What Comes After Conservation?

Readers may be interested in this thought provoking article by Alex Hunt, Head of Foresight.

The National Trust has a seemingly rare attribute in modern society in having both a desire and capability to think and act for the long-term. Words and phrases with connotations of the long-term - like “in perpetuity”, “forever”, “enduring” and “endowment” - infuse our language. When it comes to nature conservation, we are able to be deliberately long-term in our effort. Few others are afforded this necessary luxury.

Yet the future for which we are planning for today will not offer us an unchanging terrain. We know this from our past. During the lifetime of the National Trust we have experienced two World Wars, seen the transition from the coal to nuclear age, witnessed the UK population grow exponentially, seen the tentative first few metres of flight be transformed into space exploration, and the communications revolution take us from Marconi to Microsoft. The consequential environmental quake which has followed all this change has made us recognise that we have well and truly moved from the Holocene into the Anthropocene.

It is therefore timely, as we rush headlong towards the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century – and having tasted what this Century might have in store - to ask ourselves two long-term questions:
1) What might we anticipate as the forces which will shape the natural environment across the 21st Century?
2) What might this mean for our approach to nature conservation, in the context of our mission of looking after special places, both now and in the future?

Anticipating 21st Century Forces for Change
The advice of an early American colonial almanac wisely reminds us that “to this all predictions do belong, that either they are right, or they are wrong”. I therefore offer some cautious ‘anticipations’ of the possible shape of things to come:

Global resource challenges are likely to be more strongly felt in UK landscape than ever before: a triumvirate of resource challenges, of energy, water and food will collide in the coming decades with the forces of population growth and a changing climate. This will introduce increasing pressures on landscapes in our care, and the underlying dynamics of the wider natural environment in which they sit.

Such resource pressures may increase public recognition of the importance of the ecosystem services which underpin daily life, and also accelerate innovations which help us live with limited resources. We may move from a cradle to grave economy (based on mining, making, buying, binning which we will not be able to afford) to a cradle to cradle economy (based on a continuous cycle of biological and industrial ‘nutrients’ in which there is no ‘waste’). Yet the potential is high for our growing resource demands to outstrip the needed investments in environmental innovation and nature’s capital.

Bio and nano-sciences will bring untold understanding, powers, opportunities and risks, within reach: as we increase our knowledge of nature at the genetic level, and of materials at the nano-scale, we will eventually see a convergence of these technologies. In the short term, we should not be surprised if we see wider and sometimes surprising application of Genetically Modified Organisms and new technologies (for example in efforts to increase productivity of biofuels, in producing animal feeds, in pharmaceutical GMOs, in monitoring and managing environment quality (e.g. through nanosensors, etc) or in remediation of environmental problems such as pollution. We will though see increasing concern about a lag in a coherent and consistent regulatory framework to manage risks from emerging and novel GMO and nano technologies.

We will face a growing challenge and new phenomenon in how humans connect with the natural world: as we see a growth in the urbanity of many people’s lives, we should not be surprised if we see a continuing disconnection with wildlife amongst parts of the population. This may be amplified by increasing competition for attention from the hyperreality offered by other experiences in daily urban life and leisure. Paradoxically new communication and media technologies, such as augmented reality, might start to provide a window on the natural world in ways which many people will have not been able to experience before. But urbanisation of people’s lives will predominantly serve to increase the disparity between environmental ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’.

Climate change will converge with other environmental, social and economic challenges: the interplay between climate and the wider environment will greatly rise in significance, so that we rapidly move beyond seeing climate change as a discrete challenge to one which touches and is integrated into every part of the environment and economy. There will be very positive opportunities for us to find ‘win wins’ in facing the challenge of climate change, i.e. finding solutions around land use which foster other benefits beyond addressing climate change alone. But we will have to accept that there will be sizeable knock-on impacts on the dynamics of the natural environment which will be difficult to manage.

Facing the 21st Century Conservation Challenge
This landscape of change presents a new set of nature conservation challenges for the National Trust. To succeed we will need to...
- continue to move beyond our organisational legacy of excellence in conserving ‘islands’ or ‘hot spots’ of biodiversity. We will need to become world leaders in actively supporting the functional and dynamic environmental systems and networks in which the special places for which we care are located.
- continue to build wider partnerships for nature conservation to increase our capability and effectiveness.
- adopt a broader set of conservation strategic tools within the National Trust – in particular, carefully considering the effectiveness of acquisition as a tool for nature conservation versus other options to secure conservation outcomes.
- focus increasingly on the significance of genetic adaptation and adaptability in our approach to conservation of plant and animal species.
- continue to positively engage with emerging technologies, achieving a careful balance between harnessing bio and nano innovations which support environmental conservation benefits, and being rigorous in understanding the full range of potential risks.
- finding ways to engage people and strengthen public support for a philosophy of nature conservation as embracing change (and an endeavour which is now as much about creation as well as restoration of nature’s capital)
- better recognise the environmental disparities between different parts of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

