The Brighton and Lewes Downs Biosphere – it’s nearly here!

The Brighton & Lewes Downs Biosphere partnership will find out next month if the area is to be designated as a new international Biosphere. The decision will be taken when the United Nations body UNESCO meets in Sweden next month (10-13^th June).

The Brighton & Lewes Downs Biosphere partnership has spent six years developing the bid proposal, which was submitted to UNESCO in September last year and has received favourable feedback.  The Sussex Wildlife Trust has been part of this partnership since its inception and is a strong supporter of the bid.

Once approved, our Biosphere will be the first completely new site in the UK in almost forty years, will be the only such area in south-east England and one of only a handful that include major urban settlements worldwide. 

Chair of the Biosphere partnership, Chris Todd says; “We are now very close to realising the result of six years’ strenuous effort by numerous local bodies and individuals, and are keeping everything crossed for a positive outcome (expected on 11^th June,) from when our efforts to look after and improve our local environment will take a place on the world stage”.

Jeremy Burgess, Eastern Downs Area Manager for the South Downs National Park and Vice Chair of the Biosphere partnership said: “The South Downs has specific legal protection granted by its status as a national park – the highest designation for landscape in the country. In the Biosphere we want enhancing quality of life, the local economy and the environment to develop hand-in-hand and this international recognition would help to attract more people and funding to promote and research how we can achieve this.”

WHERE IS IT?

The proposed Brighton & Lewes Downs Biosphere will cover all of the land and near-shore coastal waters between the two rivers of the Adur in the west and the Ouse in the east, so includes the South Downs National Park block here as well as the city of Brighton & Hove and neighbouring towns of Lewes, Newhaven, Peacehaven, Shoreham, Telscombe, Southwick and Shoreham Beach.

An international Biosphere area would bring the three environments here of downs, towns and coast together under a flagship initiative to not only look after and improve the natural environment, but also better engage people in the nature on their doorsteps and promote action to reduce the environmental impacts of our lifestyles.

WHAT IS IT?

The aim is to become a “world-class environment”, as part of an international network spanning some 600 sites in over 100 countries that share best practice and bring people and nature together while seeking to balance the needs of both.

The Biosphere bid is being led by Brighton & Hove City Council, working in partnership with some forty organisations including local authorities, public bodies, the private sector, educational bodies and voluntary bodies, including the Sussex Wildlife Trust.

Sussex new town would damage UK Barn Owl recovery programme

Plans for a significant new town north east of Henfield threaten to concrete over a huge swathe of cherished Sussex countryside.  Below I reproduce an excellent article written by Jane Simmons, a local resident.  A wide range of wildlife will be affected by this proposal (not to mention the devastated landscape, over-crowding and congestion) but this current article looks at the issue from the perspective of Barn Owls, one of our more threatened bird species.

The peer responsible for the Government’s planning reforms wants to build a new town on countryside of ‘National Importance’ to Barn Owls - contrary to the guidelines set out in his own legislation.

Mayfield Market Towns wants to build 10,000 homes around Wineham and Twineham, on countryside straddling the River Adur Corridor. However, Colin Shawyer, former Director of the Hawk and Owl Trust and founder of the Barn Owl Conservation Network, says the area plays a vital part in a UK-wide Species Recovery Network.

 “These sites are important not only locally,” he says “but also regionally and nationally because this is all part of a UK wide project to restore the failing Barn Owl population. It is important to see this as a link in a chain.  Barn Owls are very sedentary birds so they are not going to fly very far to new sites. In fact they won’t leave their home ranges - they will just not breed within them. Then, as the habitat goes, eventually the population dies out.”

One of Mayfield Market Town’s Directors, Lord Matthew Taylor, was responsible for reviewing the Government’s National Policy Planning Framework two years ago. These guidelines advise planners to ‘identify and map components of local ecological networks,’ and ‘promote the preservation, restoration and re-creation of priority habitats’ to protect vulnerable species like the Barn Owl.

The Barn Owl is a Schedule 1 protected species and, due to its fragile population, has been closely monitored for many years. Figures compiled for the Sussex Ornithological Society show that more than 10% of West Sussex’s Barn Owls depend on this area. And according to Mr Shawyer, the loss of habitat here would also affect many more birds further along the river.

 “You can’t integrate Barn Owls into development schemes however much green space you put in. You can try and recreate it, but it won’t work because in order to have a good viable Barn Owl population you need habitat stretching over a twenty km stretch of river – you can’t fragment it with housing developments. Barn Owls will no longer survive in those areas. If an area of houses encroaches onto the River Adur corridor and within about one and a half km either side then you are not going to hold that population steady.”

But Lord Taylor’s fellow Mayfield Director, Peter Freeman has confirmed that Mayfield Market Towns is pressing on with its plans.

