2021

Environment Secretary, George Eustice MP, has announced the payment rates farmers will receive for the environmental measures they carry out on their land in a new scheme called the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI).

I suspect you had to read the title twice before continuing! The misinformation starts with the term “peatland burning ”. Let’s be clear from the outset – moorland managers undertake controlled burning to manage heather and implicitly not to burn the peat.

The Scottish Government is seeking views via a consultation on proposals to strengthen the law relating to the use of dogs to hunt and flush foxes and other wild mammals in Scotland.

We respond to the recent decision taken by the Welsh Government to 'bring forward legislation to amend the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 to ban the use of snares and glue traps'.

Policy makers must broaden their view of upland management.

The May 2021, the government ceded to calls for a ‘net zero’-style target for nature in the Environment Bill by introducing a Species Abundance Target, the detail of which is to be determined and the aim of has just been strengthened to “halt species decline by 2030”.

The lessons from America on wildfire suppression are real and urgent. There is a significant policy gap in the assertions made by the IUCN, Climate Change Committee, RSPB and others that managed burning on peatland must be stopped.

The recent debate on driven grouse shooting revealed two very different attitudes to management. Those opposed to banning grouse shooting regard the management of grouse moors as a constructive action supporting biodiversity and other public goods and services; those supporting a ban see management as artificial and destructive. So who is right?

Whilst farming policy has looked to embrace a more sustainable, practical future, the approach to wildlife conservation, as demonstrated by the latest pronouncements from Defra, seems to be ‘stuck in the mud’.

Seems a simple enough question, but when it comes to public policy it is more difficult. The current focus on climate change centres predominantly around carbon, with biodiversity rendered a supporting role through nature-based solutions. This raises the question: is biodiversity a good in its own right, or is it a supporting service that underpins delivery of a broad range of ecosystem services?