UK will miss almost all its 2020 nature targets, says official report

Failure to protect wildlife, cut pollution and increase funding have left nature in ‘deep crisis’

Damian Carrington and Patrick Wintour

Fri 22 Mar 2019 11.14 GMTLast modified on Fri 22 Mar 2019 16.51 GMT

The UK will miss almost all the 2020 nature targets it signed up to a decade ago, according to a report by the government’s official advisers.

The nation is failing to protect threatened species; end the degradation of land; reduce agricultural pollution; and increase funding for green schemes, the assessment concludes. It also says the UK is not ending unsustainable fishing; stopping the arrival of invasive alien species; nor raising public awareness of the importance of biodiversity.

The targets were set in 2010 by the global Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the report from the joint nature conservation committee (JNCC) found insufficient progress was being made on 14 of the 19 targets.

The news came on the day Britain formally launched its bid to host the UN climate change conference in 2020, seeking to prove its green credentials are not tarnished and to show the disarray that has been caused by Brexit does not mean the UK has forfeited its right to be a major international player.

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