Show caption The cirl was hurtling towards extinction but was saved by slight changes to farming practice. Photograph: Alamy Wildlife RSPB boss: Britain has one last chance to save endangered species Chief executive warns of a devastating loss of wildlife if three new parliamentary bills do not rein in UK farming practices Robin McKie Science Editor Sat 18 Aug 2018 13.59 BST Share on Facebook

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Ministers may have only 12 months to rescue Britain’s degraded environment and to save its endangered birds and animals. That is the stark conclusion of Michael Clarke, chief executive of the RSPB, who has warned that parliamentary bills – to be published over the next year – will have to make crucial changes to the way our farms and fisheries are run if the wildlife and landscape of the nation are to be rescued from their dangerously depleted condition.

“We are on a cusp, and if we fail to act decisively we will pay the price in coming years,” Clarke told the Observer last week.

The three forthcoming bills – on agriculture, on fisheries and on the environment – will replace the EU legislation that currently controls our farming, fishing industry and the quality of our air, water and wildlife. The government has yet to announce what these bills will contain. However, conservationists such as Clarke now fear there is a real risk that one or all of these new pieces of legislation will fail to provide the necessary powers to restore our crisis-hit environment.

“Since 1980, across Europe 420 million individual birds have disappeared from the countryside thanks to the practices of modern agriculture,” said Clarke. And that staggering drop is matched by an even more catastrophic decline in insect life over the same period of time, he added.

The mountain hare has almost vanished from Scotland. Photograph: Alamy

“For years, we could see the lack of insects on our windscreens on summer evenings. It was a smoking gun but there was no hard data – until recent research in Germany showed there had been a 75% decline in its flying insects, figures since matched by Dutch and some UK data. The insects have gone – and so have 420 million birds.”

Similarly a study, published by a team led by Adam Watson, of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, showed numbers of hares in the eastern Scottish highlands have plummeted by 99% since the middle of the 20th century. This disappearance – due, in part, to the uprooting of moorlands to plant conifer forests – is “both compelling and of great concern,” said Watson.

As to the causes of these declines, the intensification and spread of agriculture and changes in land use take most of the blame – with the EU common agricultural policy (CAP) being considered a particularly destructive agent in this process. The CAP stresses the importance of agricultural output above all else and has helped destroy the homes and food sources of countless birds, animals and insects, said Clarke.

Michael Clarke, RSPB chief executive, believes there is still time to save turtle doves and other endangered species. Photograph: RSPB

Crucially, as Britain prepares to withdraw from the CAP and the EU, the nation has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put right this damage, said Clarke. About £3bn a year is spent on British farming through CAP, he pointed out.

“That money has more or less gone entirely on boosting output from farms – at a terrible cost to the countryside. The forthcoming agriculture bill needs to ensure that some of that money goes on maintaining the ecological quality of farms and the countryside.” Failing to do so would have appalling consequences, he added. “Dozens of critically endangered birds will be wiped out unless we change our ways.”

The turtle dove provides a good example, he added. Once widespread in the UK, it has declined in numbers by more than 90% since the 1980s. “At the rate we are going, the only sight we might get of these birds in a few years is on a Christmas card.”

The turtle dove feeds its young on the seeds of a range of wild flowers that have, over the years, been uprooted to provide land for intensive farming. “Farmers need help and cash to return some of this land to protected, ecologically rich countryside and so save the turtle dove and other threatened species. That means less money for intensive farming and more for protecting our landscape in future.”

These goals are not pious: conservationists point out that the cirl, or village, bunting, was hurtling, like the turtle dove, towards extinction in the 1990s and for similar reasons but was rescued after farmers were persuaded to make slight changes in farming practices that helped preserve food stocks and restored numbers to encouraging levels. Similar success has been made in reversing declines in numbers of stone curlews. “It is possible to make reversals in species declines and often by taking fairly simple measures,” said Clarke.

In the wake of the agriculture bill, the government is also set to publish its fisheries bill, which will replace much of the legislation involved in the EU’s common fisheries policy, a process that Clarke described as “a disaster” that has led to serious depletion of stocks. The new bill would have to find ways to ensure future fish stocks were better preserved, while the third bill on the list, the forthcoming environment bill, would have to establish an environmental watchdog for the nation, one that had real powers to hold the government’s own agencies to account over ecological issues.

Intensive farming, which is one of the causes of the loss of habitat for the UK’s wildlife, has to be addressed say the RSPB. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty

“Britain is one of the world’s most depleted countries in terms of its biodiversity loss,” said Clarke. “Out of 218 nations, Britain comes out as the 29th worst in terms of the degree to which we have already degraded nature.

“These bills could be our last chance to stop this degradation and to start putting things right. We need to set strong targets for recovering our lost biodiversity as well as establishing standards for improving the quality of our soil, air, and water.