The pros and cons of developers ‘offsetting’ to conserve wildlife
AT FIRST GLANCE, THE vertiginous farmland overlooking the sea between the Teign Estuary and the seaside town of Torquay in South Devon is an unlikely location for one of Britain’s great conservation success stories. Here at Labrador Bay, the land plunges 120m through fields, scrub and woods. I feel like I’m standing at the top of a giant green rollercoaster.
“Look,” says the RSPB’s Cath Jeffs, pointing to the hedge in front of us. “There’s a nice male here, that’s him calling. Do you see him? Russetty at the sides, olive-green, really pretty. And then you’ve got that black under the chin.”
It’s a cirl bunting, and I soon notice that he’s also got a very handsome black stripe through his eye and lemon-yellow further down on his breast. He is pretty! And suddenly, giving the impression they’ve been here all along, there are cirl buntings everywhere, moving through the hedge and perching high up in a nearby oak tree.
The blousy hedges and weedy arable fields at Labrador Bay are perfect for this species, a relative of the yellowhammer that is at the northern edge of its range here. Once common across the south, changes in farming threw numbers into a steep decline. Today, it’s confined to South Devon, with a small reintroduced population in Cornwall.
But it’s not all bad news. Numbers here have risen from 118 pairs in 1989 to more than 1,000 today, representing a nearly ten-fold increase in 30 years. Targeted conservation action funded by environmental farming subsidies has been the bedrock of this success, but now the RSPB has hit upon a new tool to keep the good work going.
Instead of using public money, it is funding an expansion of its cirl bunting work by raising cash from housing developers, administered by the local district council. It’s called offsetting, and it’s part of a growing trend in Britain today (see box below) whereby society is asking the private sector to help finance the protection and restoration of nature.
Over the past decade, it’s a policy that has wormed its way into the hearts of politicians. And why not? What with austerity since 2010, the billions splurged on the Covid-19 pandemic and, now, the need to spend billions solving the energy crisis, there’s not a lot of spare cash to go round.
But there are a number of reasons why we should be wary. First of all, does this new model enable the state to absolve itself of its responsibilities to pay for something it has paid for in the past? Second, this is the private sector we are talking about, whose priority is to make profits for shareholders, not boost wildlife populations. It will do what it must as long as it can carry on building houses and making money – but, in general, that’s it.
Under this new broad policy there’s a danger that, given the government’s ambitions to build 300,000 new homes each year, the private sector will be given carte blanche by politicians to carve up any remaining green spaces on the edges of our towns and cities in a kind of corporate freefor-all that is then justified by the promise of new habitat being created on a barren patch of farmland far away. It makes me wonder – is this really what we want? And can offsetting actually work?
THE ISSUE IS PARTICULARLY emotive for me as I, along with my sisters and cousins, have just inherited a small patch of land on the outskirts of Kingskerswell, in this patch of South Devon. It’s just below a house where my grandparents lived when I was young, and where I spent idyllic sun-kissed holidays.
The field – which measures 0.7 hectares, roughly the size of a football pitch – was owned by my grandfather, and it stayed in the family after he died in the early 2000s. Eventually it passed to my two sisters, six cousins and me, and we’ve been pondering what to do with it ever since. In the end we decided to apply for planning permission for self-build housing plots. There’s a national shortage of land for people to build their own homes, and we didn’t want to sell to a big developer. There’s a part of me that wants to leave it to nature, but it’s currently of little value to wildlife and we had no guarantee that we’d get planning permission.
It was then that we found out that the field lay within the ‘cirl bunting consultation and breeding buffer zone’. Not only would we have to contract an environmental consultant to survey the site, we would also most likely need to pay into the RSPB’s offsetting scheme.
It felt like an irony. I’ve written a lot over the last couple of years about offsetting, and I’ve heard numerous stories of developers who deliberately try to reduce or even avoid the liabilities they face in paying for their environmental impacts. As I’ve previously written in BBC Wildlife (February 2021), nature is now being audited like a set of corporate accounts, with savvy companies learning to cook the books. Now, it seemed, it was my turn to foot the bill.
Our consultant did indeed find evidence of cirl bunting activity on our plot. So how would offsetting for the species work?
Conservationists know that a single cirl bunting pair needs about 2.5ha of land to survive. They are fussy birds, requiring arable land that will sustain them with seeds from agricultural weeds such as chickweed over the autumn and winter; livestock pastures that will produce a bounty of grasshoppers and other insects in the spring and summer; and good, thick hedges where they can nest and shelter all year-round. Sowing spring barley works best for cirls, because this crop requires little input in terms of herbicides, allowing those all-important seed-bearing weeds to thrive.
To buy and enhance those 2.5ha costs £75,000 – so for every cirl bunting pair found on land earmarked for development, a developer must pay that amount into a central pot that is collected by Teignbridge District Council and passed to the RSPB.
