UK Trails Many Countries in Wildlife Protection
8/24/99
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Title: UK Trails Many Countries in Wildlife Protection
Source: British Broadcasting Corporation
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: August 24, 1999
Byline: Alex Kirby
The United Kingdom is accused of coming last in an international
league table of care for wildlife habitats.
The claim comes from Friends of the Earth UK (FoE), which has
compared the proportion of land given over to strict wildlife
protection by the world's richest countries and some of its poorest.
But the comparison takes no account of how much land highly
industrialised countries may have left devoted to wildlife and
Environment Minister Beverly Hughes told the BBC: "The criteria that
FoE have used are simply not valid for Britain.
"We clearly haven't got great swathes of land like countries such as
Kenya, where we can have nobody living - one of the criteria they
use."
"That is not to say that we don't have large areas and National Parks
that we are conserving, it's just that Britain has a lot of people
and they have to live in these areas too."
FoE compared the performance of the G8 countries with a selection of
the most impoverished, and with countries with celebrated wildlife
habitats like Kenya, Brazil and Ecuador.
The yardstick used by FoE was the percentage of their land area each
country had designated as meeting categories I and II of the
International Union for the Conservation of Nature (the World
Conservation Union).
IUCN's category I covers strict nature reserves and wilderness areas,
while category II refers to national parks, "relatively large areas
not materially altered by human activity".
According to the United Nations' list of protected areas, Ecuador
tops the league, with 8.5% of its land area designated. Several
densely-populated countries show up fairly well - Japan has 3.6%, and
even Burkina Faso in West Africa, one of the poorest countries on
Earth, manages 1.9%.
European performance
Four European members of the G8 group are in the last five. They are
Italy (1.2%), France (0.8%), Germany (0.1%), and the UK, with none of
its land designated at all.
The United Kingdom does have some wildlife protection sites known as
special areas of conservation, designated under the European Union's
habitats directive. That requires stricter protection than the UK in
fact provides.
But FoE says 27% of these SACs (or the sites of special scientific
interest that make them up) have suffered loss or damage since 1991.
The main causes of damage are farming and development. FoE, which
says a thousand more sites should be given European protection, is
urging the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to act to protect the SACs.
It wants him to introduce a new wildlife bill in the next session of
Parliament.
Matt Phillips of FoE said: "Countries in the developing world
struggling to protect rainforests and coral reefs need to see
commitment from richer countries, but the UK is not supplying
leadership".
"It's time Tony Blair lived up to his green rhetoric and introduced a
wildlife bill this year."
FoE is launching a website which allows users to find out about the
state of protection of the internationally important wildlife sites
close to them. The site details official records of loss and damage
to each site, and is supported by the Worldwide Fund for Nature-UK.