Coventry East MP Mary Creagh has welcomed a record £60 million investment aimed at protecting some of the UK’s most threatened wildlife, as part of a major expansion of the Government’s Species Recovery Programme.
The funding, announced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), will support 130 projects helping 364 threatened species across England, the largest sum ever committed to the programme.
Ms Creagh, who has responsibility for the scheme as part of her Defra brief, said the investment reflected the scale of the challenge facing British wildlife.
“Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and we are determined to turn that around by doubling the amount of money available. This £60 million investment is the largest ever made in the Species Recovery Programme,” she said.
“It will make a real difference to 364 threatened species, from dolphins and harbour porpoises around our coast to the northern dune tiger beetles and swallow tail butterflies.
“Nature recovery depends on the work of dedicated conservationists across the country. This funding will help them go further and faster in bringing our rarest wildlife back from the brink.”
Decades of decline
Wildlife populations in the UK have fallen by around a third since 1970, with one in six species now at risk of extinction. Ministers hope the funding boost will help reverse that trend, supporting plants, animals and fungi across woodlands, farmland, rivers and coastal waters.
The Species Recovery Programme has already helped prevent the national extinction of at least 35 species, including the large blue butterfly and the fen orchid, since it began.
The new money, which will be delivered by Natural England, forms part of the Government’s wider “Wild Again: Restoring England’s Wildlife” initiative. A further £30 million will go towards species recovery on the national forest estate.
Where the money is going
Among the projects being funded is research into how “forever chemicals” and other pollutants are affecting dolphins and harbour porpoises around the UK coastline. The work, led by the Zoological Society of London, will help conservationists target protection efforts where they are needed most.
In Cumbria, habitat restoration work on the coastal dunes will support the northern dune tiger beetle, one of England’s fastest and rarest insects, in a project led by the Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Trust.
Elsewhere, conservationists will track individual swallowtail butterflies, Britain’s largest butterfly species, along with the milk-parsley plant on which they depend, as part of a monitoring project spanning several regions of the country. The species is now confined to a small number of wetland sites.
Natural England is also using detection dogs and environmental DNA testing in an effort to locate any surviving populations of the ghost orchid, one of the country’s most elusive plants, which has not been recorded in the wild for decades.
The investment is designed to support the Government’s legally binding commitments to halt the decline in species abundance by 2030 and reduce the risk of species extinction by 2042.
