The government’s plan to protect and restore nature in England by 2030 has been condemned as “pathetic” and “completely insufficient” in the face of the spiralling environmental crisis.
The long-awaited plan published on Monday calls for landowners to voluntarily opt to protect and enhance nature, rather than creating legal protections for nature across more of the country’s land, critics say.
Ministers said the strategy would accelerate action to meet an international commitment to restore 30% of nature by 2030 made by more than 100 countries during Cop15 negotiations in Montreal in 2022.
The target is considered the minimum restoration needed to halt and reverse the global decline in nature. But with four years to go, the government is a long way off the target. Its analysis shows just 7% of land in England meets the “30by30” criteria.
The new plan identifies land covering about 32% of England that is either already likely to or has the potential to contribute to the 30by30 goal, but the plan acknowledges that reaching the target will require a step change in ambition, coordination and delivery.
Meanwhile, the country’s biggest landowners, the Church of England, is preparing to vote on Tuesday on a motion to rewild 30% of its land by 2030.
The environment minister Mary Creagh said the government’s plan was a call to action for land managers, farmers and communities to work together to secure the natural systems that underpin a healthy, resilient and prosperous country.
But the nature writer Guy Shrubsole said it was more of the failed politics of the past 40 years, with ministers failing to take public control of the nature crisis and contracting it out to private landowners who would not deliver.
“It’s pathetic,” he said. “In the dying days of [Keir] Starmer’s government, ministers have admitted they’re failing utterly to meet their own target to restore nature in England. So instead of an actual plan with fresh policies, they’ve issued this desperate plea asking landowners to voluntarily protect nature.”
Shrubsole called for the new government under Andy Burnham’s leadership to scrap the plan and instead take radical action, legally protecting much more land for nature, giving national parks and the Forestry Commission a legal duty for nature recovery, and funding habitat restoration through many more landscape recovery projects.
The RSPB said the strategy was “deeply disappointing and completely insufficient”.
The strategy says the most protected natural landscapes, known as sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs), are the gold standard and can be formally counted towards the target. But critics note that the strategy contains no plans or timeline to create new SSSIs.
The plan highlights how managers of protected landscapes, including national park authorities, are powerful delivery partners for meeting the 30by30 target. But ministers said that because most land in national parks and national landscapes was privately owned, the success of the strategy would depend on the actions of landowners, land managers and other organisations with an interest, such as water companies.
The weaknesses of this approach are highlighted by a row that is coming to a head within the Church of England over its attempt to rewild 30% of the land it owns by 2030.
The Rev Canon Val Plumb, an area dean in Oxford, will introduce a private motion to the General Synod to be voted on on Tuesday. She said the country’s land was “crying and dying out for liberation”. Currently, 3.5% of the church’s land is used for nature restoration, which Plumb said was not enough. “As humans and Christians, we have an honourable calling to protect creation,” she added.
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However, not everyone in the church agrees. William Nye, the secretary general of the archbishops’ council, said the motion was inconsistent with the church’s legal obligations and responsibility to ensure “long-term capital growth”.
The financier and environmentalist Ben Goldsmith described this approach as nonsense. He said: “There is a whole slew of revenues you can get now from nature that weren’t there five or 10 years ago.”
The environmentalist and TV presenter Chris Packham said a key reason for the slow progress in reaching the national 30by30 target was access to land, with 50% of the land owned by 1% of the people.
“So as a consequence of that, we’ve always struggled to be able to access or afford land for any nature conservation purposes,” Packham said. “The church owns a significant amount of tenanted land which is given over to industrial farming. We feel it’s responsible in this time of crisis for them to rewild a proportion of that land.”
For the motion to pass, it would need majority support among the 480 synod members.
The Church Commissioners, a body that manages the church’s endowment fund, argues that the current approach to managing the fund’s farmland portfolio is consistent with its legal duties. But in a legal opinion commissioned by the campaign group Wild Card, Prof Mark Hill KC found that the church was legally free to restore 30% of its land.
Hill wrote: “It is to be hoped that the commissioners will revisit their current policies and implement the 30by30 target as a matter of expedition without the need for litigation. It is both an ecological and a doctrinal imperative.”
In response, the Church Commissioners said while 30by30 was an “important national target”, it related to conservation. “Because of the nature of our land, our efforts primarily focus on sustainable farming, forestry, renewable energy and thriving communities,” it said.
