The reducing colour in our countryside.

Native, species-rich grasslands have suffered around a 97% loss since the 1940s – a staggering rate of loss for any habitat so why have we not heard more about it?

Perhaps one reason might be our reducing expectations.

Look out of the window and you would be forgiven for thinking that there is grassland everywhere –  so what is the fuss about!  Well, it seems that we have forgotten what grasslands can actually be like.  A good “unimproved” grassland can be a riot of colour – all sorts of species existing together in intimate mixtures.  Literally dozens of flower species can exist in an area that today might hold just two (perennial ryegrass and white clover).  Look at grasslands today and, usually, the colour has gone.  We see an expanse of green, imagine that is all it can be and don’t expect to see anything else.  We don’t imagine better so we don’t see the loss.  This narrowing of our horizons is perhaps more depressing than the actual loss.

Indeed calling these habitats “grasslands” at all is a misnomer.  There is not much grass in a good ancient grassland – a better name would be pasture or meadow.  We do however call them “unimproved” meadows because they have not been re-seeded, fertilised or sprayed with pesticide.  This means that a wider range of native plants are able to survive.

Meadows, alive with colour, cut for hay and then grazed by sheep or cattle, were a mainstay of mixed farming for centuries.  You could argue that these habitats are just not relevant to modern agriculture so perhaps they are just a relic of a bygone age.  This is certainly not a criticism of farmers or farming, but the world has moved on.

I do not hold with this view, however, and perhaps the world should move on again.

These habitats are now so rare that even if we offered a very lucrative incentive scheme to farmers for each surviving fragment just to save threatened meadow flowers it would be a small price to pay.

But flower-rich meadows do much more than just sit there and look pretty! 

Bees and wild pollinators are really suffering at present.  And if we loose pollinators then much agricultural productivity (and many other benefits we get from nature) will be threatened.  Unimproved pastures provided an expanse of nectar sources in the middle of summer, a time when nectar sources are otherwise limited.  So wild flower meadows keep our pollinators going.

Many of our unimproved grasslands sit on top of water resources – water percolates through these habitats into the underground aquifer, purifying as it goes and giving us clean drinking water.  Permanent grassland also holds the soil together preventing erosion, reducing run-off, stops silt building up in rivers and reduces flood risk.

Soils under unimproved meadows are also rich in carbon – they lock-up carbon that would otherwise contribute to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, adding to climate change.  Expanding the area of flower-rich meadow could therefore be a contribution to climate change mitigation.

If all that is not enough then it also seems that these unimproved grasslands could have great health benefits to people.  Animals that graze on these grasslands have a better fat balance to those that are grain fed.  If we eat the beef or chicken that grazes outdoors then we benefit from a healthier diet.

Flower rich meadows are therefore not just a relic of a bygone age.  We owe a great debt of gratitude to those landowners who have maintained them so far, and we are now moving into a new age where we can restore these important habitats to something of their former glory. 

We can’t rebuild a habitat that has taken centuries to evolve.  We may, however, be able to make a moderately rich new meadow which delivers some of the benefits of genuine old grassland.  We may not get the orchids, round-headed rampion or bastard toadflax, but we could get yellow rattle, ox-eye daisy and cats-ear.   

Techniques have improved over the last few years and many people are starting to make wild-flower meadows where once a green desert stood.  As well as a new form of flower-rich meadow, grazed by cattle, such an approach is also being picked up in amenity grassland, under orchards in urban gardens, school fields and even under solar farms.

But essential to all of this is keeping what remains – hence The Wildlife Trusts “Save our Vanishing Grasslands” e-petition.

We don’t need to look at flower-rich meadows through the rose-tinted spectacles of an imagined rural golden age; we need to see them for what they offer us for the present and the future – which is plenty.

What has Europe done for nature conservation in the UK?

Wildlife and natural processes do not recognise administrative boundaries.  It is therefore logical that countries need to co-ordinate in their efforts to conserve the environment on which everyone depends. 

In this respect the UK has worked through Europe in much of its environmental legislation.  Today European environmental legislation has become the core framework in most areas of environmental policy.  Pro or anti European arguments rarely seem to recognise the international nature of the environment and rarely come up with alternative strategies for delivering nature conservation in the absence of the European context.  Indeed, more worryingly, arguments seem to focus more on removing commitments to nature rather than proposing alternative ways of improving them.  This race to the bottom seems linked to a mistaken belief that it is something to do with removing blocks on so-called economic growth.  This is all the more incredible against the good work being done all over the world to show how fundamentally important investing in nature is to the economy (as well as to our very existence).

Joan Edwards, Director of Living Seas for the Wildlife Trusts, has written more on this theme in this blog on the Wildlife Trusts web site.

Malta – Massacre on migration

Conservation in this country will be permanently at a disadvantage if migrating species; birds in particular, are killed on their way through other countries.  I am therefore delighted that Chris Packham is shining a spotlight on this issue. 

His mission is to generate wider awareness of this practice, with factual reports on the huge numbers of our migrant birds that are being shot.  He will be showing this on a nightly YouTube video between 21^st and 26^th April.

Please support this by clicking on to this link and sending it to all your contacts.  It will not be pretty and will be depressing, but essential viewing!

Publication of the IPCC report on Climate Change

The Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change (IPCC) published its report “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” on 31^st March.  This is a critically important document and Steve Trotter in The Wildlife Trusts National Office has done an excellent blog about it.

The report is consistent with all the IPCCs previous reports and in line with the vast majority of scientific evidence on climate change.  Climate change deniers really have contributed nothing to the debate for the last 20 years and need concern us no further.

More worrying, however, is the point that our economy seems to be going in completely the wrong direction.  Indeed the disconnect is incredible.  Last month BBC news reports linking the floods to climate change often were presented back to back with items on government plans to support fracking – with no sense of conflict or irony!  We know we must reduce carbon emissions by 80% yet we are in the midst of a renewed push for new roads, more air travel and an extra runway at Gatwick.  It is difficult to see how the current approach to economic development is anything other than massively conflicted.  There are answers to the question of how to develop in an environmentally acceptable way – but we won’t find them if we don’t look for them.