A new poll published by The Wildlife Trusts yesterday demonstrated just how important environmental issues will be in this General Election. It showed that action on nature and climate change is a key concern for voters, with 4 in 10 people surveyed planning to vote based on environmental policies offered by candidates and a majority of people considering environmental issues to be at least as important as other issues facing the country.
Today’s intervention by the Labour Party, who have set out their plans for restoring nature, is therefore a significant one in the election campaign, as voters look to analyse the political parties’ environmental policies.
The Wildlife Trusts are pleased to see some essential steps to restoring nature included within the plan. Labour pledge action to promote regenerative farming to ensure nature’s recovery and food security, putting an end to the use of bee-killing pesticides, and improving people’s access to green space by embedding nature into the planning system.
These commitments are a welcome start, and we look forward to seeing more detail on how nature’s recovery and renewable energy will be delivered alongside Labour’s commitment to build 1.5 million homes and how nature will play a role in combatting the climate change. We strongly encourage all political parties to now set out their plans to tackle the nature crisis.
The British public care deeply about nature. They worry that the country we will leave to our children will be without the sights and sounds of wildlife that previous generations enjoyed, and they recognise that without nature we cannot meet the challenges we face as a country. Our polling also showed that almost 8 in 10 people think that nature is important for our well-being and economic prosperity, but just a quarter are satisfied with the current state of nature and climate in the UK.
This election is a critical one for nature’s recovery.
As a result of decades of nature loss and degradation, we now face risks to food security, floods, extreme heat and wildfires, and a societal disconnection to nature with ensuing mental health repercussions.
The current UK Government took significant positive steps by committing the UK to the world’s first legally binding targets to halt nature’s decline and the international target to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030. However, if we are to meet these, the next government will have to do the bulk of the work – and the current Government has yet to take sufficient action to meet that target nor have they laid out clear and credible plans for how they would do so.
We need all other political parties to step up their plans for nature recovery to ensure that they meet the challenge to halt and reverse nature’s decline – as well as to mitigate and adapt to climate change. If they manage, the electorate and history will look on them kindly: achieving these targets will leave the country a greener, happier and healthier place.