Biodiversity Working Group

Chair: Nicola Hutchinson, Plantlife
Vice Chair: Nigel Bourn, Butterfly Conservation
Secretary: Kirsten Knap

The Biodiversity Working Group aims to halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity by working to improve the UK BAP process and seeks to ensure that the England Biodiversity Strategy is fully implemented. The group leads Link’s Post-2010 Campaign that strives to push biodiversity up the political agenda and give it the rightful recognition at the highest level.

QUARTERLY UPDATE: April to June 2010

The England Biodiversity Strategy was reviewed at the England Biodiversity Group meeting in April. Link highlighted key issues that the strategy should contain, including landscape-scale conservation delivery that has biodiversity at its heart and clearly demonstrates wildlife outcomes, and the efficacy of the Integrated Biodiversity Delivery Areas and other large-scale projects.

It was announced in May that the target to halt biodiversity loss by 2010 had ‘officially’ been missed. Although the failure to reach the target had long been known, it was ironic that the announcement came days before the UN’s International Biodiversity Day; a celebration of biodiversity around the world.

However, the good news is that the EU has now agreed on an ambitious headline target of, 'halting the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystem services in the EU by 2020, and restoring them in so far as feasible, while stepping up the EU contribution to averting global biodiversity loss.'

The global biodiversity target will be adopted atthe Convention on Biological Diversity 10th Conference of the Parties (CoP10) in October in Nagoya, Japan.

The 2008 UK Biodiversity Action Plan (BAP) Reporting Round was finally published in May, six months later than expected, and showed 42% of priority habitats and 24% of priority species are still declining.

In June Link submitted a response to the Biodiversity chapter of the National Ecosystem Assessment. Although Link could see the merit for a separate chapter on biodiversity, we were disappointed with the current draft and suggested that a shift in the focus of the chapter was needed to illustrate the central role of biodiversity in ecosystem services.

Link continues to engage with Natural England’s Biodiversity Integration Groups (BIGs), although we have raised the concerns we have on the role of the EBS framework with the Director for Biodiversity at Natural England.