JNCC easily slip under my radar but they aren’t irrelevant. Here is a paper which claims to advance the thinking on protected areas but shows signs that it might take thinking backwards instead.
Here is a most unpleasant quote:
“It seems that for protected areas to be more effective in the future, becoming a flexible part of integrated landscape-scale planning that balances the needs of many sectors of society is essential. Roads, houses, industry, crops, leisure pursuits, biodiversity and protected areas are all competing for space. A healthy, wealthy, sustainable society requires all of these things, and finding the optimal balance is what the ecosystem approach aims to achieve.“
We know that there are competing interests for land – that’s why we need strong protected areas so that we don’t trash the future for short-term, and often illusory, gain.
And that’s why we need government agencies with ‘environment’, ‘natural’ and ‘nature’ in their names to show a bit of fight, rather than rushing to compromise before conflict is even reached.
The paper as a whole seems to show that we have too many statutory sector staff with not enough to do – perhaps they should be saving more sites, habitats and species?
I’ll be interested to see what the minutes of the relevant, March, meeting say when they are published.
[registration_form]
Not one thing this government has done [and the Lib Dems!!] has benefited wildlife and the habitats. When you ask a developer come speculator to run the countries wildlife what do you expect from a man who even has the words ‘sale’ in his name. Next you will be telling us that this man shoots Red Grouse!!
Well, if we’re so crowded it means all our land should be functioning as effectively as possible – so the first thing JNCC and the Government need to do is ensure that we move from 95% of our protected areas in favourable or favourable recovering to at least 95% favourable, Also, it is clear that if one land use is failing – biodiversity, so surely that means flexibility should be deployed to repair the damage, especially for farmland birds.
And, of course, the whole point of a landscape/ ecosystems services approach is missed by the assumption of traditional head to head competition between siloed landuses – what we need to be looking for is, for example, wetland areas deployed for flood management but also great for wetland wildlife.
My impression is that we are already expecting wildlife to be rather flexible, I’m not sure how much more bend there is left for us to take?
I agree that some of the statements in the paper are rather worrying, but I’m afraid I couldn’t disagree more with your suggestion that “the paper as a whole seems to show that we have too many statutory sector staff with not enough to do”. I don’t work in the statutory sector myself but often encounter staff from JNCC, NE, etc through my work, and I think it’s fair to say that pretty much all of them have far too much to do and work extremely hard to try to meet all of their commitments at a time when their funding has been cut but their workload has not. If they’re getting things wrong I suspect it’s more to do with either (a) staff being so stretched that they don’t have the thinking time required to get the message right, or (b) pressure from above to put out a particular message or produce a report on a particular topic. If you want someone to blame I’d suggest it’s the government you should be looking at, and not the hard-working statutory agency staff.
Mark
I love your blog and I’m a big admirer of what you write and the work you do. But I can’t agree with you on this one.
The purpose of the paper (which is clearly a draft) is to ask:
i. is the contribution of protected areas to nature conservation as
effective as it could be?
ii. what factors influence the effectiveness of protected areas?
iii. are there other approaches to nature conservation that contribute to
wider objectives of sustainable communities?
This is just the kind of blue sky thinking I’d expect to see from JNCC (indeed any conservation body) from time to time. It’s always worth going back to first principles and asking what we are doing and why, and if it is effective. I’m afraid you’ve rather cherry picked a quote, as the report itself recognises that protected areas are the cornerstone of nature conservation in Britain, but will not be sufficient in the future on their own.
I agree with Lucy on your comments about JNCC. That looks like a cheap shot to me and that’s not like you at all.
Mark
Should have added that JNCC aren’t the only ones thinking about the future of nature conservation…
http://www.britishecologicalsociety.org/events/current_future_meetings/2014-annual-symposium/
See you there?
The politicians have decided that there should be a policy shift away from protected sites so the agencies are now flying kites which get the concept into view. One thing I have discovered is that in these circumstances, there is no point offering any counter argument, they simply will not listen.
Biodiversity, Ecosystems, Ecosystem services, networks, offsetting etc are concepts that are being rehashed and re-interpreted to come up a solution the puts the wishes of our politicians before the needs of our wildlife.
The main thesis of the paper is that at present the main conservation strategy for preservation of biodiversity is the provision of protected areas. The problem is, biodiversity loss has continued apace, and faster than the ‘targets’ set – arbitrary, but presumably the best we have. It is concluded that protected areas are helpful but not effective enough alone.
So far so good, but we have little science to show what would work better, so at about Para 3.4 it descends into flimsy evidence on what would involve the public, then (4.0) lists any different ideas that might work better, without troubling to analyse and evaluate them, and ends with the questions it should have at least tried to answer. It should have asked whether more protected areas are the solution to continuing biodiversity loss, and the failure to ask this question is the one indication of bias I would be concerned about.