{"id":21167,"date":"2022-10-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-10-19T22:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcwildlife\/?post_type=purple_issue&p=21167"},"modified":"2022-10-21T12:04:59","modified_gmt":"2022-10-21T10:04:59","slug":"nature-becomes-a-number-that-is-there-to-be-negotiated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcwildlife\/2022\/10\/20\/nature-becomes-a-number-that-is-there-to-be-negotiated\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cNature becomes a number that is there to be negotiated\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The pros and cons of developers \u2018offsetting\u2019 to conserve wildlife <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n

By <\/em>JAMES FAIR <\/strong>Illustration by <\/em>KATE HAZEL <\/strong><\/p>\n\n

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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\u2019s great conservation success stories. Here at Labrador Bay, the land plunges 120m through fields, scrub and woods. I feel like I\u2019m standing at the top of a giant green rollercoaster.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

\u201cLook,\u201d says the RSPB\u2019s Cath Jeffs, pointing to the hedge in front of us. \u201cThere\u2019s a nice male here, that\u2019s him calling. Do you see him? Russetty at the sides, olive-green, really pretty. And then you\u2019ve got that black under the chin.\u201d <\/p>\n\n

It\u2019s a cirl bunting, and I soon notice that he\u2019s also got a very handsome black stripe through his eye and lemon-yellow further down on his breast. He is <\/em>pretty! And suddenly, giving the impression they\u2019ve been here all along, there are cirl buntings everywhere, moving through the hedge and perching high up in a nearby oak tree. <\/p>\n\n

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\u2019s confined to South Devon, with a small reintroduced population in Cornwall. <\/p>\n\n

But it\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n

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\u2019s called offsetting, and it\u2019s part of a growing trend in Britain today (see <\/span>box <\/em>below) <\/em>whereby society is asking the private sector to help finance the protection and restoration of nature.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Over the past decade, it\u2019s 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\u2019s not a lot of spare cash to go round. <\/p>\n\n

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 \u2013 but, in general, that\u2019s it. <\/p>\n\n

Under this new broad policy there\u2019s a danger that, given the government\u2019s 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 \u2013 is this really what we want? And can offsetting actually work? <\/p>\n\n

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\u2019s just below a house where my grandparents lived when I was young, and where I spent idyllic sun-kissed holidays. <\/p>\n\n

The field \u2013 which measures 0.7 hectares, roughly the size of a football pitch \u2013 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s a national shortage of land for people to build their own homes, and we didn\u2019t want to sell to a big developer. There\u2019s a part of me that wants to leave it to nature, but it\u2019s currently of little value to wildlife and we had no guarantee that we\u2019d get planning permission.<\/p>\n\n

It was then that we found out that the field lay within the \u2018cirl bunting consultation and breeding buffer zone\u2019. 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\u2019s offsetting scheme. <\/p>\n\n

It felt like an irony. I\u2019ve written a lot over the last couple of years about offsetting, and I\u2019ve heard numerous stories of developers <\/span>who deliberately try to reduce or even avoid the liabilities they face in paying for their environmental impacts. As I\u2019ve previously written in BBC <\/em>Wildlife <\/em>(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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Our consultant did indeed find evidence of cirl bunting activity on our plot. So how would offsetting for the species work? <\/p>\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n

To buy and enhance those 2.5ha costs \u00a375,000 \u2013 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.<\/span><\/p>\n\n