Lost Nature
A new report from Wild Justice, authored in conjunction with Kiera Chapman, shows that developers are not keeping their ecological commitments.
When a residential development gets planning permission, it comes with a series of conditions. Developers commit to installing a range of ecological mitigation and enhancement features in exchange for being allowed to develop the land.
This summer, Kiera and two colleagues set out to find out how many of the ecological conditions for development had been met. They looked at 42 housing estates across five different Local Planning Authorities, counted nearly 6,000 trees, and surveyed 291 hectares of developed land.
What they found was shocking. Only 53% of the conditioned ecological features are present. When they excluded street trees, this figure fell to 34%.
In terms of mitigations for specific species, 83% of hedgehog highways were missing, along with 75% of bat and bird boxes, and 85% of hibernacula.
For habitats, 82% of woodland edge seed mixes were absent, 48% of native hedges and 59% of wildflower grasslands.
These findings call the government’s housebuilding agenda into question. The assumption underlying the ambition to build 1.5 million homes over the course of this parliament is that Biodiversity Net Gain will be able to ‘offset’ the harms of this level of development. Yet this research suggests that the ‘net gain’ will only exist notionally, on spreadsheets, plans and documents – and that what will happen in real life will be a net loss.
The report makes five key recommendations to fix this situation, most notably funding new ecological enforcement officers to check that onsite biodiversity plans are executed properly on the ground.
