“Quite simply… human population increase is much the biggest threat to the welfare of our wildlife in these islands.”

Norman Maclean, Emeritus Professor of Genetics, University of Southampton¹ , Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology, & the Linnaean Society, ‘A Less Green And Pleasant Land.’

When my fellow environmental campaigner Jonathon Porritt was born in 1950, the UK population stood at 50 million neatly coinciding with the new decade. A quarter of a century earlier, when this country’s, probably the world’s, best known natural history broadcaster Sir David Attenborough was born in 1926, our population was five million fewer. Today the UK is home to just over 69 million people, projected to top 70 million over the next couple of years, increasing to 76 million by 2050 – a growth of 6 -7 million more people in one generation. ² That’s equivalent to having to build six to seven cities the size of Birmingham, plus all the additional transport infrastructure, health and public services (including over 2,000 new primary schools, 1000 secondary schools) to meet the needs of those extra people. ³

Over the same period that our population has grown by over 50% (45 million in 1926 to 69 million today), once common and iconic wildlife species have declined. The Turtle Dove immortalised in the traditional song ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’ has proved all too mortal, crashing from an estimated 125,000 pairs breeding in the UK in the 1950s to just 2,000 pairs recorded by the British Trust for Ornithology last year. ⁴ Being voted the UK’s ‘favourite mammal’ in 2016 hasn’t slowed the hedgehog’s demise, with 95% ‘lost’ over the past 70 years.

2016 also marked the publication of the ‘State of Nature’ report, the first comprehensive audit of the UK’s fauna and flora since the national statutory nature body the Nature Conservancy Council was shamefully broken up by Nicholas Ridley in 1991. That first report gave a damning indictment of the UK as being “one of the most nature depleted countries in the world” ⁵, relegating us to the lowest 10% of countries globally in terms of ‘biodiversity intactness’.⁶ Subsequent reports of 2019 and 2023, show no improvement in the overall downward trend, “It is widely accepted that the UK’s biodiversity had been massively depleted by centuries of habitat loss, management changes, development and persecution…” (SON 2019) and “No let-up in the decline of our wildlife, with 1 in 6 species at risk of being lost from Great Britain” (SON 2023).

With farmed land making up 70% of the UK’s overall area, agriculture is highlighted by many conservationists as the key driver of change to our countryside and cause of the negative impacts upon its wildlife. There’s no doubt that the ‘second agricultural revolution’ post-World War Two focused on maximising yields per acre and output per ‘livestock unit,’ embodied in the policies and incentives initiated by the 1947 Agriculture Act, then amplified through the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, pushed wildlife to the margins. Hundreds of thousands of acres of ‘unproductive’ woodland were cleared, over 300,000 miles of hedgerow grubbed out, a quarter of million farmland ‘dew’ ponds drained and ploughed over to increase field size and accommodate bigger, ‘more efficient’ machinery. ⁷ Add the damage to our wildlife and its natural food sources through the arsenal of chemical insecticides, herbicides, wormers, and artificial fertilisers aggressively marketed to farmers, and intensive agriculture certainly fits the suspect profile. Recent studies across Europe have found that the abundance of insects has declined by between 38% to 75%. ⁸ Similar declines in abundance and distribution have been seen in UK populations of bees and hoverflies, butterflies and moths, beetles, and freshwater insects – with bees and hoverflies suffering the most dramatic losses since the 1950s. The citizen science ‘Bugs Matter’ survey of 2022 involving volunteers counting the number of insects splatted on car front number plates estimated that in comparison to twenty years ago England has suffered a 67.5% reduction in observed squashed insects, Scotland 40.3%, and Wales a 74.8% reduction. Although the scientific methodology of that survey has been questioned, it’s incontrovertible that wildlife has declined dramatically across the UK, in particular wildlife that used to be common to our farmland. ⁹

It’s easy to blame agriculture, the farmers who use the sprays, and who have enlarged their fields. But agriculture is not an objective in itself, the post-War push to increase yields was driven by the rational policy to improve the UK’s food security (see my companion article) following the German U-boat blockade which exposed the country’s vulnerability in relying on food imports and the neglect of our own food-growing resources. Over the next four decades modernisation, coupled with farm subsidies boosted our self-sufficiency in arable crops to 80%, such that the UK had a surplus of some cereals for export. Farmers have simply responded to policymakers’ signals to produce more (and cheap) food for an ever-burgeoning population. Now policymakers are tasking farmers with both continuing to produce ‘cheap’ food and reversing the losses to our native fauna and flora. Notable progress has been made, for example Tim Scott, a tenant farmer for the Countryside Regeneration Trust, has transformed a former mono-cropped ‘prairie farm’ restoring its hedgerows and watercourse wildlife margins, and installing ‘beetle-banks’ – attracting back bats, barn owls, otters, and IUCN Red List endangered species such as the grey partridge. ¹⁰ Productive farming can co-exist with wildlife, but achieving that balance becomes ever more challenging as our numbers grow, farmland is taken for development, and what remains is required to yield more food.

