The importance of protecting nature is not up for debate. One in six species in Britain is threatened with extinction. Since 1970, more than half our flowering plants have decreased in areas where they once thrived. In the 1950s, Britain’s hedgehog population was 30m strong. Now, it is believed to be under a million.
All this demands action. The problem is that a lot of the action we’ve taken – mainly in the form of legislation – fails to target the biggest drivers of nature loss. Instead, it bites when we try to build: wind turbines, solar farms, railways or nuclear power plants, making their construction lengthier, more expensive or, in some cases, impossible.
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 cause habitat loss on a massive scale. Greening the grid and providing clean electricity to homes, transport and industry is one of the most urgent tasks facing us. The only way to do it without generating a cost of living crisis that would dwarf our current predicament (and cause an anti-green backlash) is to get building – and fast.
At the moment, that’s proving far too difficult – and the obstacles include those well-intentioned laws designed to guard habitats against unchecked development. Not only do they block the green building we desperately need – they don’t even do a good job of protecting nature. The money spent on them could transform conservation if used differently, but instead, it’s effectively thrown away.
One infamous example is HS2’s £100m-plus bat shed. The 900m-long structure is being built to let a 300-strong population of rare Bechstein’s bats safely cross four railway tracks. For the same amount of money it would be possible to create 4,500 hectares (11,000 acres) of new woodland while paying the farmers and landowners affected a decent income.
Even if you assume the shed saves every single Bechstein bat near the HS2 route, it’s still terrible value for money. There are schemes out there that are far more cost-effective. Take High Marks Barn, in south Devon, which was built in the 19th century for agricultural use. Today it hosts one of the UK’s largest colonies of the greater horseshoe bat. With a single £180,000 grant, the Vincent Wildlife Trust was able to add barriers to keep predators such as barn owls out and adapt the stone barn to be more resilient to the hotter summers and more frequent cold snaps caused by the climate crisis. This helped to safeguard more than 1,100 bats.
Why do our environmental laws end up creating these bizarre situations? The problem is their inflexibility. They are designed to prevent specific harms caused by specific developments. This approach only makes sense if building is one of the main drivers of nature loss. But it isn’t, for a simple reason: we don’t, and almost certainly never will, do enough of it.
Less than 6% of Britain is built on. If Labour succeeds in building 1.5m homes, the total amount of built-up land would only increase by a few hundredths of a percent. Even if you tripled the rate, it would take decades before even a tenth of Britain was built on. Far more of it, nearly two thirds, is dedicated to agriculture.
How and what we farm is far more consequential to Britain’s nature than what and where we build. The land set aside for sheep is twice the size of all built-up areas combined, and yet constant grazing strips areas of natural foliage. When farmers are paid to plant trees instead, wildlife soon returns. Fencing off just 26 hectares of common land in the Howgill Fells in the Yorkshire Dales national park, while planting tens of thousands of trees, has been transformative. Butterflies, bluebells and birdsong are back – 11 new species of breeding bird, including meadow pipits, reed buntings and stonechats, have been spotted. All of this costs just £25,600 per year. One planned offshore windfarm is set to spend £170m protecting 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 they rely on for food. Technology that could slow the warming that threatens these birds is being hamstrung by mitigation measures that do nothing to address the actual cause of their decline.
But it is the story of the “fish protection measures” at Hinkley Point C in Somerset that really demonstrates how broken the system is. Britain’s first new nuclear plant in more than three decades will use a lot of water. To cool the steam generated by its two reactors, it will draw in more than 4,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools-worth every single day through two 3.5km (2.2 mile) tunnels. All of that water eventually gets pumped back into the Severn estuary, but not everything that goes into Hinkley Point C’s cooling pipes makes it out intact.
The Environment Agency estimates that around 50 tonnes of marine life could be destroyed every year. Most of that is eggs, larvae and juvenile fish unlikely to make it to adulthood. This isn’t an impact we should dismiss lightly, but we should place it in context: it’s comparable 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 intake velocity side entry water heads”, £150m on a “fish recovery and returns” system and £50m on hundreds of speakers playing jumbo jet-level noise underwater to deter fish from swimming near. None of these features existed on any of the other nuclear plants that once operated in the Severn estuary. Nor are they part of Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 or France’s Flamanville 3 plants, which use the same fundamental reactor design as Hinkley Point C. The cost amounts to £250,000 per single protected fish saved.
And this is only a fraction of the total cost of complying with environmental protections: 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.
The delays and extra expense themselves aren’t without environmental impacts. The more expensive clean power is, the less likely we are to build it, and consumers to switch to it. Unless clean electricity gets cheaper, hard-pressed households are unlikely to buy electric vehicles or heat pumps.
A recent government-commissioned review of nuclear regulation identified a project that removed a weir from a river, unlocking 160km of habitat for migratory fish including the Atlantic salmon. The cost? One seven thousandth Hinkley Point C’s fish protection measures.
The reason that project delivers so much more is that its goal is actually restoring habitat. The real aim of these measures is not to save wildlife, but to comply with regulation. Wouldn’t it be better if a chunk of the cash spent on HS2’s bat tunnel or Hinkley Point C’s fish deterrent went to schemes that do thousands of times more good? It can be tempting to resist anything that looks like the “watering down” of environmental protections. 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 We Build a Better Future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Profile, £16.99)
Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree (Picador, £10.99)
