The story of the Voles, the ditch and the Prime Minister

Posted on January 13, 2016 by Miles King

Water_Vole_on_Boot_Hill_(5592665124)Those of us who believe that nature is important and that in order for nature to be better protected from the activities of people the best approach is to gather evidence, scientific evidence, analyse it, and present it to those in power, should heed this story.

Yesterday the Prime Minister attended the Liaison Committee, where he was questioned on a wide range of issues. The Liaison Committee comprises all the chairs of the Parliamentary Select Committees. So Neil Parish, new chair of the EFRA committee, and Devon farmer, was there, as was Labour’s Huw Irranca-Davies, new chair of the Environmental Audit Committee. You can watch the piece here from 17:22.

It was good to see Huw I-D give Cameron a hard time over the cuts in subsidies for renewable energy, though Cameron is an accomplished PR man and had the figures to hand, which he deployed. It’s a pity in these sorts of situations that the chair isn’t able to intervene and ask an independent arbiter to look at the facts on both sides and determine who is right. In normal circumstances this would be someone like the National Audit Office; but I can see it would be difficult for the NAO to have all the necessary information to hand instantly.

Davies then congratulated the PM on reappointing Natural Capital-finder General Dieter Helm to chair the Natural Capital Committee, and quoted Helm’s recent paper (which I have written about earlier this week) on flooding saying the “current approach to flooding is never going to be adequate”.

Cameron agreed “we need to do more of everything – more defences, better at river management, whole drainage and area systems work”.

As an example of more of everything he explained how the “Military came in more quickly the money was disbursed more rapidly.” He also celebrated an “attitudinal change in the Environment Agency – were trying to balance up the effect on nature and protection of property. The time for that is over. This is about protecting human life, about protecting our homes”. I want to see that continued shift

In Somerset the PM said “this is a man made environment, it was ridiculous those rivers weren’t being dredged. I threatened to go and drive the dredger myself and now we have seen those rivers dredged.”

EFRA committee chair Neil Parish, who is close to the National Farmers Union, congratulated Cameron on dredging the Somerset Levels. Parish asked “what is your long term vision plan on flooding?”

The PM explained that there would be more spending on investment, building capital schemes, bringing in partnership money, and looking again at agricultural policy, planning policy and pushing this attitudinal change he mentioned earlier. He rejected the idea that it was a bad idea to build on floodplains claiming that London was a floodplain. Only a tiny proportion of London sits in the floodplain of the Thames, perhaps he was confusing Westminster with London.

Parish pushed on arguing for more dredging, but also suggested upstream management to slow the flow including planting trees and rewetting land, but he wanted farmers to be paid extra to do such things – “more of a carrot” as he put it. Cameron agreed that a catchment approach was needed, with dredging downstream and upstream attenuation ponds and changed farming practices.  So far so vaguely promising.

But then Parish returned to the fold “are you convinced attitude of the Environment Agency towards dredging has changed? Many places in Britain need dredging”.

At this point our PM recounted a story, “an epiphany” as he put it. (here’s the verbatim), It was probably a well-versed one judging by the way he recounted it. At Kelmscott in his constituency, the Environment Agency were threatening to take legal action against a landowner who had cleared out ditches with water voles present, without EA consent. The PM had a site visit, and in front of all concerned, two water voles appeared on the bank. This, as the PM said, settled the matter. The moral of the story is that  EA red tape stopped sensible landowners doing what was needed, and the red tape didnt even do what it was supposed to do ie protect nature, because the voles were still there.

Parish leapt on the opportunity – arguing that the EA needs to pass powers for dredging and maintenance down to local drainage boards (IDBs), Local Authorities and local landowners/farmers (and this is what Truss announced last week). As he said “if there’s a tree in the river, lets have someone local come out and do the work.” Leaving aside whether the tree is helping to slow the flow or not, Parish was pushing the argument that landowners should do this work – and presumably be paid for it. Who would pay though?

