8 UK organisations join UKOTCF calling for UK Government to give adequate support to UKOT terrestrial conservation

Sombrero Black Lizard, a species unique to tiny Sombrero Island, Anguilla - and rating highly too in the new measures. A campaign some 20 years ago coordinated by UKOTCF, other conservation bodies and FCO, prevented total habitat destruction across the island, which is now a nature reserve designated under the Ramsar Convention. Photo: Dr Mike Pienkowski

In an open letter to The Rt. Hon. Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park, Minister of State for Pacific and the Environment, at UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), UKOTCF and 8 other UK national and international conservation organisations have called on UK Government to fund more adequately terrestrial conservation in UK Overseas Territories (UKOTs). The UKOTs and Crown Dependencies (CDs) hold at least 94% of the species which are found on UK sovereign territory and nowhere else. For obvious biological reasons, these species are mainly terrestrial. However, although in recent years, funding from UK Government for marine conservation around UKOTs has received major and overdue increases, terrestrial conservation has not – and has even been reduced in priority for UK funding.

In an event linked to this issue, on 8th December, Lord Goldsmith reflected on the very small proportion of world environment spend which addresses biodiversity, compared with climate-change, and the need to boost the biodiversity spend. We hope that, similarly, the very low UK spend on terrestrial conservation in the UK Overseas Territories can be boosted to a more reasonable level.

In addition to fulfilling its own international responsibilities, and in the context of the forthcoming 2021 Conferences of the Parties (CoPs) of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Climate-Change conventions, the letter calls on UK Government also to take the lead in encouraging nations to adopt additional technical measures to help assess progress (or otherwise) in their conservation success over the years. These different measures also demonstrate the greater importance of UKOTs over Great Britain and Northern Island (GB&NI) for international conservation importance. GB&NI are themselves important, but UKOTs far more so, but receive several orders of magnitude less UK Government conservation funding per unique (endemic) species than does GB&NI.

In addition to the great intrinsic value of endemic and other native species and natural ecosystems of the UKOTs and CDs, they also provide irreplaceable ecosystem services to the human communities there. These include provision of food, water, materials, medicine sources, air and water cleansing, carbon-capture (to fight climate change), storm protection, enhancement of local economies and employment, and the quality of life, amongst countless other functions on which we depend.  

The letter can be read here.

The organisations signing the letter to the Minister of State are:

On the EDGE Conservation

Fauna & Flora International

The Shark Trust

Synchronicity Earth

Zoological Society of London

Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

UK Overseas Territories Conservation Forum

People’s Trust for Endangered Species

Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust

For descriptions of the technical measures reference in the letter, see e.g.

https://www.edgeofexistence.org/science/; and https://www.iucn.org/commissions/ssc-groups/cross-cutting/phylogenetic-diversity-task-force.