UK Nature and Environment

A three-year project to protect birds of prey in Sheffield has been launched.

The Owlthorpe Fields Conservation Group will focus on monitoring and supporting populations of diurnal raptors, such as Common Buzzard and Common Kestrel, and owls in the city's S20 area.

The project is supported by a £101,990 grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and an additional £1,000 from Sheffield City Council. It will end with a detailed report for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and the city council’s ecology unit.

It covers more than 50 square kilometres of blanket bog, heath, meadows and woodland and rises from a valley floor to the 640m summit of Cold Fell in the north Pennines. This is RSPB Geltsdale, and it will now be the organisation’s largest English bird sanctuary when the society announces this week that it has bought land that expands the existing reserve by a third.

“This is going to be a reserve on a different scale from many of our other sites in England,” said Beccy Speight, the RSPB’s chief executive.

“We are going to achieve an abundance of species and a size that will be unmatched for bird reserves elsewhere. It is going to demonstrate what is possible when it comes to rewilding and protecting birds.”

An exciting £1.7m project to restore precious wetlands across the South Downs region and raise awareness about water is now under way.

Work on the “Downs to the Sea” initiative begins in time for World Wetlands Day (2 February), with a bumper action plan to restore and create a network of “blue spaces” in the landscape.

It comes after National Lottery Heritage Fund awarded a grant of £1.7m late last year.

It has been native to Britain for thousands of years and was heralded as the national fish on the BBC’s Springwatch, but a government report suggests the brown trout risks being wiped out in large parts of England within decades.

The first national temperature projections for English rivers by the Environment Agency forecasts that by 2080 the water will be too warm almost everywhere in England at the height of summer for the Salmo trutta species to feed and grow.

It is further suggested by the chief scientist’s group’s report that the important temperature threshold of 12C for the survival of brown trout eggs during the winter spawning season from November to February will be exceeded by 2080 at more than 70% of the sites where temperatures were modelled.

A report published today has revealed that 84% of pond sites created through a pioneering scheme that replaces habitat lost to development are colonised by Great Crested Newts after three or more years. The research also shows that individual ponds created or restored through the scheme are more than twice as likely to be occupied by great crested newts than the average English pond.

The national scheme is entirely funded by developers and does not rely on any public money. It creates at least four new ponds for any pond occupied by Great Crested Newts, which is lost to development.

The new report is from the Newt Conservation Partnership, which was formed by two national conservation charities: Amphibian and Reptile Conservation and Freshwater Habitats Trust. The report includes monitoring data on ponds created and restored for the NatureSpace District Licensing Scheme between 2018 and 2024.

A major project to make one of Norfolk's biggest rivers meander once again is taking shape - but its location is being kept top secret.

Engineers are currently making a section of the River Yare wiggle and are creating floodplain wetlands as part of a £282,000 scheme.

The waterway is one of only 210 chalk streams in the world - rare habitats which are often dubbed England's rainforests.

Campaigners have celebrated an “important victory” in a closely watched case that will determine whether the government will enforce new legislation aimed at protecting national parks and landscapes in England.

Dedham Vale is a designated “national landscape” on the border of Essex and Suffolk, home to increasingly rare species including hazel dormice and hedgehogs. Within it is Manningtree station, where the train operator Greater Anglia built an extension to the car park to cope with increased traffic.

The Dedham Vale Society and Campaign for National Parks said the works, which included an extension to add capacity for another 200 cars, dozens of lighting columns, a 190-metre-long steel wall and bike storage, inhibited public access to St Edmund Way, an ancient pilgrimage path, generated light pollution and threatened habitats.

Scientists have discovered a never-before-seen mind-controlling fungus that creates spider "zombies" after it was stumbled upon in a Victorian gunpowder store on the grounds of a destroyed Irish castle.

The fluffy white fungus, similar to the zombie-ant fungus that inspired the "The Last of Us" video game and TV series, likely uses chemical signals to direct cave spiders out of their lairs and into the open. The fungus then kills the spiders and uses their corpses to release its spores, according to a new study.

Members of BBC's nature documentary TV series Winterwatch first discovered the fungus in a gunpowder storeroom at Castle Espie wetland reserve in Northern Ireland in 2021. Scientists analyzed the fungus and found it is new to science. They describe the species, named Gibellula attenboroughii to honor Sir David Attenborough, in a study published Friday (Jan. 24) in the journal Fungal Systematics and Evolution.

Developers need not “worry about bats and newts” before they start building, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said in a speech that outlined her plans to reform the UK’s planning process. Reeves’ comments suggest construction firms and housebuilders will be allowed to destroy habitat if they pay into “a nature fund” that might finance restoration elsewhere.