Andrew Tyrie, the chair of the Liaison Committee, also leapt on the vole story, taking the opportunity for some more nature bashing.  “While looking at voles” he said sardonically, “perhaps the PM could look bats, aphids, newts and snails, all of which seem to have slowed up work at one time or another.”

The evidence, scientific evidence, that nature benefits people in a hundred different ways continues to build. The evidence that clearing out ditches insensitively or at the wrong time of year, damage water vole populations is total and absolute – there is no ambiguity. While sensitive ditch management is good for water voles, Insensitive or inappropriate ditch maintenance is one of the reasons why the Water Vole population in England has crashed. But because the PM saw two voles (who may have been running around on the bank, starving, precisely because their habitat had been destroyed by the dredging) on the bank, the case was dismissed.

And it’s easy to see how such an experience, and such a good story, could influence the PM’s views on nature more generally, as well as reinforce his own prejudices against “ridiculous” regulation. Not only his – as the same language was used by the Chancellor, when in2011 he said he was going to “make sure that gold–plating of EU rules on things like habitats aren’t placing ridiculous costs on British businesses”.

While we may recoil at the abject naturephobia of our political leaders, we must also recognise that they understand that a good story (even if it’s wrong) will usually trump facts or statistics.

Read about other epiphanies at Kelmscott here

Photo by Peter Trimming from Croydon, England (Vole on Boot Hill) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
Posted in David Cameron, deregulation, Dredging, Environment Agency, flooding | Tagged , , , | 24 Comments

Somerset Levels Drainage: Back to the Future

Posted on January 11, 2016 by Miles King
River-Sowy-Beer-Wall-Somerset-New-Years-Eve-2015-The-Stream

Bridge works on the River Sowy, Somerset; photo courtesy of Bren Hodkinson EA.

 

While the debate over flooding continues to ebb and flow, it seems that the newly minted Somerset Drainage Authority, sorry Somerset Rivers Authority, have found their way back to the bright shiny future of the 1950s, when electricity would be too cheap to meter; and we would all be traveling around in flying cars.

The SRA announced that they will be widening the artificial drain known as the Sowy River “by as much as Four Metres” along a 10km stretch of this drain. As well as widening the Sowy, a flood bank along its edge will be raised further. Another enormous land drain, the King’s Sedgemoor Drain will be dredged and deepened, and its flood banks raised.

The main beneficiaries of this multi million pound scheme (funded by the taxpayer through the Local Enterprise Scheme) will be farm landowners, whose land will flood less than it would have done. This will enable them to increase productivity, get rid of their low productivity  permanent grassland and grow more of crops such as Maize, the most environmentally damaging crop grown in Britain.

There are also claims that it will reduce urban flooding though there is no mention of this in the 20 year SRA flood action plan. Indeed it is difficult to see how the Sowy river would do much for urban flooding, at least compared to allowing Aller Moor to flood more naturally.

The area which the Sowy drains is also valuable for wildlife. The northern section of the Sowy passes through King’s Sedgemoor Site of Special Scientific Interest, which is also part of the Somerset Levels and Moors Special Protection Area. To the south of this area of wildlife-rich wet grassland, lies an area of most intensive agriculture, on Aller Moor. One unanswered question is whether the proposed works on the Sowy will lead to the wildlife of the Somerset Levels being damaged. Given that King’s Sedgemoor is protected under European legislation, the SRA will have to show that widening and deepening the Sowy will not have any damaging impact on the wildlife there.

Sowy and SSSIs smaller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are alternatives – allowing low-lying farmland to flood during periods of high rainfall, just as it used to for centuries. But this would require a change in attitude about what farmland is for, and what farm subsidies are for.

This is just one more example of the regressive approach this Government adopts when it comes to tackling flooding. We should be reconnecting rivers such as the Parrett to their floodplains, allowing them to flood naturally, not developing ever more expensive hard engineering solutions, with all the long term maintenance costs they demand. And, given that climate change is predicted to increase the extent and intensity of flood events, what is the carbon footprint associated with removing the around 200,000 cubic metres of peat that widening the Sowy will entail?