Over 700,000 hectares of farmland were developed in the fifty years following the second world war, an area of land amounting to all of Greater London, Berkshire, Herefordshire, and Oxfordshire combined. ¹¹ Today our countryside and farmland, even the ‘scrubby’ corners and marginal areas that have escaped human development to date are under renewed threat, as the Labour Government plans to deliver on its manifesto promise to build 1.5 million homes in its first 5- years, doubling that if it wins a second term. 1.5 million households added to a country already one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, with 438 people per square kilometre in England, 279 for the UK overall. ¹² Only the Netherlands and Malta have higher densities. ¹³

“Growth, growth, growth” was Labour’s campaign mantra repeated ad nauseam over the years running up to their election victory and since then, ¹⁴ without any questioning as to whether that projected demand could or should be managed. As camouflage for this blunt push for economic growth above all else, the government has conjured up ‘5 Golden Rules’ it claims will be met before allowing the development of greenfield sites. These add little to the previous government’s requirement that developers should prioritise brownfield sites first, or the blindingly obvious ‘rule’ that any new housing development should be accompanied by adequate supporting infrastructure and services. In fact, Labour are running a spin campaign questioning what is and isn’t ‘proper’ Green Belt, coining a new variant of ‘Grey Belt’ land that it and its friends in the House Builders’ Federation can use to diminish and carve-off areas they consider as of ‘poor quality,’ ‘scrubby,’ and ‘ugly.’ To whom? Wildlife seems to like those ‘scrubby’ remnants (it doesn’t have much option). Far from being ‘wasteland’ devoid of wildlife, scrub offers a vital habitat for at least 10% of the UK’s listed Biodiversity Action Plan priority species. ¹⁵

Such blurring of definitions and boundaries seems a deliberate strategy to undercut landscape and wildlife protections, by a government which prioritises short-term economic outputs above long-term environmental ‘goods.’ Even if the majority of those houses were built on previously developed brownfield land, ‘planning experts’ have calculated an area of greenfield sites double the size of Milton Keynes (over 30,000 hectares) will still be needed to meet the housebuilding targets. Emboldened those same ‘experts’ argue that “confident bites” should be taken out of Green Belt land¹⁶ – dismissing the founding principle and purpose of that planning designation being to prevent urban sprawl and the creeping loss of distinction between countryside and urban areas. Some conservationists appear to accept that those housebuilding targets are set in bricks and mortar, that nothing can be done to reduce forecast demand, merely voicing rather desperate pleas for tweaking development rather than unequivocally standing up for nature, wildlife and green spaces. With even the head of Natural England claiming that, “development could unlock the vital funding needed to turbo-charge recovery in these areas,” ¹⁷ and the President of the once unambiguously pro-countryside Council for the Protection of Rural England joining the housebuilders’ choir, “We need more homes. We need homes for rural communities to thrive and for the countryside to thrive. The countryside isn’t this place for nostalgia. It’s not set in aspic, not just for pretty calendars.” ¹⁸

Of course, rural areas need to be economically viable and able to sustain vibrant communities, and natural capital and biodiversity value should be integrated into human society and our built environment, but not at the expense of our already dwindling wildlife and its remnant habitat – and those ‘conservation’ groups should have the honesty and courage to acknowledge like Professor Maclean that human population growth here and abroad is a key factor in Nature’s demise. As it is by such wildlife luminaries as Sir David Attenborough, Gordon Buchanan, Dame Jane Goodall, Chris Packham and Iolo Williams – who those same conservation groups fall over themselves to feature on their marketing materials.

Designations protecting our green spaces and wildlife should be defended and strengthened, not weakened. We need more ‘Wild Belt’ land encircling and cutting through urban areas, allowing wildlife to recolonise and reconnect, for our own wellbeing as well as the ecosystem services Nature provides. ‘Wild Belt’ including areas that are no go for human trespass. The headlong rush by some ‘green groups’ for everyone to ‘spend time in nature,’ may have been well-intentioned but has placed additional stresses on natural areas and their wildlife.^{19 20}

At the time of drafting this piece, many of those NGOs would have been attending COP16 on the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) in Cali, Colombia. The UK has been ‘exemplary’ in signing up to these paper conventions and international agreements over the years. Boasting of its record as being the first country to draft a national ‘Biodiversity Action Plan’ following the original Earth Summit meeting in 1992. Re-affirming that commitment via a revised Strategic Plan for Biodiversity and the 20 targets agreed at Aichi, Japan in 2010 – none of which have been met in reality. No matter, a new set were drafted at the COP15 Convention on Biodiversity held in Montreal in 2022 – the best known being to protect and manage 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030 (known as ’30 by 30’). Easy to sign up to, harder to achieve. Currently only just over 3% of the UK’s land area is protected or managed for wildlife, at a generous pinch it could be claimed that 8% of
marine areas are.

Over thirty years of attending international conferences, signing up to treaties and conventions have not been entirely pointless, but nor is there enough progress on the ground to show for all that intellectual effort and policy-process.

