The latest thing endangered by Brexit? Britain's rich biodiversity

In the late 20th century, rewilding efforts saw populations of wild wolves in Poland expand. By 2000 they had crossed the border into Germany. In 2017 a young female wolf travelled 500km from Germany into Denmark and met male wolves there, and now Denmark has its own company of wolves.

The ecological reality is that nature doesn’t respect geopolitical boundaries. Species cross borders, and that means anyone who wants to protect nature will need to be involved in international cooperation.

Some might protest that Britain is an island, and that Denmark’s wolves are unlikely to turn Viking and invade by sea. But we are not Madagascar; our nearest neighbours are 20 miles away. Many of the species essential for the quality of British air, water and crops are not unique to our shores. Our wildlife is part of the ecogeographic region of mainland Europe, to and from which birds, seals and fish freely move. Even some bats travel thousands of miles and cross the North Sea.

But there’s an even bigger picture to consider. If a European species is endangered, a pan-European approach is needed to identify where the surviving pockets are, so that a coordinated effort can be made to protect them.

As an ecologist, I spend much of my time advising British developers on how to deal with protected species found on building sites. They’ll often ask why on earth great crested newts are protected. “How can they be endangered?” a developer will say. “All my sites are crawling with them.”

The answer is that great crested newts have suffered huge population declines right across Europe. There are indeed lots of newts in some parts of England because we’re essentially the world’s stronghold for the species, and that’s why we protect them. Great crested newts may not be as glamorous as wolves, but they play a vital role in cycling nutrients between land and water.

The European eel used to form 50 per cent of the weight of the fish in UK rivers, but populations have declined by 95 per cent since 1970. Reversing that decline is not a problem for Britain alone. When it’s time to breed, all the eels in Europe swim down river and out into the Atlantic to spawn. When their elvers hatch they drift back into whichever European country the ocean current takes them. European cooperation is needed to monitor eel populations, and to stop international criminal gangs poaching elvers in, say, the Severn Estuary and transporting them illegally across Europe to sell as a delicacy in east Asia.

That’s why the strategy suggested by the UK Environment Secretary’s speech this week is unlikely to work. What George Eustice said was full of hints that biodiversity protection may be watered down once we leave the EU. He stressed that there was “no point leaving the EU to keep everything the same” and talked about “better protection for species that are characteristic of our country and critical to our ecosystems that the EU has sometimes overlooked—things like water voles, red squirrels.”

This fundamentally misunderstands the cross-border approach needed for species protection. Bats and newts may have featured in Macbeth rather than The Wind In The Willows, but they are nevertheless an essential part of European ecosystems. Mr Eustice talked about the “negative consequences to attempting to legislate for these matters at a supranational level. It tends to lead to a culture of perpetual legal jeopardy where national governments can become reluctant to try new things.”

But the purpose of supranational law is to act as the floor, not the ceiling. There has never been any barrier to trying “new things” that go further than the law and better enhance species protection. Eustice’s suggestion that only by leaving the EU would the UK have the freedom to try different ways of protecting species and then rethink them if they don’t work suggests we can now expect a lowering of protections.

Parties to the International Convention on Biological Diversity are now working on a post-2020 framework and it is clear that the next ten years are critical in turning back the tide of biodiversity loss. Every aspect of human society depends on biodiversity and the “goods and services” that the ecosystem provides for us, from food and water, fibre and fuel, clean air to breathe and a regulated climate to spiritual and cultural benefits. Biodiversity protection really is the key to our continued survival.

That’s why now is not the time to try things out and tinker with them, or to take a Little Britain approach to minding our own hedgehogs. We do still have time, but what we need is international cooperation, and not to throw out EU species protection legislation in a bonfire of red tape.