 

Posted in drainage, flooding, Somerset Levels | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

The Flood, The Environment Agency Chair and the Grouse Moor

Posted on January 8, 2016 by Miles King
P_Dilly

Sir Philip Dilley, Environment Agency Chair

 

The Forest of Bowland is an interesting place.

It’s a chunk of Northern England’s uplands, where a number of rivers originate. Much of it is owned by Unitied Utilities, and they ran a project called SCAMP, for Sustainable Catchment Management Programme. SCAMP showed very clearly how changes in the management of the uplands can help with things like Carbon storage, water quality and downstream flood attenuation. Management such as blocking drains in blanket bogs, reducing sheep grazing and stopping moor burning. Here are some slides about SCAMP from one of the project partners RSPB. RSPB were particularly interested in Bowland because it’s a Special Protection Area for birds, like breeding waders and the Hen Harrier.

Bowland is a bit of a black hole for Hen Harriers, thanks to much of it being managed as Grouse Moor. I’m not going in to the detail of this, as you can read about it ad nauseam at Mark Avery’s blog. Suffice to say Hen Harriers do very well on Unitied Utilities’ land in Bowland.

There are two other main estates on Bowland – one is owned by the Duchy of Lancaster. This is a little known offshoot of the Government, but Duchy land is effectively public land. There is no Duke of Lancaster! The third one is called the Abbeystead Estate and it’s owned by the Duke of Westminster, who certainly does exist. The Duke of Westminster is one of Britain’s wealthiest people and enjoys shooting grouse at Abbeystead, as do others. In fact Abbeystead, an 18000 acre estate of grouse moor and hill farms, holds the record, set 100 years ago, for the largest number of grouse shot in one day – 2929 birds were shot by eight shooters.

Coincidentally, 1915 probably held the record for the number of people shot in one year, until it was surpassed by 1916.

Hen Harriers do not have a good time on the Abbeystead Estate. And neither do Lesser Black Backed gulls, an amber listed species.The gull colony has been decimated, under a legal programme of culling.

But Gerald Grosvenor loves his field sports, and was Vice President of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust. He also bankrolled the Countryside Movement, which became the Countryside Alliance. He gave the Movement a £1.3M “loan” which he never expected to be repaid. I haven’t managed to find out whether that loan still sits on the books of the Countryside Alliance – if anyone can enlighten me, please do.

The Abbeystead Estate, being grouse moor and hill farm, is managed by sheep grazing moor burning and the drainage of blanket bog – all of which contribute to speeding water off the hills. Despite being a European protected Special Protection Area, the moors are still burnt for grouse. Due to the bizarre way Natural England determine SSSI condition, the Abbeystead SSSI units are assessed as unfavourable recovering, apart from those areas where the gull cull takes place. Natural England have produced a plan for the Bowland SPA that recognises all the different “impacts” on the birds and their habitats  – it makes for interesting reading – the Abbeystead Estate are name checked under almost all of the “pressure/threat”.

Although it’s difficult to know exactly where the estate boundary is, as far as I can tell, the Abbeystead Estate comprises most, perhaps all, of the catchment of the River Wyre, which flooded so badly in December. 80 properties were flooded in St Michael on Wyre, though they did not receive a visit from Environment Agency Chair Sir Philip Dilley. Why would they? You may ask, after all thousands of properties were affected by the flooding this year and Dilley visited only a few.

The reason they might expect to see Sir Philip is because he is a Director of Grosvenor Estates, who own the Abbeystead Estate Grouse Moors and hill farms.

It would be interesting to know whether Sir Philip has been invited to shoot any grouse on the Abbeystead Estate yet.

 

Posted in countryside alliance, Environment Agency, flooding | Tagged , , , , | 23 Comments

Food or Floods?

Posted on January 6, 2016 by Miles King

Fell Foot floods

So much has been written about the recent flooding, that I have resisted the temptation to jump in with size 12 boots; not least because, so far, we have escaped the worst of it in the south-west.