As an ecologist (with a passion for bats), I have serious concerns about what this would mean for the UK’s dwindling biodiversity. The comments from the chancellor are, at best, disheartening at a critical time for nature conservation.

Bats and newts are derided as the gum in the wheels of the planning system. But the idea that nature inherently obstructs development and stymies our collective prosperity is wrong. There are many ways infrastucture can be designed to work with nature in mind from the start – often with low cost.

A nature reserve in East Yorkshire has seen a resurgence in numbers of a rare bird that nearly disappeared from the UK.

RSPB Blacktoft Sands, in Goole, has experienced a record year in the breeding of bearded tits, also known as "beardies", which came dangerously close to extinction in the UK in the 1940s.

Around 120 pairs of the small, reedbed bird produced 500 young last year at the reserve – more than double the breeding success rate of previous years.

WILDLIFE charities have warned that a proposed project could result in more intense floodings in Warrington.

Cheshire Wildlife Trust and The Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside are sounding the alarm over controversial plans to build a tidal barrage across the River Mersey.

The scheme, which is in the pre-application stage, is proposed by Liverpool City Region Combined Authority and documents state it will harness renewable marine energy and provide reliable and predictable electricity power generation using the significant height difference in the tides.

The UK is home to two species of seal, the grey seal and the smaller harbour seal.

In some areas of Scotland, harbour seal numbers are in decline or are at drastically depleted levels compared to 20 years ago.

SMRU aerial surveys revealed harbour seal numbers in The Wash (southeast England), the main population centre in England, are ~25% lower than in 2018. This large embayment has regularly been home to around 5,000 harbour seals, when surveys began in 1988 and as recently as 2018. University of St Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) are undertaking a programme of work to understand the decline.

Peatlands are critical ecosystems for carbon storage and biodiversity, containing more carbon than all the world's forests despite covering just 3% of the global land surface – but new research has revealed that vast areas of the UK’s peatlands, including the Flow Country UNESCO World Heritage Site, are likely to be unsuitable for peat accumulation by 2061-80 due to climate change.

A group of researchers including Dr Jonathan Ritson from the University of Manchester are calling for a shift in conservation strategies in their new study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology, and their findings highlight significant regional differences - Western Scotland emerges as a stronghold for peatlands, making it an urgent priority area for conservation efforts.

Using advanced bioclimatic models, the study projects substantial reductions in areas suitable for peat accumulation across the UK, with the Flow Country, Dartmoor and the Peak District being particularly at risk. Even under moderate emissions reductions, many of these landscapes may no longer sustain the conditions necessary for peat formation.

The decision to greenlight a giant new oilfield off Shetland has been ruled unlawful by the courts, in a major win for climate action that scientists say is urgently needed.

The proposed Rosebank development – the UK’s biggest untapped oilfield – had been given the go-ahead in 2023 under the previous government.

But on Thursday the court of session in Edinburgh sided with campaigners and climate experts in ruling that the original decisions to permit Rosebank and a second, smaller, gas field called Jackdaw were unlawful, as they had not taken into account the carbon emissions created by burning any oil and gas produced.

The Environment Agency working closely with Natural England has secured the largest ever commitment from water companies to clean up the environment and invest in new infrastructure since privatisation.  

The Water Industry National Environment Programme (WINEP) sets out over 24,000 actions water companies must take over the next five years to meet their legal requirements for the environment. This series of targeted interventions represents a £22.1bn investment in the environment - four times more than was secured in the last Price Review and will deliver tangible benefits for our water system and for customers.

As part of the PR24 process the Environment Agency assessed actions proposed by water companies and, alongside Ofwat and Natural England, provided technical guidance to make sure these actions will provide direct solutions to environmental pressures and help drive nature recovery.

Mountain (or montane) woodland consists of short, hardy trees that grow from around 450m above sea level in tough upland conditions where tall upright trees cannot establish. Most have been lost to overgrazing and burning.

These wee trees are important for high-altitude biodiversity, and valuable for protecting steep slopes and reducing flooding as the country faces more extreme weather.

A seed stand is a small group of individual trees planted and maintained in an accessible spot to provide a genetically predictable source of seed to be grown in nurseries or directly sown on mountainsides. They are necessary because remaining montane species in the wild are often in very inaccessible places.

Worcester City Council has created a biodiversity strategy to help wildlife thrive across the city.

The council, which is responsible for more than 260 acres of green space, including 24 conservation sites, wants to stop the decline of important wildlife species.

The strategy, which has been supported by councillors, sets out a plan for the next five years to stop biodiversity loss and boost wildlife habitats.

