One in six species at risk of going extinct in Great Britain

The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth.

Over the past couple of centuries, through dramatic changes in industry, agriculture and development, the animals and plants that call the UK home have borne the brunt of this change. But rather than these historic declines stopping in recent times, they have continued.

This is the sobering conclusion from the latest State of Nature report, which though the combination of the expertise of over 60 nature organisations is the most comprehensive analysis covering the natural world in the UK. It has found that since the 1970s wildlife populations are continuing to decline, on top of an already perilously low baseline.

This has resulted in the UK having only half of its biodiversity remaining.

‘The UK’s wildlife is better studied than in any other country in the world and what the data tell us should make us sit up and listen,’ explains Beccy Speight, the RSPB’s Chief Executive. ‘What is clear is that progress to protect our species and habitats has not been sufficient and yet we know we urgently need to restore nature to tackle the climate crisis and build resilience.’

Read the State of Nature 2023 report in full, in addition to regional breakdowns for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Continual declines

The headline stats from this year’s State of Nature report are concerning enough, but dig a little deeper and it reveals some even more concerning numbers.

The distribution for invertebrates, for instance, has decreased by an average of 13% since the 1970s. But within this, the data shows that the distribution for those species that provide pest control for industries like agriculture, like the 2-spot ladybird, have dropped by more than a third.  

In addition to the decline in individual species, the report also looked at the general health of the UK’s environments. It found that only one in seven habitats important for wildlife were in good condition, while just one in fourteen woodlands and a quarter of peatlands were assessed to be in a good ecological state.

The reasons for these worrying numbers are largely due to the UK’s long history of industry and agriculture.

Dr Gareth Thomas is a researcher at the Museum who works on looking at how human activities are changing the planet's biodiversity.

‘It’s not great,’ says Gareth. ‘When it comes to the amount of biodiversity remaining, the UK finds itself in the bottom 10% of countries worldwide, and the bottom of the G7 and most other comparable countries.’

‘That is primarily due to the fact that about 70% of our land is agriculture.’

This raises the question of how the UK effectively manages the continual decline in biodiversity. The UK needs to produce food, and so it is not a question of scrapping all agriculture but rather working out how to make it more sustainable and biodiversity-friendly.

‘The key for the UK is farmland, that is where the biggest gains can be achieved,’ explains Gareth. ‘So there are projects such as regenerative farming, but there are also things like ‘land sharing’ and ‘land sparing’.

Put simply, land sharing works to lower the overall impact of agriculture in order to grow the crops we need but with a lighter footprint. This would mean giving space around the margins of farms, reducing the use of potentially harmful chemicals, and restoring hedgerows to allow little bits of nature to creep back in across the landscape. On the other hand, land sparing looks instead to create more natural habitats by giving over entire parts of the landscape to nature, while more intensively farming what is left in order to make up for the lost land that is being allowed to recover.

‘We still need agriculture, and there is always a trade-off,’ says Gareth. The report shows that while 20% of farmland is in some form of agri-environment scheme and increasing, the results also clearly indicate that we are still not doing enough at the speed required.

Working together to save nature

The stats also obscure some interesting possible early signs of things to come. For example, while in general the UK’s birds have been hammered over the past few decades, with the numbers of farmland birds declining by a staggering 58% since 1970, the number of rare or colonising birds has actually increased. 

It is thought that this trend has been driven in part by the arrival of new colonising species, such as the European bee-eaters that have started nesting in Norfolk and the glossy ibis that successfully bred for the first time last year in Cambridgeshire. As the climate continues to warm and species’ distributions continue to shift north, it is only expected that the UK will see more continental bird species colonise its shores. 

These colonisation events do not, however, make up for the losses elsewhere. Instead, there is a lot of effort from thousands of conservationists to slow and reverse these declines.

For example, the population of hazel dormice in England has crashed by 51% since 2000 and in places gone locally extinct, but reintroductions in recent years has seen the small rodent being released into 25 woodlands in 13 counties, while habitat restoration is providing hope for natural recolonisation events.

Similarly, the critically endangered pine hoverfly was reduced to a single 10km² patch of forest in Scotland, but a captive breeding programme has now seen their range expand to multiple other sites, while the restoring of ground cover in Northern Ireland has seen the return of the corncrake after it became extinct in the country 23 years ago.

In the face of the expanding climate and biodiversity crisis these may only be small changes, but they go to show what can be achieved over a relatively short period of time when given the chance.

‘We know that conservation works and how to restore ecosystems and save species,’ says Beccy. ‘We need to move far faster as a society towards nature-friendly land and sea use, otherwise the UK’s nature and wider environment will continue to decline and degrade, with huge implications for our own way of life.’

‘It’s only through working together that we can help nature recover.’