However, I read a very interesting paper from Natural Capital-finder general Prof Dieter Helm, yesterday. While I had to metaphorically hold my nose during the natural-capital-ese sections, there is quite a lot of sense in what Prof Helm says in the paper, at least in terms of the need for catchment wide approaches to flood prevention, the perverse incentives that encourage farmers to grow  flood-making crops such as Maize, and the absurd situation where moor and bogs are overgrazed and burnt, weakening their capacity to retain water during peak flood events. Para’s 19 and 20 follow:

19. Agriculture takes up most of the UK’s landmass, and it is both a major cause of increased flood risks and a major potential means to alleviate these risks. Yet agricultural policies and the associated subsidies pay little or no attention to the flood risk dimensions. Some particular examples include:

  • the much greater exposure to rapid run off from the planting of maize;
  • the soil erosion of such crops;
  • the importance of pasture and grasslands on river margins;
  • the burning and encroachments on heather moorlands;
  • and high stock grazing densities.

20. The farming practices of the upper reaches of river catchments are especially important in determining flood risk. These are also typically the most highly subsidised types of farming, with the lowest agricultural yields. Thus the costs to outputs of adapting practice are lowest, yet they have the highest benefits in reducing flood risk by holding water. They typically also have the greatest value in natural capital for recreation, leisure and biodiversity.

21.In the Somerset Levels case, the changing farming practices directly contributed to the silting of the two main rivers, and there were demands for dredging to deal with theconsequences. Upstream farming practices have contributed to the more recent flood events too.

This all eminently sensible stuff. Where Helm and I diverge (apart from the obvious Natural Capital frame) is his solution, which are publicly owned flood prevention companies operating within each catchment.

Anyway last night say an interesting debate on the flooding in Parliament – which you can read here.  Leaving aside whether Defra has or has not increased its budget for capital flood defence works and maintenance (it hasn’t) what I thought was more interesting was the number of times MPs and ministers mentioned catchment management, upstream solutions and natural flood management.

Shadow Defra Secretary Kerry McCarthy said

“the natural environment [which] must be central to any efforts to reduce flooding”

There were 13 mentions of catchments in the debate, compared with only 4 mentions of dredging – two of which were “appropriate dredging” and “dredging – where appropriate”. Secretary of State Liz Truss mentioned “slow the flow” as an aphorism for upstream management three times and name checked Pickering and the Somerset Flood Partnership.

But, (this is a big but), The Government is seeking to have its food production cake, while attempting to eat its upstream flood prevention. In the same debate, Truss put on her old MAFF flat cap and reassured MPs in uber farming constituencies that, as well as retaining water in catchments, the Govt will protect a million more acres of farmland from flooding by 2021.

How so? If there is a finite amount of water landing on Britain as rain, and there is a finite amount of land in Britain, then shifting it away from one place (urban areas) means shifting it towards, or indeed holding it on, another place (farmland.) Unless Truss has a secret plan to blow huge holes across England down which the water can flow into giant subterranean chambers the existence of which has been kept secret for decades, it has to go somewhere on the surface (before entering aquifers where they exist yes).

And this is where it all gets rather messy. Because today, at the Oxford Farming Conference, a certain Defra Secretary of State will announce that farmers will be given a free pass to maintain the ditches on their farmland, whenever they want to, however often they want to, at whatever depth they want to, without any interference from those busybody, red-tape swirling, clip-board wielding, bureaucrats at the Environment Agency. A couple of years ago I wrote about a personal experience of seeing a landowner “managing” watercourses running through their land, in the floodplain of the River Frome (an SSSI). This management involved removing lots of trees and scrub from along a watercourse, piling it up in May and setting fire to it. The EA made a visit but decided that there was no problem as the river itself hadnt been affected. Of course what had happened was that water would flow more quickly away from the farmland, enabling the farmer to produce more food. You can’t blame farmers for wanting to produce more food, that is what they they do.

