In what sounds like a throwback to Stalinist Russia we now have a People’s Plan for Nature. Produced by three of our heavyweight nature conservation organisations, WWF, RSPB and the National Trust, it outlines the path to a utopian nature-friendly future. In this wonderland everyone not only loves nature, but actively works to provide for it. The plan was published to coincide with the David Attenborough’s Wild Isles TV series. Although the content of the series was excellent, its irritating message seemed to be that the UK’s priceless, diverse and exciting wildlife had just been discovered and was being revealed and highlighted for the first time.
Formulating the Plan – beyond the talking shops
The process of preparing the Plan (PPN) involved public discussions and facilitated workshops. The methodology used is called RAPID, defined by its proponents as doing things with people, rather than to or for them. There are five stages in the process; input, recommend, decide, agree, perform. The plan has been produced through the first two of these, and presumably the organisers will now move on to the much more difficult last three.
The process was launched during Liz Truss’s brief premiership, when her government was being accused of an attack on nature. We were all invited to join “the biggest ever conversation about nature”. In the event nearly 30,000 people joined the conversation to express their ideas and feelings about the natural world. To take the ideas forward a group of 103 people from various backgrounds formed the grandly named People’s Assembly for Nature.
Their discussions led to the hundred page-long plan, with its utopian visions of a nature-friendly future, a number of cross-cutting themes, and 26 main calls for action related to eight areas. These are:
- vision and leadership
- regulation and implementation
- nature-friendly farming
- food production and consumption
- marine protection for our coastal waters
- waterway and catchment management
- local access to nature, and
- using evidence effectively
A nature-friendly future
The visions and cross-cutting themes of the PPN are, as might be expected, a wish-list of perfection in our relationship with nature and wildlife. One that amused me was “We have free, frequent transport between urban and rural areas, to ensure everyone has equal, accessible access to nature.” Presumably that is to enable people in the nature-depleted countryside to enjoy the biodiversity bonanza in our towns and cities?
Others include “Nature is valued and respected by all” (good luck with that) and “We have more nature corridors, and urban environments have green spaces”, which makes me wonder if some of us working hard to deliver just that, have been wasting our time for the last few decades.
In this context there seems to be an old fashioned underlying assumption that nature and wildlife are found in the countryside, and urban areas are devoid, or at least deficient, as far as the natural world is concerned. I thought we had nailed this falsehood many years ago, but apparently not so.
The calls to action are too numerous to list here, but the outputs are summarised by the organisers as:
“A vision for the future of nature and the actions we all need to take to protect and renew it”
“Nature to be considered in decision-making at all levels, UK-wide and regional targets for biodiversity”, and
“More people to be involved in making the big decisions, including the creation of a permanent assembly on nature”.
I struggled to find much that would be new here. For instance, I was involved in preparing nature conservation strategies for local authorities in the 90s, and regional biodiversity strategies at the turn of the century. Since then we have moved on to include wider landscape-scale thinking and working.
Added value from this Plan?
There are two main weaknesses of the plan. First, it does not pay enough attention to, or acknowledge, much that is already in hand. Parts of its vision for the future already exist, giving the impression that it does not start from where we are already. It would carry more weight if it did so, and sought improvements and accelerated progress, rather than appearing to be emerging from a vacuum. For example, there is a call for a water management framework: until we left the EU we had one, and we don’t have to start from scratch with a successor. Hopefully the current furore about the water companies dereliction of duty in relation to wastewater discharges will catalyse this process.
As for the call for a “national conversation on diet and nature” in relation to food production, it ignores the fact that such a conversation has been going on for years about diet and health, with no apparent impact on most of our eating habits.
Another call is for a law for 12% of new development land to be given over to nature. This seems to be an expansion to a combination of biodiversity offsetting and the existing discretionary Access to Natural Greenspace Standards, but these are not referenced.
The second major weakness is that nowhere in the plan is there any mention or estimates of the human and financial resources needed to implement it, or where these would come from. There are generalisations, such as wanting businesses, government or farmers to act, but nothing specific. That omission reinforces the wish list aspect of the exercise and makes calling it ‘a plan’ a bit of a stretch.
Overall the PPN might look like a bottom-up, citizen-inspired process, but it has resulted in something that is in many respects indistinguishable from that which would have been produced through a top-down process by the organisations themselves. Again and again it reflects, but does not reference, much of what is already being called for by the nature conservation sector, or even is, however imperfectly, being done. What may be new is the idea of a National Assembly for Nature. This would perhaps mirror the Office of Environmental Protection but with a narrower remit.
One of the problems I suspect is that the RAPID methodology may be more suited to smaller scale issues at community and neighbourhood levels, where a significant proportion of those affected can participate. Thirty thousand initial participants may sound a lot, but it is very small in relation to a population of 65 million. This could blunt the Plan’s impact because the Government and others may feel they do not have to pay much attention to it. They can say, as Mandy Rice-Davies famously did “They would say that wouldn’t they?”
The fact remains though that the UK is in the bottom ten per cent of all countries in relation to nature depletion. We need as much attention, commitment and endeavour that we can command to rectify this. From that point of view the plan is worthy and welcome, but it does seem to lack punch or sparkle, or to give credit to existing hard work already happening.
That’s just what I think though. You can find out more, make your own judgements, and offer your support to the initiative here: https://peoplesplanfornature.org/