Without evidence, protected areas will not deliver for nature
British Ecological Society
We are working towards a world inspired by #Ecology in which nature and people thrive.
Professor Rick Stafford, Chair of the British Ecological Society’s Policy Committee
In 2021, I was part of a British Ecological Society team of academics, civil servants, PhDs, postdocs and practitioners collating all the available evidence on the UK’s Protected Areas.
The aim was to help civil servants in Natural England, Nature Scot and Natural Resources Wales understand what state our current protected areas were in and what was needed to meet the internationally agreed commitment of protecting 30% of the UK’s land and sea to support nature recovery by 2030.
It took the best part of a year to put together our report . We all had our busy day jobs, but we were passionate about what we were doing, if dispassionate in our approach. And this is crucial – to be dispassionate – to look at the evidence and draw conclusions from that.
Knowing how important the evidence was in compiling this comprehensive report, and will be for fulfilling the 30x30 target, it’s lamentable to hear that UK government cannot detail any evidence of progress towards this.
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This matters because of the importance of the UK’s protected areas in our plan to reach biodiversity and climate targets. The health of areas like the South Downs, or Caithness and Sutherland peatlands, or Poole Harbour, or the Dogger Bank, matters because if we are failing to protect biodiversity, all our futures become less safe.?
On paper, the target to protect 30% of UK seas has already been met, but in reality, we are very far from this target. Currently only 0.0024% of UK waters completely ban all fishing and there has been poor progress on highly protected marine areas (HPMAs). Scotland has shelved its plans and England have not designated all the HPMA sites first announced, and they are still in the process of implementing management measures.
Pledges are a start but we need the proof.
It’s important to realise that we don’t need outright fishing bans in all of our MPAs, and we need to work closely with the fishing industry in their design and implementation. But at present very few offshore sites have any fisheries management measures in place at all, despite some Marine Conservation Zones being designated over 10 years ago.
An absence of evidence will derail any hope of protected areas delivering for nature. We need urgent progress to give real protections to our land and seascapes, and this will involve detailed management plans, full implementation of these and long-term monitoring with substantial and sustained funding from The Treasury. Pledges are a start but we need the proof.