It’s the system of incentives and regulations that help farmers determine the balance between producing food and producing all the other public benefits that land provides, including preventing downstream flooding of villages and towns, or, in the case of the River Frome, preventing excess nitrogen from farm fertiliser, from entering Poole Harbour and stuffing it as a top nature site.

By removing the regulations and leaving it to the farmers to decide when and how much ditching to do, the danger is that those other public benefits are ignored. I don’t imagine this is what Prof Helm had in mind when he wrote the paper – and it blows a huge hole in Helm’s idea of catchment flood companies co-ordinating actions across the board to prevent downstream urban flooding.

Secretary of State Truss would do well to listen to him on this.

Posted in deregulation, Dieter Helm, farming, flooding, Kerry McCarthy, Liz Truss | Tagged , , , , | 19 Comments

Nature Conservation: barking up the wrong tree?

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Miles King

I wrote this article for the latest edition of ECOS, the magazine of the British Association for Nature Conservationists (BANC).

You can see all of the articles in this edition of ECOS here. The article was my response to the question

“How can the spirit of nature conservation be re-energised in coming years, and what’s needed to bring more direction and more clout to conservation…?”

There is a fundamental paradox at the heart of the conservation movement. The “movement” if indeed there is one movement, has grown extraordinarily during the nearly 30 years I have been involved. I make no claim for having had anything to do with that. Organisations such as RSPB, National Trust and the Wildlife Trusts (collectively) boast hundreds of thousands or millions of members, all signing up to pay their monthly direct debits for nature (or free car parking.) TV wildlife documentaries garner millions of viewers gasping in awe at the spectacles presented in ever, higher definition. Governments fall over themselves to be seen as the greenest. Companies enthusiastically sign up to deliver biodiversity action plans or to place natural capital at the heart of all their decision-making.

Yet at the same time, over the same period, nature continues to decline, to disappear – in some cases the decline and disappearance is accelerating in lock step with the increased support for it. Farmers proud to have lapwings nesting in their arable fields simply cannot believe the farmland bird statistics that show unambiguously the birds which were formerly too common to bother with, are now at risk of extinction. And for them, they see things improving compared with their parents’ generation, blissfully unaware of Shifting Baseline Syndrome.

Legal protection has been partially successful at “holding the line”. Places rich in nature have been protected from development by the European Nature Directives, at least in part. And Sites of Special Scientific Interest have gradually received stronger and stronger protection through a series of wildlife protection laws. Outside of protected areas, formerly ubiquitous wildlife habitats such as lowland grasslands have gone entirely from some counties; and hang on in tiny, unsustainable fragments in others. The 25 year experiment in “renting nature”, known as the agri-environment schemes, has not worked out so well – delivering only illusory gains for nature, and seems unlikely to survive another round of CAP reform.

And what nature are we trying to conserve? Species, and the habitats that support them, were created by and dependent on agricultural and forestry systems that have long gone. We try and recreate facsimiles of these systems – for what purpose? Yes many are beautiful (at least to our eyes) but are there not better ways of providing a future for nature in Britain, than looking to a past now gone?

Rewilding is one such approach – looking to create a more “natural” ecosystem, by bringing back large extinct mammals and birds. The scale needed for these systems to work is eye-watering, especially given how small and crowded these islands are: the only real options are in the uplands, which are themselves highly contested landscapes; it’s difficult to see the shooters and shepherds giving up these hard-won hills without a seemingly fitting fight to the death.

The real paradox with rewilding is that it is people who need rewilding, far more than land. Until people rediscover just how much benefit they derive from nature, nature will always struggle to be recognized. I don’t mean benefits as framed by the economists language of ecosystem services, let alone natural capital.

Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital frame nature in terms of economic gains, profit and loss, financial risk. Investors will only be interested in the aspects of nature that can be quantified, commodified, monetized. Everything else will be thrown into a pot labeled “nice if” and ignored. So the carbon locked up in a forest, or the water that could cause downstream flooding, will shine brightly from the natural capital balance sheet and profit and loss account. The beauty a child sees in the flap of a butterfly’s wings will not even register.

