Why We Cannot Save Our Wildlife

 UK NATURE & ENVIRONMENT — APRIL 2026

Based on Defra official statistics, published 28 April 2026 | Data: 1,185 species, 1970–2024

There is a real anger in me about the continued decline of British wildlife. I have spent 30 years watching all my efforts to save British wildlife come to little, and understanding why has been my passion throughout my career. I became a brilliant fundraiser and project manager; I was one of the first advocates of rewilding and helped make rewilding the dominant philosophy that it is today.

But we are still losing, the ‘why’ is explored throughout my work and my writings. Read on. But first, let’s analyse the latest surveys and research.

This week, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs published its annual update to the Indicators of Species Abundance in England, covering data up to 2024. it is one of the most comprehensive audits of English wildlife ever assembled. And what it shows is devastating.

Since the baseline year of 1970, the relative abundance of species across England has fallen by approximately 40%. Priority species, those already identified as threatened and in need of targeted conservation action, have fallen by roughly 80%.. And the trend, in 2024, continues downward.

 

Both indices set to 100 in 1970. All-species index (green): approximately 60 in 2024. Priority species index (red): approximately 20 in 2024. Source: Defra Worksheets 1 and 4, published 28 April 2026.

The mathematics of disappearance

It’s very complex and a lot is missing, and that complexity is actually hiding things that make the real picture a lot worse. When Defra’s statisticians assess species trends over the long term — from the 1970s to the present — they find that 22% of all monitored species have undergone what is classified as a “strong decrease”. Another 19% have weakly declined. That means roughly 41% of English wildlife is heading in the wrong direction, against just 30% that are broadly stable and 30% showing some degree of recovery.

But the short-term picture is even more alarming. Looking only at the past decade, nearly 47% of species are showing strong short-term declines. This is not a slow burn. The rate of loss appears to be accelerating.

The priority species data is, if anything, harder to look at. These are the 161 species already known to be in trouble, listed under Section 41 of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006 precisely because they were identified as requiring focused conservation effort. In 2024, the priority species index stands at roughly 20 out of 100. The species we most urgently tried to protect have lost four-fifths of their relative abundance in fifty years. The long-term trend assessment shows that 48% of priority species have undergone strong declines, with a further 22% weakly declining. Fewer than 12% are broadly stable.

The species we most urgently tried to protect have lost four-fifths of their relative abundance in fifty years.

A tour through the wreckage

There are more worrying signs when you look at individual taxonomic groups. As any experienced ecologist will tell you, it is those most important to supporting our ecosystem that are doing badly, and that means the decline will only worsen.

MOTHS

Moths constitute the largest single group in the indicator, with 444 species tracked through the Rothamsted Insect Survey’s network of light traps and through specialist priority moth monitoring. They are also among the most severely affected. Over the long term, more than half of all monitored moth species are declining: 27% strongly, 25% weakly. Over the short term, the picture is even worse, with 44% in strong short-term decline.

This matters for reasons that go beyond the moths themselves. Moths are nocturnal pollinators of enormous ecological importance, visiting flowers that day-flying insects miss entirely. Research has estimated that moths transfer pollen between a wider variety of plant species than bees and butterflies combined. They are also a primary food source for bats, for swifts, for nightjars, for hedgehogs. When moth populations collapse, the reverberations travel up the food chain and across the food web in ways that are difficult to predict but impossible to stop.

Eight moth species that were previously included in the indicator have had to be dropped this year because their populations have fallen so far that there is insufficient data to model a reliable trend. Among them: the emperor moth, the grey mountain carpet, the heath rustic. We are not watching these species struggle. We are watching the monitoring infrastructure for tracking their struggle begin to fail.

 

BUMBLEBEES

Of the 11 bumblebee species in the indicator, nearly half have shown strong long-term declines. The BeeWalks scheme, which began in 2010, has documented a troubling picture: 45% of species strongly declining over that period, 63% showing strong short-term falls. Bumblebees are of course among our most important pollinators, responsible for a significant proportion of the pollination of both wild plants and agricultural crops. Their loss is not merely a conservation problem. It is an agricultural and economic one.

The ecological context matters here. Bumblebees are losing habitat at both ends: the wildflower-rich grasslands they need for foraging have been reduced to fragments by decades of agricultural intensification, while the warm south-facing banks they require for nesting have been degraded or built over. Climate change is shifting the distributions of both the bees and the plants they depend upon, often at different rates and in different directions. The result is a slow uncoupling of relationships that took millions of years to establish.

FRESHWATER INVERTEBRATES

The 235 freshwater macroinvertebrate taxa tell us a different story: a long period of improvement in river water quality following the clean-up of industrial pollution has produced genuine recovery in some species. But the proportion showing strong short-term declines still stands at 44%.

