Huge tracts of precious riverside habitats for water voles and other wildlife in England are being lost as they are not covered by post-Brexit farming rules, campaigners warn.
New analysis by the Wildlife Trusts found more than 400 square km of riverside habitat in England may have been lost since the UK left the EU in 2020.
Under the common agricultural policy (CAP), which subsidised farming when the UK was in the bloc, farmers had to keep a 2-metre buffer between their fields and the rivers. But with the UK’s exit from the CAP, farmers may try to increase their income by ploughing to the edge of their field – an area that, at present, is unprofitable for them.
As well as being a critical habitat for wildlife, waterway banks are home to plants that filter pollution from the water.
The Guardian recently revealed the UK is using Brexit to weaken crucial environmental protections and is falling behind the EU, despite Labour’s manifesto pledge not to dilute standards.
The Wildlife Trusts are now calling on the government to set targets for riverbank restoration schemes to help clean the UK’s rivers. In a submission to ministers, they said: “The post-Brexit end of cross-compliance requirements for farmers to maintain a 2m buffer strip next to waterways means this problem is likely to have worsened over recent years. The absence of wilder banks has significant effects on the form and function of rivers. Eroded soil and farm chemicals and manure flow straight into the channel.
“Exposed waterways, lacking in overhanging plants, let alone trees, heat up in the summer sun, sometimes reaching temperatures that are fatal for fish and aquatic insects. Road runoff contaminated with urban chemicals also flows directly into watercourses. In times of flood, waters break out of the channel, causing disruption and damage to crops, roads and homes in their path.”
Riverbanks and wetlands have been deteriorating for some time. On the River Swale in Yorkshire, the Wildlife Trusts found that more than half the historical wetland habitat, which includes the river and the wetter land that surrounds it, had been lost from the mid-Swale area since the early 19th century, and much of what remained was severely fragmented. This has caused plants including bog sedge, white beak-sedge, Rannoch-rush and oblong-leaved sundew to become locally extinct.
Devon Wildlife Trust is restoring a huge section of riverbank at Halsdon nature reserve, where hundreds of tonnes of soil has been lost to erosion. This is owing to factors upstream, including intensification of agriculture as well as housebuilding.
Sorting the post-Brexit change in law could form a critical part of a rescue plan, campaigners say.
A Department for Environment,Food & Rural Affairs spokesperson said the government was looking at funding farmers to restore riverbanks, adding: “Ministers are considering how the reformed SFI scheme can best be spent to clean up our waterways, including buffer strips.”
Ali Morse, water policy manager at the Wildlife Trusts, said: “Rivers are polluted by a cocktail of chemicals, old and new, and excess nutrients from farming and sewage. Record-low spring flows and summer drought has concentrated pollution levels further, leaving wildlife under severe pressure and, as a society, we make matters worse by taking too much water out of rivers for our own use. It’s a deadly blend of damage and it’s time we invested in recovery.
“Wilder riverbanks would help stop pollution from getting into waterways and also restore badly needed natural habitats to help wildlife thrive along rivers once more. People could enjoy a riverside picnic beneath trees and see the flash of a kingfisher or the splash of a water vole.”