The benefits of nature that really count for people are the things that create sensory, emotional and spiritual connections with nature. Few people are interested in nature because of facts or statistics. People are interested in and develop connection with nature through personal experience, and if not personal experience, through sharing stories about other people’s personal experiences.

Most of us in nature conservation (not landscape conservation) have tended to downplay the importance of stories and emotions, let alone spiritual connections with nature. We focus on this rare species, or that “important” habitat or that this place is very diverse; or that tonne of peat sequesters so many tonnes of Carbon Dioxide. Is this displacement activity on our part? These facts and figures mean very little to most normal people. They probably make very little difference to politicians either, who are mainly concerned about what the normal people who vote for them care about.

How do we get more people interested in nature? We need to focus our efforts on nature where people live. Is there much point in encouraging people to drive from their homes to a nature reserve, so they can empty their dog there? Great for the dog, but better to ensure that there is plenty of high quality nature in their local park, which they can see every day. Better to work to get really good large areas of “wild” land incorporated into new housing developments.

We need to work to incorporate nature into everyone’s everyday lives. And this is the crux: it’s not “rare” nature that counts. It’s common nature – street trees, green roofs, colourful flowers in planters on street pavements, turning boring amenity grassland parks into riots of colour.

We also need to change the language we use – it’s too late to stop the demise of the semi-natural (outside of a few museum piece reserves or patches of landscape).

We should mourn its passing, create ceremonies to remember it, in the way we remember the fallen of wars on Remembrance day.

We need to start talking positively about nature and what it means to people, celebrating the joy and wonder that nature provides us with, the inspiration it provides for art, music and writing. And we need to start talking seriously about the spiritual value of nature to people.

This is what we will be doing through People Need Nature (www.peopleneednature.org.uk). People Need Nature is a new charity, which will be highlighting the value of nature to people for its spiritual value, for things like the inspiration it provides to writers, artists, musicians – indeed all of us. And it will promote the value of nature in the public realm, where nature is accessible for everyone. We will be working with individuals and communities across England and Wales on projects to celebrate nature and also carrying out research and advocating the importance of nature to people for its sensory, emotional and spiritual values.

Posted in People Need Nature | Tagged , , | 21 Comments

2015 in review

Posted on December 30, 2015 by Miles King

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 58,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 21 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The Answer Lies in the Soil

Posted on December 24, 2015 by Miles King

As Arthur Fallowfield, the farmer character in the legendary Radio 4 comedy series’ Beyond our Ken and Round the Horne, would have said, “The arnswer loies in the soil”.

I read with interest and increasing disbelief, an article by George Monbiot in yesterday’s Guardian. George, who I hold in very high regard, claimed that eating a kilo of Beef or Lamb, especially if it’s from animals that have lived in the uplands of Britain, had the same carbon footprint as an individual flying to New York. George also couldn’t quite believe what he was reading and contacted the author for more information. You can find the calculations at the bottom of George’s piece on his own blog (not the Guardian version.)

I had a look at the paper the figures were based on – as I don’t have access to scientific references for free I wasn’t able to see where George had got his figures from, but the paper was published in the Journal of Agricultural Science. The paper compares the carbon footprint of cattle and sheep from 2 upland farms in the Cambrian mountains of Wales – and was received for peer review in February 2009. And yes, using these figures, you can get to the astonishingly high carbon footprints George mentions in his article.

But the story does not end there.

18 months later the same author, Professor Gareth Edwards-Jones, published a much larger more comprehensive study of 20 upland farms in the Cambrian Mountains. This was published as a CCW policy research report in September 2010. This gives quite a different – in some cases completely polar opposite, picture to the one George has painted.

On three of the 20 farms where the study took place, the production of cattle and sheep caused a net sequestration of Carbon. Yes, that’s right. Producing lamb and beef can actually lead to the storage of Carbon. How could this be?