Key goals include improvements in tree canopy cover, the creation of wildlife corridors, and a five per cent net gain in biodiversity across council-managed land by 2030.

A rail route backed by chancellor Rachel Reeves – who played down consideration of bats and newts in development – has been fraught with fears it will wipe out bats and their habitats.

Cambridgeshire County Council this month warned of a potentially catastrophic effect on barbastelle bats of the East West Rail project, a new rail link between Oxford and Cambridge.

The scheme could be "unacceptable" and have a "catastrophic” impact on their population, including "in the worst-case scenario, loss of the maternity roost", the council said.

Rachel Reeves has been accused by environmental experts of putting the climate at risk with high carbon projects including the expansion of Heathrow airport.

The chancellor made airports the central focus of her plan for growth, despite having previously promised to be the first green chancellor and having extolled the benefits of green growth.

Environmental leaders have asked her to recommit to green growth, such as the renewable economy and green public transport, rather than expanded aviation and new roads.

A new fund to support Nature Recovery environmental projects, the first of its kind, across Northern Ireland has been launched by Environment Minister Andrew Muir.

Councils and voluntary organisations can now apply for the Nature Recovery Challenge Fund Competition 2025/26 – 2027/28 which will offer a minimum grant award of £50,000.

This Challenge Fund grant competition is primarily CAPITAL funding for projects to deliver the key theme of Nature Recovery including Nature Recovery Networks, Species Recovery Networks and 30x30 Projects. Projects which support the conservation of Lough Neagh are particularly welcome to apply.

The Welsh government has given the charity £249,995 as part of its Nature Networks Fund programme to support the rare Large Heath.

Butterfly Conservation will employ a new full-time officer to lead a project researching what conservation methods can benefit the species on the peat bogs where it lives.

Butterfly Conservation Head of Conservation in Wales, Alan Sumnall, said: "We are so pleased to get this fantastic funding. We've wanted to explore if peat bog restoration is good for the Large Heath for years, but this project will tell us for certain what techniques are helping the most so that we can target our efforts even more.

• Chester Zoo’s milestone Welsh restoration project won against 22 other native species projects for the coveted Great British Wildlife Restoration Award.

• The competition saw over 80 parliamentarians vote for native species projects, from beaver reintroductions to community waterway restoration, all led by British zoos and aquariums.

• The winner, voted by politicians, was announced at a special parliamentary reception hosted by the Speaker of the House of Commons Sir Lindsay Hoyle, featuring speeches by Defra Minister Sue Hayman and Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment Victoria Atkins

The first step towards creating a Celtic rainforest – a now extremely rare habitat that once covered large swathes of the west coast of Britain – has been completed in Devon.

More than 2,500 native trees have been planted so far this winter at Devon Wildlife Trust’s Bowden Pillars site, above the Dart valley and close to the green-minded market town of Totnes.

In decades to come, these trees – oak, rowan, alder, hazel, birch, willow and holly – will form a temperate rainforest, sometimes known as a Celtic or Atlantic rainforest.

Water firm river pollution fines must be spent on rivers, MPs to say

Lib Dem Tim Farron seeks law to protect fund as Treasury tries to take control of £11m Sandra Laville Tue 28 Jan 2025 09.53 GMT

Fines from water companies that pollute rivers must be ringfenced by law to be spent on restoring water quality in rivers, MPs will urge.

The Treasury is trying to take control of £11m in fines from water companies, which was intended for small charities to restore rivers, in a move criticised by river restoration campaigners as “appalling”.

In an attempt to protect the water restoration fund, and ensure future fines collected from water companies are used to restore the river environment, the Liberal Democrat MP Tim Farron is seeking an amendment on Tuesday to the water special measures bill in parliament.

In 2021 Rachel Reeves announced her ambition to become ‘Britain’s first green chancellor’ – however, recent announcements on planning and airport expansion put this aspiration in jeopardy. The irony of Rachel Reeves's crusade for growth is that these policies risk undermining the UK’s natural capital – an essential foundation for growth.
Nature is not a blocker to growth

Nature does not block growth – it is the very foundation on which growth is built. Research by PwC found that 47% of the companies on the London Stock Exchange are highly or moderately dependent on nature. The assertion that protecting nature undermines economic growth is simply incorrect; nature is the bedrock upon which the economy is built. The findings of the Dasgupta Review reiterate this view, highlighting the significant economic value of nature.

Healthy ecosystems provide stability for businesses by mitigating risks such as flooding and droughts and filtering pollutants from the air and water; nature provides the stability necessary for business. Beyond these practical benefits, restoring nature also delivers significant well-being and health benefits, which strengthen the foundation for sustainable growth.