Wildlife conservationists say the company behind the multi-billion high-speed rail project has got its calculations on biodiversity losses badly wrong
The damage to wildlife and nature from the construction of the high-speed rail link HS2 will be much greater than claimed, according to a report published by The Wildlife Trusts.
Conservationists have assessed the figures produced by HS2 and say the measurable loss of biodiversity as a result of phases 1 and 2a – London to Crewe – will be nearly five times greater than stated.
There’s little disagreement about the area of habitat that will be affected by the line’s construction; it’s the biodiversity value contained within the hedges, grasslands and ponds being lost that’s disputed.
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The report, HS2 Double Jeopardy, blames the discrepancy partly on HS2’s continued use of an out-of-date metric that turns information collected in the field into numbers, called No Net Loss (NNL) units. The metric is based on a version created in 2012, it says.
The report’s author, Dr Rachel Giles from Cheshire Wildlife Trust, says she was shocked by the errors she had uncovered.
“HS2 Ltd should urgently recalculate the total loss to nature by re-evaluating existing biodiversity along the entire route whilst there is still time to change the scheme’s design and delivery,” she says.
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Environmental consultant Dominic Woodfield, who is an expert in the use of metrics to evaluate biodiversity, said no other projects used the same tool for assessing how nature is impacted by developments.
“For some time now people have been saying that HS2 should be testing itself against [the Government’s] Metric 3.1 but they’ve swerved this,” he says. Woodfield believes this is because HS2 knows this official metric will produce a much higher value for the amount of biodiversity being lost.
But HS2 says its assessments were based on extensive surveys by ecologists visiting huge areas of land, while the Trusts’ report was “unreliable [and] based on limited desk research.” HS2 will update its figures once the Government has published its final version of the biodiversity metric, it adds.
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Arguments like this between developers and conservationists about the wildlife value of land being built on are likely to be replicated in the years to come when the Government’s offsetting policy, Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG), become mandatory later this year.
Main image: Aerial view of the construction site for HS2 railway project in Birmingham city centre. © Teamjackson/Getty