The answer really does lie in the soil. Soils, mostly under grassland, are the UK’s second largest carbon store, after peatlands. One third of the UK’s Carbon is stored in grassland soils, many of them in upland areas. The capacity for grasslands to store carbon depends on a number of things, including how they are managed. Grassland soils can also release the very potent greenhouse gas Nitrous Oxide, again depending on how they are managed – or example whether artificial Nitrogen fertiliser is applied. So how upland grasslands are managed has a huge impact on the carbon footprint of the animals, and therefore the meat, which is produced there.

As the Edward-Jones research found, this carbon footprint can range from 4 to 17 kgCO2e/ha for a kilo of lamb (liveweight) and 4 to 23 kgCO2e/ha for beef (table 3), before the Carbon sequestration happening in the grassland soils of the farm is even taken into account. Edwards-Jones did not calculate the per kilo carbon footprint after sequestration. He also used a conservative estimate of the capacity of grasslands to absorb carbon. Had he used a slightly less conservative estimate of carbon sequestration another 3 farms out of 20 may have been shown to be net Carbon sinks (table 9).

Time and again in the CCW paper, the authors point out how little research has been done into Carbon storage and sequestration in grasslands. Which is extraordinary when you consider that this is far and away the most important factor in determining the carbon footprint of meat from livestock. What is known is that wildlife-rich grasslands are known to contain high levels of carbon in their soils – up to 438 tonnes C per ha (that’s equivalent to over 1700 tones of CO2e), far higher than agriculturally improved ones. And converting arable or improved grasslands back to wildlife-rich ones causes them to rapidly absorb carbon, one study found at over 3 tonnes per ha per annum, while continuing to provide grazing/fodder for livestock.

It seems strange that this very important piece of work was not published in a scientific paper. Sadly the reason was that Professor Edwards-Jones died of cancer in August 2011.

The problem with treating upland farming as one “thing” is that you end up with simplistic pictures of their environmental impacts, costs and benefits.  Even among the 20 farms within the Cambrian Mountains research study there is huge variation. That variation will be reflected in other parts of upland Britain. But one thing does appear to be consistent – that uplands that support semi-natural habitats – wildlife-rich grasslands, upland heathland, peatland, mires, scrub and so on – are net carbon sinks, hold water back to prevent downstream flooding, produce high quality food, and provide homes for some of our most threatened wildlife.

They are very different from other uplands (which form the majority) – the uplands overgrazed in the past and to a lesser extent today, supporting very degraded upland acid grassland, or grasslands that have been agriculturally improved.

While there may be good arguments for rewilding some uplands, the carbon footprint of meat produced there, amongst other factors, would indicate that some uplands are better for rewilding; and others need to be cherished for what they are now.

Posted in agriculture, carbon storage, George Monbiot, grasslands, grazing, uplands | Tagged , , , | 13 Comments

More golden balls from Defra: You are spoiling us, Rural Ambassador!

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Miles King

We may have been led to believe that the avalanche of Government announcements on “take out the trash day” last Friday, signalled the end of “work” for the year, but today holds one further surprise. As reported in the Telegraph, Defra has announced it will be “rural proofing” every new Government policy from now on.

The Torygraph piece, to help its readers understand what the countryside means, had some helpfully illustrative photos – two (no less) of the Defra Secretary of State Liz Truss, one showing a man with a shotgun and two dogs on a moorland (where are those pesky Hen Harriers?); one showing a hunt; and one showing Hambledon Hill hillfort in Dorset, recently purchased by the National Trust.

I’m not sure whether the Telegraph picture editor is having a quiet joke here, but Hambledon Hill was recently damaged when the local hunt careered over it. Hambledon Hill is a National Nature Reserve and one of the UK’s most important archaeology sites.

Is this really what the Telegraph thinks the countryside looks like? I suggest they get out of their London office a bit more.

P1040451

The West Dorset countryside

Of course this rural proofing is good news for The Countryside Alliance. It means that they can effectively lobby fewer officials and ministers to achieve whatever it is they want to achieve, saving them money.

