Investment vs Nature?
THE Government has hit back at claims that its recently announced growth agenda constitutes an ‘attack on Nature’. Last week, the heads of the National Trust, the RSPB and The Wildlife Trusts accused ministers of abandoning manifesto commitments on the environment and said all options were on the table, including public demonstrations. The combined membership of the three groups is eight million people.
The Government has stressed that it does not intend to go back on its environmental commitments. It still fully intends to halt the decline in Nature by 2030 and to reach net zero by 2050, ‘while delivering growth’.
Concern has been mounting for wildlife groups for the past three weeks, after it was-reported in that Defra was intending to water down or scrap its flagship post-Brexit farming policy, the Environmental Land Management scheme (ELMS). This would have seen farmers and landowners paid to restore Nature, replacing the EU’s basic payments scheme that focused subsidies on the size of the farm. ELMS was popular with environmentalists and was often held up as an overall positive of Brexit, with Hilary McGrady of the National Trust warning that the Government will ‘squander one of the biggest Brexit opportunities for Nature’, if it returns to an EU-style land subsidy for farmers.
