climate change. Droughts, floods and plagues make the headlines, and dire warnings may induce scepticism or, worse, fatalism, but behind the hysteria lie some very inconvenient predictions. Heat in summer means more demand for water.10 Floods in winter mean more silt and more pollution. The river life is adapted to what we have, not the climate we might get. For the river catchments, business-as-usual for another quarter of a century looks bad.
Agriculture plays a big part in both water demand and pollution and much else. A common theme in all these sad tales of decline is the impacts of modern farming not just on specific species, but on farmland birds generally and on the state of our rivers and on inshore marine environments and on the emissions and air-quality consequences and on the loss of invertebrates and mammals and the serious decline in the soils. It is beyond doubt that it is the intensification of farming, and in particular the application of chemicals, that is a primary driver of this major environmental damage.
By 2050, targeted chemicals should be able to get rid of almost anything that competes with or damages crops. Indeed, many can now. Almost all arable weeds (and in some robotic applications every individual weed) can be killed off with the non-selective herbicide glyphosate. That is why one well-known brand is called ‘Roundup’. As glyphosate comes under increasing regulatory scrutiny, replacements are on their way. Without a change of direction in agriculture, by 2050 herbicides will be completely and selectively engineered for specific crops, and pesticides will finish off specific insects. Ultimately nothing will be left for wildlife to eat. By 2050 it will largely be over.
The uplands will not escape these pressures in the business-as-usual scenario. Being home to a lot of biodiversity now does not mean they will continue to be so. The economics of marginal upland farming is already precarious. If and when the main elements of the CAP wither away, and in the absence of proactive efforts to protect and enhance the uplands, things could go downhill very quickly. This farmed landscape could revert to ranch-style extensive farming, to intensive game-shooting and to development. Worse still, it might simply be abandoned. The rewilders might like this idea. Let the scrub grow back and then the woodlands re-clothe the hills. Except it will not be like this. The uplands are farmed landscapes. It is farmers who have shaped the landscapes that so many people, and so much of nature, enjoy. Farmers created the hedgerows, and the ditches and the lanes and the meadows. Grazing stock is the essence of the uplands. Woodland birds and woodland mammals might benefit, but this will not conserve the nature and landscapes we so admire today. By 2050 the uplands may be playgrounds still, but not the playgrounds we know now. Few think that zero subsidies will produce a helpful answer, except those who simply want us humans to abandon the land.
The impacts of farm pollution are exacerbated by other developments. Fish farms bring direct pollution to our coasts, and perhaps even more pernicious is the harvesting of sand eels and other small marine life to feed the farmed salmon. Direct pollution from shipping, from oil slicks and the washing of tanks at sea (including now palm oil), to the illegal dumping of waste and chemicals, all contribute to the declines. Plastics have become ubiquitous in our seas and along our coasts. Their sources are all largely out of sight, diffuse, and able to escape the law.11 These are largely out of control. By 2050, with lots more trade and shipping, with lots more fish farms, and with global warming impacting on already stressed ecosystems, there may be no puffins, few gulls, and below the surface a more lifeless habitat. By 2050, eels and wild salmon might be an occasional rarity, as their populations decline below the thresholds for renewing themselves naturally.
The threats to our urban environment out to 2050 are about both its size and its content. There can be little doubt there is going to be a lot more ‘urban’ in 25 years’ time. More greenfield and brownfield sites12 will be built on, new villages and towns will be built, and the built land area will absorb more and more of the Green Belt. There will be quite a lot of semi-urban sprawl for the ‘executive homes’ so beloved and profitable to the building companies. It is not inevitable that all of these developments will have less biodiversity than the land they concrete over. But concrete they will, and without strong net environmental gain compensations, the aggregate impacts are probably going to be worse. For every showcase green development project, there are many that are anything but.
In terms of the content of urban areas, the temptation to concrete over the green spaces in our towns and cities will become increasingly intense. The parks and gardens are going backwards for a variety of reasons, and over the next quarter of a century, if we carry on as we are, these will gradually disappear. What remain may be turned into amusement parks, and nature will get squeezed out. Brownfield sites, even where they have surprisingly high levels of biodiversity, will go under concrete.
What is coming next
The above stock-taking is a picture of general declines, with some noticeable exceptions. Almost all of the causes are known and persistent, and all can and should be dealt with. Yet what dramatically raises the stakes are the new challenges the natural environment is facing. Without positive action, all the trends described above will continue. It will be a picture of gradual declines, punctuated by sudden population collapses and occasional trumpeted successes. As resilience is tested, one day you will look up and there won’t be any swallows and swifts in May. The scary thing is that you might not even notice. For the next generation, it may be a case of not missing what they have never seen, except in pictures and films.
These extrapolated trends could get a whole lot worse without immediate action. Over the next few decades through to mid-century, Britain faces a rising population, and rising consumption. These together mean more houses, more developments and more hard infrastructures. On a business-as-usual basis, the results will in aggregate be negative for the natural environment. It is not only the present baseline that needs to be addressed, but also the ‘known unknowns’, and resilience against the ‘unknown unknowns’ of the future.
More people
Britain is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, even though large areas are sparsely inhabited. There are the great conurbations, and then there are the Scottish mountains, the Pennines and mid-Wales. Although London and the surrounding area is being overtaken in scale by the mega cities of Southeast Asia, the southeast is as densely populated as parts of the Netherlands and Hong Kong. The corridor that runs north to Birmingham and Manchester is dense too, and HS2 will make it more so. The new Oxford–Cambridge corridor, with more than 1 million new houses planned, is going to add another dense conurbation. The clamour to build on the Green Belt is getting ever louder.
In the 1970s and especially the 1980s, the assumption was that Britain’s population would peak and then perhaps gradually decline, and in the process it would age. The assumption was that Britain would go the way of Japan and Germany – with an ageing, static or even declining population. British women have already gone through the so-called ‘demographic transition’, and the silver lining to the silver age should be less pressure on resources. The depopulation of the rural areas that followed the great urbanisation of Britain in the nineteenth century, indeed since the enclosures, would continue relieving environmental pressures. We could, it was thought, become an older, less populated and greener country.
This has been turned on its head by immigration. For much of its recent history, and especially in the nineteenth century, Britain exported people (and Ireland more so). The displaced rural populations colonised the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and countries throughout the British Empire. It was the safety valve as mortality rates fell.
Britain started the twentieth century with a population of around 25 million, and ended it with around 60 million. Nature was bound to suffer as a result, especially as the 60 million were many times wealthier than the 25 million. Immigration picked up as the Empire slowly wound down, with notable flows from the Caribbean and then Uganda and East Africa, and from India and Pakistan.
The initial numbers were quite small, but the game changed in the twenty-first century. European immigration was added to the non-Europeans, notably after 2004 when the Eastern European countries