Labrador Bay, the RSPB’s reserve for cirl buntings 
The Devon field that James, his sisters and his cousins inherited 
Cirl buntings were first discovered in Devon in 1800
IN 2017, THE RSPB COMPLETED THE purchase of a 60ha farm called Ashhill, just outside Teignmouth. With developers’ contributions, it is slowly paying off the loan it took out and adjusting the habitat to suit cirl buntings.
The RSPB’s Cath Jeffs is a fan of this approach. If you get the habitat right, she says, then cirl bunting numbers will grow quite quickly, as they have in Devon. She believes it’s working much better than what was happening before, when developers would fund little pockets of habitat enhancement that didn’t do much good.
The approach is highly tactical and strategic. “The whole species recovery plan has been to work with people who’ve already got cirl buntings and maximise habitat on those sites,” she tells me. “If you then create fantastic new habitat within 2km of where you’ve got breeding birds, you make somewhere for their young to move into and you start spreading them out. Our goal is for our hub sites – like Ashhill – to be engine rooms, producing lots and lots of cirl buntings that then colonise new areas like little armies.”
There’s a strong argument that hub sites are better for cirl buntings than fragmented fields that aren’t managed properly for the species. Plus, the habitat is also being enhanced for other wildlife – some of the weeds that are good for cirl buntings (and other farmland songbirds) include rare arable plants such as corn spurrey, small-flowered catchfly and the brilliantly named weasel’s snout. Conservation for cirl buntings allows them to thrive, too.
There are drawbacks, of course. First, as already noted, nature becomes a number that is there to be negotiated. When land within the Teignbridge and Torbay council areas is designated for development, the RSPB will assess how many cirl bunting territories it supports. If they say there are three pairs, it’s almost inevitable, says Cath, that the housing developer will argue there’s only one or two, to reduce their liabilities.
“You can get a better, more joined-up outcome on the basis of developers all feeding into one project”
DOMINIC WOODFIELD, ENVIRONMENTAL CONSULTANT
Worse still, Cath has heard that farmers who may be considering selling land for development are told to manage it in such a way as to reduce cirl bunting numbers. “I’ve talked to people who’ve said we tell our clients to plant maize,” she tells me. Maize is notoriously bad for wildlife, and certainly doesn’t allow the growth of small weedy plants that provide a source of autumn and winter seeds. Farmers are also told not to leave stubble or put cattle on their land.
“They’re told, ‘Flail your hedges right down, plough right up to the field margins’,” says Cath. “They are told to farm the wildlife out.” Think about it like this – if the developer can reduce, say, the number of cirl territories from six to three, that’s a saving of £225,000.
THERE’S ALSO THE FACT THAT wildlife is, in effect, being moved from a place close to where people live to a reserve – Ashhill – that, though it backs onto the edge of Teignmouth, currently has limited public access. Some people might see that as a good thing, creating a safe space for breeding birds. On the other hand, cirls used to be known as the “village bunting” because they were very comfortable around people and in built-up areas. The presence of a few people wouldn’t have much impact – though dogs racing around fields and cats stalking the hedges would. The arguments go back and forth.
Environmental consultant Dominic Woodfield is an expert in the policy of Biodiversity Net Gain, the new England-wide offsetting policy that will come into force in 2023 and is fiercely critical of the way it works in many instances. But he is more sanguine about the cirl bunting scheme. “You can get a bigger, better, more joined up outcome on the basis of developers all feeding into one project,” he says.
Our field in Kingkerswell is not great habitat for cirl buntings. The hedges are thin and the pasture has nothing by way of a winter food supply. If we leave it as it is, it will probably slowly scrub up with brambles and nettles, providing some food and perhaps nesting space for some songbirds. Without managed intervention, it’s never going to be more than that.
If we get planning permission and have to offset the impact of the development by giving money that will ultimately fund thicker hedges and arable fields bursting with weasel’s snout at Ashhill, there’s a good chance it could turn out better for cirl buntings in the long run. Offsetting for wildlife more generally though? I’m not so sure.
PRIVATE FUNDING FOR WILDLIFE
Biodiversity Net Gain
From 2023, developers in England will have to offset the impact of their activities by paying to enhance or create habitat – either on the actual site they have developed or elsewhere. Under the new rule, they’ll have to increase biodiversity by a measurable 10 percent, using a specially developed metric to assess what’s been lost and what will be created.
Carbon compensation
Increasingly, companies are compensating for the carbon emissions they are responsible for by funding woodland creation or peatland restoration. The alcohol company Diageo has pledged £500,000 to Trees for Life, while the insurance company Standard Life is also paying to offset for their impacts.
Sewage solution
The more houses we build, the more untreated sewage ends up in our waterways, destroying marine life. To counter this, home-builders can buy ‘credits’ to offset the damage. For example, house-builders responsible for more sewage going into the Solent could buy credits for a rewilding scheme that reduces run-off on the Isle of Wight.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Fair writes about wildlife conservation and broader environmental issues for a wide range of publications, including BBC Wildlife, where he spent 18 years as commissioning editor. Read more of his work at jamesfairwildlife.co.uk