What the indicator cannot fully capture is the nature of the threats bearing down on freshwater ecosystems right now. Sewage spills from water companies, agricultural run-off, microplastics, pharmaceutical compounds in treated wastewater, the cumulative warming of river temperatures: these are stressors piling on top of one another faster than any monitoring scheme can track.

FISH

The fish data, drawn from the Environment Agency’s National Fish Population Database, covers 37 freshwater and estuarine species and is notable for its instability. What the data shows is high polarisation: 32% of fish species in strong long-term decline, but 35% showing strong increases. This is not reassurance. It reflects the fact that some species have benefited from habitat improvements while others have continued to collapse, and that the aggregate masks a great deal of turbulence beneath it.

Known Knows, Knows Unknown & Unknown Unknowns

The most important statement in the technical annex accompanying this data is that the UK is estimated to be home to around 55,000 native species of fauna, flora and fungi. This indicator tracks only 1,185.

The 2.2% are, on the whole, the species we happen to be able to monitor: the birds that visit fixed transects, the butterflies that fly in daylight along paths where volunteers walk, the moths attracted to the light traps. They skew overwhelmingly towards vertebrates and towards charismatic, well-studied invertebrate groups. They almost entirely exclude fungi, which constitute 32% of the UK’s species. They exclude most beetles, most flies, most wasps and ants, most spiders. They exclude mosses and liverworts. They exclude the vast majority of invertebrates entirely.

 

This is not a criticism of the researchers. They are doing extraordinary work with limited resources, drawing on citizen science surveys run by charitable organisations, statutory monitoring by the Environment Agency, and volunteer networks that have taken decades to build. The Breeding Bird Survey alone relies on the annual effort of thousands of amateur naturalists who walk fixed transects at dawn each spring. Without them, we would know almost nothing.

The 40% decline in species abundance that this indicator documents is a decline in the abundance of the 2.2% of species we can track. The remaining 97.8% are experiencing we know not what. Given what we know about the trajectory of habitat loss, agricultural intensification, pollution and climate change, there is no ecological reason to believe they are doing better than the species we can see, and some concern they are doing worse.

What the data cannot tell us: The indicator covers birds, butterflies, moths, bats, a handful of mammals, some freshwater species and a limited number of plants. It tells us nothing directly about beetles (4,000 UK species), flies (7,000 species), spiders (670 species), fungi (15,000 species), or the vast majority of wild plants. The 40% decline figure represents the most visible fraction of a much larger and largely unmeasured collapse.

Priority species and the illusion of targeted conservation

The priority species index deserves particular attention, because it is the one most directly connected to fifty years of explicit conservation policy. Since the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, through the UK Biodiversity Action Plan in the 1990s, the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act in 2006 and now the Environment Act 2021, successive governments have identified threatened species, listed them, written action plans for them and allocated resources to their recovery. The priority species tracked in this indicator are the beneficiaries of more targeted conservation efforts than any other wildlife in England.

They have declined by 80%.

In a sense, this is the most important number in the entire dataset. It tells us that the existing framework for conservation, identify threatened species, targets resources, monitors, and reports, has not worked. Not in aggregate. Not for the species it was most specifically designed to help.

There are, of course, individual success stories. The peregrine falcon has returned to English cities. The red kite now circles above many motorway verges. Bittern numbers have risen from a handful of booming males to several hundred. These are real and significant achievements, and the people who made them happen deserve genuine credit. But they are the exception in a dataset where the rule is ongoing, accelerating decline. Cherishing the recoveries while ignoring the broader trend is like praising a few successful repairs while the building continues to burn.

Why has targeted conservation failed at scale? The honest answer is that targeted conservation has largely operated at the wrong level. It has focused on individual species when the problem is systemic. It has tried to protect fragments of habitat while the processes destroying habitat have continued unimpeded. It has worked within the existing economic and agricultural framework rather than challenging the framework itself.

Protecting a small population of stone curlews on a managed reserve does not address the fact that the intensive arable landscape surrounding it is essentially dead to almost all other wildlife.

The structural drivers, but not the root cause

The technical annex to this data release is very plain about what it measures and about what it cannot. It is deafeningly quiet about why things are happening, because government statistics are framed not to challenge the people who control the Government and the powerful interests they protect.

But this is no surprise to me. They have been documented in hundreds of peer-reviewed studies and summarised in successive State of Nature reports. They are: agricultural intensification, the use of pesticides and herbicides on a landscape scale, the loss of hedgerows and field margins, urban sprawl, light pollution, river pollution, the fragmentation and degradation of semi-natural habitats, and the compounding effects of climate change on species already stressed by all of the above.

