In a stark indictment of Britain’s responsibilities towards protecting nature, researchers at the Natural History Museum Newton used an index that measures biodiversity to give Britain a score of 50.3 which makes it the most nature-depleted country in the group of leading industrial nations i.e. G-7 nations.
France scored 65.3, Canada scored 89.3 in the US scored 63.4. A report from 2019 said that 40% of species in Britain had declined in the past 50 years. Britain is the worst nation in the G-7 in respect of protecting flora and fauna.
Comment: it’s hard to comment positively. Protecting the environment costs money and the coronavirus pandemic has trashed the British economy and due to heavy borrowing to deal with it the nation has more than £2 trillion worth of debt, which is the highest in the history of the nation. A lack of funding is going to bear heavily upon any projects to conserve nature.
I see a bleak future for conservation in Britain. I don’t see it improving. Another factor is that Britain is more heavily populated than the other nations referred to in this article. This surely must have a massive bearing upon the nation’s relationship with nature. The more people there are, the harder it is to protect the landscape and the animals that live within it. That’s common sense.
However, the country does very little about curbing population growth if anything at all. And as the population grows farming has to become more intensive to feed people which is also liable to destroy wildlife and deplete biodiversity. It’s bleak I’m afraid.
