To ask Her Majesty's Government whether they intend to remain closely aligned with the EU’s Biodiversity Strategy after Brexit; and if not, what plans they have to implement a long-term post-Brexit strategy on biodiversity.
Answered on
20 May 2019
The Government is committed to ensuring that, when the UK leaves the EU, our existing environmental protections are maintained and, where possible, enhanced. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act ensures that the whole body of existing EU environmental law, including the Habitats and the Wild Birds Directives, continues to have effect in UK law following our departure from the EU.
The EU Biodiversity Strategy implements commitments to halt biodiversity loss agreed in 2010 by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
Biodiversity policy is devolved in the UK. In England, those same international commitments to halt biodiversity loss are implemented through the Biodiversity 2020 Strategy and related documents such as the National Pollinator Strategy.
In the 25 Year Environment Plan, we committed to developing a new strategy for nature to replace Biodiversity 2020. Our intention is to publish this strategy in early 2021 to take forward the new international commitments for biodiversity, in particular the new global biodiversity framework, to be agreed under the Convention on Biological Diversity, in 2020. It will also set out in more detail how we intend to take forward the ambitions for nature in the 25 Year Environment Plan.
Under the new strategy, the Government will continue to work towards, among other things, clean, safe, healthy, productive and biologically diverse oceans and seas; and on land, restoring 75% of our protected sites to favourable condition by 2042 and establishing a Nature Recovery Network. The Nature Recovery Network will expand and connect wildlife rich habitat by developing landscape scale partnerships to manage land in a way that supports the recovery of our much loved wildlife.