Almost all of these drivers are the direct result of policy choices. The UK’s post-war agricultural policy, shaped by European subsidies and domestic price support mechanisms, systematically incentivised farmers to remove hedgerows, drain wetlands, plough grasslands and maximise yields from every available hectare. The results were spectacular for food production and catastrophic for wildlife. Over roughly three decades between 1950 and 1980, England lost around half its ancient woodland, most of its lowland heath and wet grassland, and the vast majority of its wildflower meadows.

The post-Brexit agricultural settlement was supposed to change this. The Environmental Land Management schemes, replacing the area-based subsidies of the Common Agricultural Policy, were designed to pay farmers for environmental outcomes rather than production. The theory was sound. The economics and practice have been a disaster - the simple truth is we cannot afford to pay landowners not to destroy wildlife. The fundamental question is, we should not pay landowners to rent a little wildlife from them, but tax those landowners who destroy nature, natural processes and ecosystem services.

We can liken this problem to a tree; a tree represents a systemic problem like poverty, injustice, inefficient land use or degradation of our environment. Hacking at branches is futile, as it can stimulate growth, whereas striking at the root eliminates the source.

The root cause of all environmental problems are becuase people make money from destroying nature - that is the root and the problem we need to face.

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

What ‘halting the decline by 2030’ actually requires

The Environment Act 2021 committed the UK government to halting the decline in species abundance by 2030 and increasing it by at least 10% by 2042. The target is legally binding. The data published this week tells us that in 2024, with six years remaining, the trend continues downward.

Halting a decline of this magnitude and trajectory in six years would require action at a scale that is without precedent in the history of English nature conservation. It would require not tinkering at the margins of agricultural policy but fundamentally changing the economics of farming and land ownership in England. It would require not protecting a few more Sites of Special Scientific Interest but restoring ecological function across a significant proportion of the English countryside. It would require addressing water quality, light pollution, pesticide use and urban expansion simultaneously, with the kind of joined-up policy ambition that no recent government has shown the slightest inclination to attempt.

It would also require honesty about the fact that conservation, as currently practised, is operating far too far downstream of the problems it is trying to solve. Counting species in reserves while the surrounding landscape continues to degrade is not a conservation strategy. It is an attempt to maintain a living museum while human activity engulfs and destroys it.

 

How to make damaging nature unprofitable

None of this means conservation effort has been wasted, or that individual species cannot recover. Some clearly can. Beaver reintroductions, which John McAlistair and I pioneered back in 2001, have transformed stretches of riparian habitat at a pace that has impressed ecologists, with knock-on effects on water quality, flood attenuation and invertebrate diversity that would have taken decades of active management to replicate. Rewilding projects on degraded agricultural land have shown that, given time and reduced grazing pressure, substantial biological richness can return without continuous intervention.

But these examples work because they change the conditions on the ground, not just the species list. That is the logic that needs to operate at a national scale, and it is a logic that voluntary conservation spending and poorly designed biodiversity credits cannot deliver on their own.

The argument made here is that two fiscal tools could do what targeted conservation has not: a Land Value Tax, which shifts the cost of holding land onto its site value rather than its productive use, removing the incentive to farm intensively purely to maintain an appreciating asset; and direct externality pricing on the pollution that agriculture and industry impose on soil, rivers and the species that depend on them. Together, these would harness price signals to drive land use decisions in a direction that conservation payments are currently trying to purchase, expensively and incompletely, against the grain of the existing incentive structure.

This is not land seizure or central planning. It is a correction to a market that currently prices land as a risk-free appreciating asset while treating the ecological damage it causes as someone else’s problem, only alleviated by taxpayer subsidy. Getting those prices right is the only promising route to reversing wildlife decline, rather than adding further layers of subsidy and bureaucracy to a system whose underlying incentives remain unchanged.

Conservationists need to grasp this idea and fast, and release all other ideas that are economically unfeasible and counterproductive - read my other blogs to understand why.

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The 2024 data published by Defra this week shows the all-species index standing at approximately 60 (index value, baseline 100 in 1970) and the priority species index at approximately 20. The next update, including 2025 data, is expected in spring 2027. The underlying code used to generate the models is published openly on GitHub by the Biological Records Centre.

DATA SOURCES

All figures derived from Defra, Indicators of Species Abundance in England, 1970 to 2024, published 28 April 2026 (Official Statistics). Technical methodology described in the accompanying Technical Annex, also published 28 April 2026. Species trend data: Bat Conservation Trust, British Trust for Ornithology, Butterfly Conservation, Environment Agency, Joint Nature Conservation Committee, People’s Trust for Endangered Species, Plantlife, Queen Mary University of London, Rare Breeding Birds Programme Secretariat, Rothamsted Research, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and partner organisations. All data published under the Open Government Licence v3.0.