, shooting and fishing has a net beneficial effect on conservation.

6. Do you think we will ever be able to attach standard financial values to the natural world and include it in measures like the GDP?  Could we or should we ever decide how much say, an otter is worth? (From @danwortley)

Yes, but not always. (I know, I’m sitting on the fence all-the-time, but these are not simple questions!) So, how much is an otter worth? Well, you know it isn’t nothing, but common-sense says that a single otter isn’t worth millions of pounds either. So logically, an otter is worth something between £0 and £1m. How would we estimate what “something” is? This is a very rapidly growing field of research in environmental economics. We could have a stab at how much an otter is worth by asking how much money nature tourists are willing to pay for the chance of seeing an otter in the Hebrides, for example. Interestingly, this value may be different in different places, so an otter may be worth a variable amount of money depending on where it is. Or you could use something called ‘existence values’ – how much people might be willing to pay just to know that, say, a Wildlife Trust is helping otters survive (that’s the basis of appeals by wildlife charities to “save the wombat”, or whatever). Basically this is a question about Ecosystem Services – the economic benefits society derives from the natural world, but which largely go unpaid for. To give you some idea of the scale of the research underpinning these emerging ideas, the UK National Ecosystem Assessment Technical Report published in 2011 runs to 1465 pages, so it’s not something you take to bed to read. And some ecosystem services are relatively easy to cost, for example the financial benefits of ‘natural’ flood control by wetlands (and see also questions 8 and 10). We already know that the financial benefits to the UK economy of those ecosystem services that can be costed runs into billions of pounds a year, and with the UK Treasury that becomes a powerful argument to conserve the natural world, and indeed enhance it. So we will see (and are already seeing) serious attempts to put monetary values on the natural world, and it is my view that they will show how much we have ignored the value of these ecosystem services; in brief they will become a major force for good in conservation. But is that the only basis for conservation? Of course not. We do not conserve Monet paintings, Mediaeval cathedrals or Mozart concertos because they are valuable (or not just because they are valuable). We conserve them because they are beautiful and enrich our lives. Let’s never forget that, about skylarks, otters and bee orchids and all the other wonderful creatures we share the planet with.

7.Could you summarise the main obstacles to connecting fragmented habitats and thus creating living landscapes ?  (From @AdamRollitRSC)

Land ownership, competing demands for land (for example housing and agriculture – see question 2), and money. How do we get round these? The Nature Improvement Area competition that came out of Making Space for Nature is one attempt to push for more, bigger, better and joined up spaces for nature, by creating ‘consortia of the willing’. There will be twelve, each roughly 50,000 ha across England, led by consortia made up of willing private land-owners, farmers, utility companies, the voluntary sector, the Environment Agency, Natural England, AONBs, National Parks, city councils, etc. etc. Considerable sums of money will be spent on habitat restoration and recreation over the next three years. So we just need more!

8. In your opinion, which habitat is the most threatened in the Yorkshire region? (From Julie Riley via website)

Interesting question (like all the others!), and one again I’m going to explain has more than one answer. First, I’m not sure I have all the data, so my answers might be ill-informed, because it is not a matter of “opinion”, it’s data we are after.  Making Space for Nature did not publish data on a county-by-county basis, but my take on Yorkshire for the aggregate national (English) date is as follows. The special habitat we have lost most of in the period 1930-1984 is upland hay meadows (think Swaledale). Between 1930 and 1984 England lost 97% of its species rich hay meadows. Only 12.6 km2 of upland hay meadows survive in the whole of England (I have no data on how much of these are in Yorkshire, but I believe most are). An alternative answer is what habitats were always quite rare, and Yorkshire has some precious remnants. That answer is lowland peat bogs and fens, specifically Thorne and Hatfield Moors as part of the Humber-head levels – a truly fantastic area. It has been hugely threatened, but now is increasingly  recognized as a site of national (and international) conservation importance. Nesting cranes anybody? You bet. And the future? Sea-level rise driven by climate change poses a huge threat to Yorkshire’s coastal habitats. Sea-level rise will seriously accelerate coastal erosion along Yorkshire’s cliff-top habitats, and threatens lowland coastal regions with increasing flood-risk and the loss of coastal salt-marshes. But this is also an opportunity. It will be increasingly impossible on cost grounds to defend the low-lying farmlands along the north bank of the Humber, and the only viable solution will be to let the sea in in a controlled way (‘managed retreat’). It’s already happened at Paul Holme Strays, and more cracking wildlife sites will emerge on the Humber as we are forced to retreat from the rising sea. And by the way, managed retreat to create new coastal wetland designed to protect property and farmland further inland is an ecosystem service that we know is very cost-effective (see question 6) . Nature does have a value that sometimes we can put £-signs on. But I just love the avocets, little egrets and redshanks that will come with it.

9. How can local authority planning departments better support the biodiversity agenda? (From @tonywhitmore)

Planning departments are central to resolving in an intelligent and constructive way the inevitable conflicts that arise from conflicting land-use needs in a small, overcrowded island (see question 1). However, most planning departments are under-staffed, under-resourced and unloved, and the coalition government (or rather the right-wing end of it) are convinced (on no objective evidence that I can see) that planning is a barrier to ‘growth’. Take housing. The fact that we need to build many more houses (question 1) but are not doing so has (with particular local exceptions) nothing to do with the planning system; house-builders are sitting on huge land-banks for which they already have planning permission. The houses are not being built because first-time buyers cannot get mortgages, and so on. So treat with huge skepticism the notion that planning is a barrier to economic growth, job creation, housing development or what have you. And even if the system was not under resourced, what it can do is constrained by law. Biodiversity conservation is (and I simplify) not something that the planning system must do; basically it is something that it must have regard to, an all-together weaker prescription. Many local authorities and their planning departments ‘get’ the need for nature conservation. They need the vocal support of local communities to help them deliver.

10. Do you think we can ever properly use biodiversity to off-set carbon emissions? (From @lauracowen)

Absolutely. Peat bogs and forests currently store huge quantities of carbon, and one of the major arguments for planting more trees, hanging onto the trees that we have, and re-wetting and restoring peat bogs is to increase the carbon they store – oh and by the way, that’s good for nature conservation. Indeed carbon storage is a crucial ecosystem service (question 6) that with an agreed price for carbon emissions that have to be prevented from entering the atmosphere is relatively easy to quantify. Paying for the carbon stored by ecosystems will probably one of the first ecosystem services to turn ‘nature into money’; I’m just looking forward to hearing more golden plovers on the restored upland peat bogs that will follow.