We have of course been aware of many of the growing challenges ahead and have been evolving our approach for some time. In many places the National Trust has already put a ‘beyond our boundaries’ philosophy for nature conservation productively to work. So the arguments above are not necessarily new. But it is clear that we will need to dramatically evolve our approach in the years ahead if we are to successfully face the longer-term challenges for nature which we can anticipate today.

Shifting Shores in the south west

The National Trust has just published this update report on its Shifting Shores campaign - the threats to our coast from climate change, sea level rise and increasing stormy weather . Both this report and the earlier national report can be downloaded from here.

The new report outlines lessons learnt already from work that the Trust has carried out. There are 5 critical messages.

1. Long term planning is essential
2. Work with nature not against it
3. Think and act in the wider context
4. Solutions need partnerships
5. Involving the public is critical.

The report also details 21 NT sites in the SW that are threatened by sea level rise. The report also poses 4 questions that need to be addressed.

1. How can people's awareness and understanding of the risks they face be raised?
2. What is the best way to decide the most sustainable approach to managing these risks?
3. How should tomorrow's coastline be managed today?
4. How can the costs of adaption be minimised and shared equitably?

Finally the report carries out an impact assessment covering

The impact on wildlife
The impact on the historic environment
The impact on the coastal economy
The impact on public access to the coast.

Nature's capital - National Trust report on land management, climate change and flooding

A new National Trust report highlights the importance of land management in addressing climate change and flooding.

A new report published by the National Trust today – Nature's Capital – urges the public and private sector to invest new money in helping to deliver major public benefits from land, including reduced risk of flooding and tackling climate change.

Recommendations in the report are based on the Trust’s own practical experience as the largest non-governmental landowner in the UK, managing over 250,000 hectares.
Investment now will save public money later in tackling the problems of climate change, flooding, water pollution and poor health.

The report contains four key recommendations for action:

The water industry should invest in land management to improve the quality of drinking water at source.Nearly two billion pounds has been spent in the last five years on an energy intensive treatment process to make drinking water quality acceptable for consumers. This needs to change and there is a need to tackle the problem at source. A partnership of public, private and voluntary organisations has been working together in the Peak District to tackle the causes of peat degradation which impacts upon water quality. The project will ultimately reduce the need for expensive water treatment.

More of the Government’s £800m flood risk budget should be spent on managing land in a way that makes space for water rather than just spending the money on hard engineering and flood defence.This change of policy would then help to reduce the risk of floods downstream and take into account the impact of climate change and the affects of extreme weather as seen in Gloucestershire and Yorkshire in the summer of 2007. A joint project between the National Trust, Environment Agency and University of Durham at Upper Wharfedale in Yorkshire is seeking to create space for water and tackle the problem of flash flooding via wetland creation and soft engineering.

Extend the use of carbon markets to provide financial incentives for investment in land based carbon, such as peat bogs, to reduce losses of carbon from soil.Over 10 billion tonnes of carbon is estimated to be stored in UK soil – equivalent to around a year and a half of global greenhouse gas emissions - and the peatlands are the single largest store of carbon in the UK. A carbon audit at the National Trust’s Wallington Estate in Northumberland is assessing the amount of carbon stored in its soil and biomass and how much is emitted through day to day operations. An essential part of this project will be to restore and conserve the carbon banks.

There is a need for more NHS and Primary Care Trust funding to be allocated for green exercise prescriptions in the outdoors.This would help get more people out into their local green spaces to tackle obesity and improve their health and well-being. At the National Trust’s Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire the local council and health authorities have been prescribing healthy walking to help tackle the obesity problems in the East Midlands.

Tony Burton, Director of Policy and Strategy at the National Trust, said:
'With a changing climate and rising demands for new built development, the pressure on land is increasing. We need to harness new sources of investment and new partnerships to realise the potential of our land to help tackle flooding, climate change and the supply of clean water and green spaces for the benefit of us all.'

Forecast changeable

This National Trust document (available as a download from here) gives a very good summary of the possible impacts of climate change on a range National Trust activities.

It is a very good read and as well as telling you a lot about what the Trust is thinking it will help you think about the diverse range of impacts that you and your business might face.