As Chris Packham noted in the foreword to Norman Maclean’s, “A Less Green And Pleasant Land” quoted at the top of this piece, the UK conservation business is failing in its purpose: “If conservation in these islands were a single-company business, all the effort, endeavour, all the strategies, money, and employees were under one roof, and that company had shares to purchase on the stock exchange, would you invest in them? Based on the results? I wouldn’t. Not because I think that the company isn’t sincere or isn’t trying hard enough, simply because its results are not only poor – they are disastrous.
Let’s be frank, in all of our major animal and plant groups the declines are catastrophic. Even some of our most cherished species, the cuckoo, the nightingale, most butterflies and moths, the salmon, our orchids and sadly so many more are cascading to extinction. In our business, in most departments, targets are not being met, and in many we’re going bust.”

No piece on the UK’s biodiversity can avoid referring to the state of our rivers, lakes and seas – and their pollution by our human waste. Every day in the UK over 10 billion litres of wastewater and sewage are released into the sewer system from our baths, showers, washing machines, and flushed down the UK’s guesstimated 45 million domestic toilets. ²¹ A sewage system that clearly isn’t up to the job, given that raw sewage is routinely discharged into our rivers, streams, lakes, and coastal seas by the UK’s 11 regional privately owned water companies. The most recent 2022 survey by the Environment Agency for England (Wales and Scotland are little better) shows that on average every day there were 825 discharges of raw, untreated sewage – made-up of human faeces, sanitary products, wet wipes, and much else besides. As Professor Jamie Woodward, geography professor at the University of Manchester noted, “Each discharge is a toxic cocktail of many pollutants, including microplastics and pathogens.” ²²

Who’s to blame for this? For sure, the water companies, whose private owners have been more interested in extracting profits and returning dividends to their shareholders during the three decades following privatisation than in upgrading the system. ²³ Hardly surprising as over 70% of those owners and shareholders are based outside the UK, who literally don’t give a shit for the impacts of cost-saving, dividend optimising business decisions upon the rivers, streams, lakes, and seas that they will never dip a toe in.²⁴

Not to let the water companies ‘off the hook,’ but all of us discharging our individual waste into the system hold some responsibility too, having for decades flushed the loo without thinking where it all ends up, and its impacts downstream on the wider environment and the wildlife feeding and breeding in what is or was their natural habitat. 30-90% of the active pharmaceutical ingredients (API) of the drugs (legal and illegal) and medications we take and use as humans simply pass through our bodies and find their way into our rivers and streams. Most obviously carried through in untreated sewage, but also in ‘treated waste’ as current processes do not strip out or neutralise all drug residues. Consequently, our wildlife is being medicated on a wholesale basis: anti-inflammatory drugs have been isolated from the fur of otters tested across six English counties.²⁵

It is pollution from both treated and untreated human sewage that is the greatest threat to aquatic biodiversity, causing more damage than all the pesticide, fertiliser, and livestock manure runoff from farms. ^{26 27}An already failing sewage system, to which this government is anticipating adding at least 2 million more toilets over the next 5-10 years to, and another 6-7 million bodies (and bottoms) over the next 25 years with no plan where all their waste will go.

Delivering on Biodiversity Action Plans and standing firm on the protection of nationally important natural habitats, greenfield and Green Belt land are essential to stop the continuing decline of our wildlife – and to force policymakers and developers to be innovative in how they accommodate our current population and its needs, without recourse to the easy, ‘cheap’ option of taking bites out of the Green Belt.

It also forces policymakers to acknowledge the elephant standing in plain sight – our human numbers here in the UK and globally. As Professor Maclean states human population remains the key driver of wildlife loss, but it is a driver that can be managed and influenced through a combination of progressive policies. Not least by introducing a long-term Sustainable Population Policy for the UK, with Cabinet Minister level responsibility and authority and a dedicated parliamentary select committee to provide independent scrutiny. In effect the creation of an independent department within government responsible for assessing evidence on demography and providing recommendations and strategy proposals to policymakers.

Any discussion of the environmental impacts of population growth must also recognise the impact of and importance of addressing our unsustainable levels of per capita consumption, natural resource use, the available biocapacity here in the UK and our ‘fair share’ of other countries’ resources.

And crucially, restoring UK aid to support the 270 million women globally who still lack access to and choice over family planning. ²⁸ Why? Because global population growth is also relevant to any consideration of our UK biodiversity, our wildlife and countryside. Over 2 billion songbirds and other species, many of them enriching our gardens, countryside, and coastal wetlands, migrate to Europe from Africa annually. An annual migration that has
halved since the 1950s.

Over the same period Africa’s human population has grown from just over 250 million people to over 1.4 billion today, projected to increase by another billion by 2050, and exceed 4 billion by the end of the century: “The inevitable outcome of this high rate of human population growth is continued conversion of wildlands to agriculture.” ²⁹

Meaning even fewer songbirds, waders, and raptors making that extraordinary journey to boost the already depleted biodiversity of our islands.