Biodiversity Net Gain – could this be the saviour?
I remember coming home from school in tears because I’d seen trees being cut down in a field I walked past. Mum used to call me “Queen O’Grief” because there was always something! Those huge trees that had taken years to grow, were replaced within a few weeks by a row of detached houses that appeared to be made of ticky-tacky and all looked just the same 😉 That was about fifty years ago. Now I’m a little more hardened to seeing the UK countryside being destroyed so developers can shoe-horn as many houses as possible into each patch of land they claim.
I know people need houses to live in, and I am grateful that I have one, but it shouldn’t be at the sacrifice of the habitats of other creatures that have as much right to enjoy life on earth as we do. This is why I am excited about this new scheme that might hopefully slow the spread of the plague of concrete across the land.
From November this year, biodiversity net gain (BNG) will force developers to compensate for the destruction of habitats on the land they build on. “Net gain” means that habitats for wildlife must be left in a better state than before the development, so there must be a quantifiable gain in biodiversity as a result of the new housing estate.
My first reaction was elation that this sounds so difficult to achieve that what remains of our countryside should be safe. Even if developers take the trouble to propagate wildlife areas around the building site, surely habitats will be disturbed by light and noise pollution, people’s barbecues and domestic pets? And it’s difficult for people brought up in a short grass and pruned trees culture to let go of being overly tidy with their gardens.
I did a bit of research and it looks as if the solution for the developers, which unfortunately means new estates will still pop up, is to allow them to buy “biodiversity credits” from the UK government to pay for habitat creation and management elsewhere.
It concerns me that the BNG contract between the developer and the government is for thirty years … so what might happen after that? Let’s hope a contingency plan will be in place well before the thirty years is up. There are bound to be lots of questions and doubts about how BNG will work, but it’s a massive step forward in protecting and securing what we haven’t already destroyed.
Since it’s fifty years since “Plant A Tree In ’73” (a government-sponsored national campaign in the United Kingdom) let’s end with some photos from a lovely local woodland. That’s steam on the first one, not smoke. The sun had just come out after a heavy downpour.
Word on a Whim 