More than 5 million tonnes of coal were hewn from land at West Chevington in Northumberland in the 1980s. Lorries, cranes and bulldozers crisscrossed the vast opencast mine that had been created there, flinging clouds of coal dust into the air and brutalising the landscape to provide fuel for the nation’s power stations and factories.
Today, the 327-hectare (808-acre) site faces a remarkable transformation. It is to become the focus of a major rewilding programme that will allow the land to return to a mix of scrub and wood and in the process provide homes for animals that could range from water voles to marsh harriers, and from curlews to harvest mice.
“We don’t know exactly what animals or birds will end up making homes here over the coming years but we are confident it will be a pleasant surprise,” said Duncan Hutt of Northumberland Wildlife Trust, which is running the project.
The West Chevington rewilding – which has £2m of funding donated by the Reece Foundation – is one of the biggest land restorations in the UK in recent years and is designed to make a key contribution in bringing the nation’s wild places back to their former glory and helping to protect our endangered wild animals.
Across the globe, rewilding is now considered to be a vital weapon in the battle to bolster the planet’s resilience to climate change and to halt biodiversity loss, which now threatens to make thousands of species extinct in the near future. Scientists have warned that at least 30% of our lands, rivers, lakes, and wetlands need to be restored and protected by 2030 if we are to prevent alarming losses of wildlife.
This goal has been encapsulated in the 30x30 programme, an international aspiration that has been put forward by the UN convention on biological diversity, and which is one of the focuses of the Cop 15 biodiversity negotiations that are now being held in Montreal. Britain has been an enthusiastic 30x30 supporter and points to projects such as West Chevington as examples of its willingness to rewild its landscape.
But just how good is the UK’s track record when it comes to protecting and managing its wild places? Over the past two centuries, the UK did more than most nations to turn its natural landscape and waterways to industrial use – as exemplified by the old opencast coalmine in the countryside around West Chevington – and has continued to pay the price in terms of lost habitats and wildlife.
Between 1970 and 2013, there was a decline in 56% of wildlife species in the UK thanks to continued agricultural intensification, river pollution, rising use of pesticides and the climate crisis. Numbers of hazel dormice, great crested newts, adders, wildcats and hedgehogs have plummeted as a consequence. So how effective has the UK been in increasing areas of protected wild land – in order to restore wildlife populations – in the past few years?
The answer was straightforward, said Rob Stoneman, director of landscape recovery for the Wildlife Trusts. “We are doing very, very badly indeed. If you look at the statistics, you find that a mere 3.22% of the land and a maximum of 8% of marine areas were rated as being well protected and managed this year, compared with 3% and 4% respectively in 2021.”
The rate of increase in areas of well-protected, well-managed wild land comes to a mere 0.22% in a year and indicates that Britain is going to fall far short of its 30% target in eight years’ time. “It is gloomy,” admitted Richard Benwell, chief executive of the Wildlife and Countryside Link, a group of 67 UK organisations with conservation interests.
One problem lies with the condition of many of the country’s sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs), areas that include ancient woodland, hay meadows, peat bogs, grasslands, moorland, marshes, flood plains, chalk streams, estuaries and stretches of coast. The UK has more than 4,000 such sites and these form the core of our currently protected wild places. However, in England only 38% of them are in a healthy condition.
“The majority need improvement and one key action by the government would be to tackle these SSSIs and restore them to a healthy condition,” said Benwell. “If we did that we would be able to bring our fraction of well-maintained, well-protected wild areas to over 10%, a considerable improvement on our current figure.”
However, this prospect was dashed by the government last week, when it refused to tackle the issue with the publication of habitat protection targets for its environment bill. There will be no target for improving the condition of protected nature areas. “This was a great disappointment,” said Benwell. “The government has not listened to consultations and recognised that habitat targets are vital.”
This point was backed by Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Wildlife Trusts. “Without a target to improve our protected sites, the government has little hope of achieving its international commitment to protect 30% of land for nature by 2030.”
For marine areas, the picture is not quite so gloomy. A total of 4% of marine areas in the UK were well-protected and managed in 2021. This year it doubled to 8%, a hopeful step that might see serious limitations being imposed on bottom trawling for cod, plaice and other fish, a practice that is ravaging sea beds, destroying cold water corals and plants.
“Marine areas are owned by the crown, so it is easier to designate and protect the sea, because it’s a single landowner effectively while, obviously, the problem you have with British land is it’s mostly privately owned. Nevertheless, even with marine area protection we have a long way to go,” says Bennett.
Many farmers are also pessimistic. “We feel that the government is going to miss out on halting nature decline by 2030,” said Cambridgeshire farmer Martin Lines of the Nature Friendly Farming Network. “They are continually kicking the can down the road and delaying the action we need to tackle the critical issue of biodiversity decline which underpins our whole survival and the way we produce food and other goods.”
Projects such as West Chevington will therefore take on an added importance as showcases for what needs to be done to restore wild places in the UK. An area that once contributed heavily to the release of fossil fuel emissions will become a focus for the capturing of carbon through its trees and plants.
“We are not going to rush this,” said Hutt. “We will watch carefully and intervene only when necessary. We may introduce some animal species – harvest mice for example – but in general we aim to keep our interventions to a minimum and just wait for creatures to move in. We are going to learn a lot from the land here.”
