How can we really protect the environment in Britain? | environment

TThe importance of protecting nature is not up for debate. One in six species in Britain is threatened with extinction. Since 1970, more than half of our flowering plants have declined in areas where they once flourished. In the 1950s, the hedgehog population in Britain was 30 million. Now, it is believed to be less than a million.

All of this takes work. The problem is that many of the actions we have taken – especially in the form of legislation – have failed to target the biggest causes of nature loss. Instead, they are painful when we try to build wind turbines, solar farms, railways or nuclear power plants, making them longer, more expensive, or, in some cases, impossible to build.

You’ll notice that these are all examples of green infrastructure—precisely the things we’ll need more of in order to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, which ultimately leads to widespread habitat loss. Greening the grid and providing clean electricity to homes, transportation and industry is one of the most urgent tasks facing us. The only way to do this without generating a cost-of-living crisis that would make our current predicament look very small (and cause an anti-environmental backlash) is to start building – and fast.

Right now, that seems very difficult — obstacles include those well-intentioned laws designed to protect habitats from unrestrained development. Not only do they hinder the green buildings we so desperately need, they don’t even do a good job of protecting nature. The money spent on them could change environmental conservation if it were used differently, but instead, it is actually thrown away.

One notorious example is HS2’s bat shed which is worth more than £100 million. The 900-metre-long structure was built to allow 300 individuals of rare Bechstein’s bats to safely cross four railway lines. With the same amount of money, it would be possible to create 4,500 hectares (11,000 acres) of new forest while paying a decent income to affected farmers and landowners.

Even if you assume the shed saves every Bechstein racket near the HS2 route, it’s still poor value for money. There are more cost effective schemes. Take High Marks Barn, in South Devon, which was built in the 19th century for agricultural use. Today it hosts one of the largest colonies of the greater horseshoe bat in the UK. With a single grant of £180,000, Vincent Wildlife Trust has been able to add barriers to keep out predators such as barn owls and adapt the stone barn to be more resilient to hotter summers and frequent cold snaps caused by the climate crisis. This has helped protect more than 1,100 bats.

Why do our environmental laws end up creating these strange situations? The problem is their inflexibility. They are designed to prevent specific damage caused by specific developments. This approach only makes sense if construction is one of the main drivers of nature loss. But that is not the case, for a simple reason: we do not do enough of it, and we certainly never will.

Less than 6% of Britain was built. If Labor succeeds in building 1.5 million homes, the total built-up area will increase by only a few hundredths of a cent. Even if you tripled the rate, it would take decades before a tenth of Britain’s size could be built. Most of it, nearly two-thirds, is devoted to agriculture.

How and what we grow is far more important to the nature of Britain than what and where we build. The area of ​​land devoted to sheep is twice the size of all built-up areas combined, yet constant grazing deprives areas of natural foliage. When farmers are paid to plant trees instead, wildlife quickly returns. Fencing just 26 hectares of common land in the Howgill Fells area of ​​the Yorkshire Dales National Park, while planting tens of thousands of trees, has been a radical change. Butterflies, bluebells and chirping birds are back – with 11 new breeding bird species spotted, including meadow suckers, reed buntings and stonebirds. All this costs just £25,600 a year. A planned offshore wind farm is set to spend £170 million to protect seabirds such as the black-legged kittiwake, whose population has declined by 70% in my lifetime because rising sea temperatures and overfishing have killed off the sand eels that depend on them for food. Technology that could slow the global warming that threatens these birds is being hampered by mitigation measures that do nothing to address the real cause of their population decline.

But it is the story of the “fish protection measures” at Hinkley Point Sea in Somerset that shows just how flawed the system is. Britain’s first new nuclear station in more than three decades will use a lot of water. To cool the steam generated by its two reactors, the project will draw more than 4,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools – each day’s worth – through two 3.5-kilometre (2.2-mile) tunnels. All this water is eventually pumped back into the Severn Estuary, but not everything that enters the cooling pipes at Hinkley Point C makes it sound.

The Environment Agency estimates that around 50 tonnes of marine life could be destroyed every year. Most of that is eggs, larvae, and young fish that are unlikely to reach adulthood. This is not an effect that we should dismiss lightly, but we should put it in context: it is similar to the annual catch of a medium-sized fishing boat.

EDF Energy, which is building the plant, will spend more than £700m on fish protection, including £500m on “low drag side water heads”, £150m on a “fish recovery and return” system, and £50m on hundreds of loudspeakers that play huge jet-level noise underwater to deter fish from swimming nearby. None of these features were present at any of the other nuclear stations that operated in the Severn Estuary. It is also not part of the Olkilooto 3 plants in Finland or Flamanville 3 in France, which use the same basic reactor design as Hinkley Point C. The cost is £250,000 for each protected fish saved.

This is only a fraction of the total cost of complying with environmental protection measures: the company prepared a 30,000-page environmental impact assessment, had to obtain more than 100 environmental permits, many of which required their own assessments, and fought unsuccessful lawsuits that delayed construction.

Delays and additional expenses in themselves are not without environmental impacts. The more expensive clean energy is, the less likely it is to be built, and the less likely consumers are to switch to it. Unless clean electricity becomes cheaper, hard-pressed households are unlikely to buy electric cars or heat pumps.

A recent government-commissioned review of nuclear regulation identified a project that removed a dam from a river, opening 160 kilometers of habitat to migratory fish, including Atlantic salmon. Cost? One of seven thousand fish protection measures at Hinkley Point Sea.

The reason the project offers so much more than that is because its goal is actually to restore habitat. The real goal of these measures is not to save wildlife, but to comply with regulations. Wouldn’t it be better if a significant portion of the money spent on HS2’s bat tunnel or Hinkley Point C’s fish deterrent went to schemes that would deliver thousands of times greater benefits? It can be tempting to resist anything that looks like a “softening up” of environmental protection measures. But what if the protections themselves are part of the problem? If you really care about defending nature, you should care about what works.

Sam Dumitriu is Head of Policy at Britain Remade.

Further reading

Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World by Tim Gregory (Bodley Head, £25)

Abundance: How to Build a Better Future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Personal File, £16.99)

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree (Picador, £10.99)