“We are now embarking on the formal planning application process, which will involve more detailed work on many aspects including ecology and flooding,” he says. “The work that our consultants have carried out to date leaves us with little doubt that there are no show stoppers.”

The owls in this area have been monitored for many years by Dr Barrie Watson who is a former President of the Sussex Ornithological Society. He holds a licence to ring them and checks the boxes each year to count and weigh the young to see how the population is progressing.

“The numbers of pairs breeding may vary from year to year according to the food supply,” he says. “We monitor the nest boxes at the large young stage, when it is very safe to disturb them.  We have a lot of boxes in barns as well as on trees. This is a brilliant habitat for Barn Owls. It is nicely away from the main road, it has plenty of low lying fields, and the eastern arm of the River Adur Valley has lots of rough banks and grassy margins for voles and mice, which provide food for the owls.

“The numbers of Barn Owls went down catastrophically from the 1930s – probably with the intensification of agriculture. The fields tended to be cultivated right up to the barbed wire fence instead of having a grassy headland at the end and the modern barns aren’t quite so friendly for owls - they don’t have the dark nooks and crannies for them to nest.

“We devised a species action plan for West Sussex, setting out things we would like to see to improve the population. We’ve put up a lot of nest boxes on trees and in agricultural buildings and farmers have been paid to leave grassy margins. I’m appalled to hear about this development plan; I have lived in Sussex all my life and was brought up in a rural area. I think we need nature and open spaces – I want some countryside left please.” 

Michael Nailard is Chairman of the Hurstpierpoint Flora and Fauna Group which has put up a number of Barn Owl boxes in the countryside nearby.

“Development would absolutely destroy all the work we’ve done,” he says. “Owls and bats need wide open spaces to survive. Without the countryside you won’t get these species surviving – they’ll be gone and our children will never know them.

“It makes me very cross. A pocket nature reserve or a wildlife corridor is no substitute for open countryside and I try to impress that on all the council officials and developers that I talk to. But they don’t seem interested – ecology is at the bottom of their list of priorities I’m afraid.”  

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.

Sussex Wildlife Trust urges MPs in the County to make the case to work with nature rather than fight against it in a forthcoming parliamentary debate on flooding, on 3rd March.

There is a parliamentary debate on flood risk preceded by a parliamentary briefing chaired by Richard Benyon MP on 3^rd March.  It is important that all our Sussex MPs go there and make a strong case for working with nature to improve our resilience to a changing climate.  We are writing to all our MPs to encourage them to do so.  A little extra lobbying from readers of this article would also help!

The impacts of the recent floods mean that there has never been a stronger incentive to re-think our relationship with water, and how we use and manage urban and rural land.  The floods have tended to stimulate knee-jerk reactions in some but the answer to reduced flood risk is not simple.  Indeed it maybe that it is the simplistic answers of the past that have caused much of the problem.

Key measures to reduce flood risk involve looking at the whole catchment, rather than focusing on one perceived solution, such as dredging.  Whilst sensitive dredging, as part of a package of measures, can help in some circumstances, it can also be counter-productive; adding to flood risk downstream, risking damage to river banks, reducing water quality and damaging wildlife habitats.  Imagining that dredging is the soul solution is to offer cruel false hope to those who suffered in the floods.

Water issues need to be addressed in a holistic way, across whole river catchments with nature is a major, cost-efficient ally in helping us manage flood risk.  This is the message in a recent CIWEM report and on The Wildlife Trusts web page.  The management of our landscape needs a fundamental shift in thinking towards the large scale restoration and creation of networks of healthy habitats that will increase our resilience to extreme weather events.

Working with nature, not against it, is the key.

Whole catchment measures should involve managing land so it can more effectively absorb and store rainwater.  This can be done by encouraging tree growth in river headwaters, by developing buffer strips of natural vegetation along watercourses and by restoring grasslands to help soak up water.

More places should be created where water can be held back and stored – washlands of natural wetland habitats which absorb water in peak times and slowly release it between rainstorms.

We should manage our rivers themselves so they function more naturally.  Instead of treating them as pipes through which we attempt to force water quickly out to sea, we should allow room for rivers to take their natural course.  River water would then be slowed down so peaks do not build up quickly and flood-waters do not rush as quickly on to the next pinch-point.

These approaches would mean that some areas, flood plains, would be encouraged to act as flood plains – absorbing flood waters that would otherwise damage people’s houses and inundate valuable areas for food production.

Key to all of this, however, is the provision of financial mechanisms to enable this to happen.  Allowing room for flood water involves working with farmers on farmed land.  By helping to manage flood water, farmers are providing an enormous and cost-effective public service in reducing flood risk and should be paid handsomely for it.  Even a highly lucrative package of incentives to farmers would be far less costly to the public purse than allowing our towns and cities to flood.