The new rural proofing will help families and businesses, according to the Government, responding to Lord Cameron’s (not a close relation to the PM) report snappily titled The Independent Rural Proofing Implementation Review (IRPIR?).

I searched in vain for any mention of nature, wildlife or the environment in Defra’s response. Defra – the E used to stand for the Environment, but I suspect that’s been quietly changed to something else – Economy perhaps?. Rural Affairs is clearly uppermost in the Secretary of State’s mind at the moment, as of course is Agriculture, always. Bizarrely though, neither agriculture nor farming were mentioned either.

The Countryside, evidently, as far as this Government is concerned, is somewhere people live and businesses work, and that’s it. “Rural Communities and Businesses rightly expect contribute to and benefit from economic and productivity growth”, spouts Truss.

But there are a couple of small issues behind all this rhetoric. Obviously there’s the fact that Defra has no money at all to do anything, other than create pointless taskforces and ambassadors.

Then there’s the cuts to rural local authorities: rural Dorset County Council, where I live, is consulting over closing all of its Youth Centres. And the changes to the way local authorities are funded, means that rural areas with larger numbers of retired or part-time workers, such as Dorset, will lose out because they have a lower base of business rate income.

Meanwhile urban areas with lots of business income but a younger population, will do much better! Westminster 1, Dorset 0, to use a footballing analogy.  or rather, Westminster £1.6Bn Dorset 0. I could go on, but I won’t.

Thank goodness, then, for the Rural Ambassador, who will be able to put all of these things right, with a wave of her magic wand. Please do spoil us, Ambassador!

Posted in Defra, Liz Truss | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Storm Desmond, climate change, land use and what it means for Dartmoor

Posted on December 9, 2015 by Miles King

excellent blog Adrian – I have reblogged it

Adrian Colston's avatarA Dartmoor blog

My heart goes out to all the people and communities in Cumbria and southern Scotland who have been impacted by the dreadful flooding. In addition the National Trust is a major landowner in the Lake District (we own around 25%) and I personally know many of the Rangers and General Managers up there. I can only imagine how stressful everything must be and how disheartening it will be to see so many places and projects damaged by the flood waters.

Fell Foot floodsThe National Trust’s property at Fell Foot on Lake Windermere on Sunday – I was at a meeting in this building 18 months ago (photo from https://www.facebook.com/ntfellfoot/) You can find out more here about the flooding in the Lake District and how it has affected the NT.

Much has been written already about Storm Desmond and no doubt a great deal more is to come. I have heard a number of…

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Natural Capital Poll: The Results

Posted on November 30, 2015 by Miles King

Thanks to the 160 people who took part in my poll about natural capital last week. THe results are:

60% of voters agreed that natural capital is one of a number of approaches to take, and believe that a natural capital approach can work together with other approaches (such as the ethical arguments for protecting nature). I could christen this the Juniper stance.

34% believed that the natural capital approach is the wrong path to go down, and we should stick to the ethical argument. I could christen this the Monbiot stance.

4% believed that the economic approach was the only one which is going to work.

and 2% were very honest and voted “don’t know”.

of course this is a just a straw poll and doesn’t tell us how the population at large would vote. Given what little I know about my readership it’s difficult to draw too many conclusions, other than this: I think my readership is well informed about environmental issues, otherwise they would not have found their way to reading me; or would not have stayed long enough to think about voting in the poll, so it’s an engaged informed readership.

And of course given what I have been writing on natural capital over the last week (and longer) it also shows that more than half of you don’t agree with me! Thanks for continuing to read…

What I think it does show is that within the conservation industry, and perhaps more widely amongst the engaged and informed conservation movement, there is general support for using a range of arguments to protect nature, including the economic and the ethical.

But it’s also clear that a sizeable minority do not accept that this is possible, and take the Monbiot stance, that the economic argument will drive out the ethical one, as one Frame becomes dominant over the others.

I aim to repeat the survey next year using survey monkey, to gather a bit more information about the voters and also explore in more depth some of the knotty issues.

 

 

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