Dave Johnston
Biodiversity indicators in Wales
NRW’s environmental reporting team’s job is making all of our statutory reports, which is really about ensuring that data is translated into the appropriate high-quality evidence and made available to allow policymakers and legislators to make the decisions that they do. NRW’s remit is driven by two world-leading pieces of legislation that give the pursuit of sustainability a statutory basis: the Well-being of Future Generations Act and the Environment Act. Both of these have biodiversity at their heart and drive the development of indicators and assessments. The Welsh Government report 46 national well-being indicators, all of them linked to the seven well-being goals that represent the Wales we all want to live in now and in the future. Although several of the indicators are relevant to biodiversity, two of them are specifically about biodiversity: the area of healthy ecosystems in Wales and the status of biological diversity. Those indicators and their framing within the Act firmly link biodiversity to prosperity, resilience, community, health, culture, and to Wales playing its part globally.
To report indicator 43, the area of healthy ecosystems, we use a proxy, which is the extent of semi-natural habitats. This is currently an experimental statistic. The indicator is calculated using a number of sources, including the phase one habitat map, Sentinel 2 satellite imagery, terrain features and agricultural data from Welsh Government. This data is used to identify the semi-natural habitats and rule out, for example, the improved grasslands. Overall, 31% of Wales is deemed to be semi-natural and significantly higher proportion of that in the uplands. Indicator 44, the status of biological diversity, is currently in development and is subject to a contract with CEH. It’s also intending to use a proxy (priority species) and will be based around the method for the UK biodiversity indicator -the priority species distribution C4. Indicator 44 is going to focus on the Environment Act section 7 priority species list, but we intend to access a wider data set than the UK indicator using the unstructured Local Ecological Record Centre data.
The Environment Act includes an obligation to publish the State of Natural Resources Report (SoNaRR) every five years. It’s expected to be published in advance of every election, and the most recent publication, though only the second, was fully published in March this year. SoNaRR is different from traditional state of environment reports as it uses the integrated reporting approach used by the UN Environment Program, the European Environment Agency and others. It seeks to draw conclusions about relationships between natural resources and well-being to help Wales plan for its future. SoNaRR focuses on addressing the drivers of change and managing the risks and potential consequences for well-being. The emphasis on sustainable management allows us to question not just the “what”, but the “so what?”.
Assessments are made at different scales, starting with the 8 broad ecosystems that make up Wales and eight cross cutting themes, including the main drivers and pressures such as climate change, land use and resource efficiency and includes a specific assessment of biodiversity. Each of those chapters makes its own assessment of drivers, pressures and impacts and recommends opportunities for action. The evidence has been used to feed into the main assessment of the report, which is against the four aims of sustainable management in Wales: that stocks of natural resources are safeguarded, ecosystems are resilient, we have healthy places for people, and a regenerative economy. The last of these is the route to the transformative change we need for the first three need to be maintained, and to deal with the with the climate and nature emergencies. The focus on addressing the drivers of change and the need to assess sustainable management, not simply the ‘state’ of biodiversity, SoNaRR 2020 doesn’t lend itself easily to having its own official indicator suite. It was felt in part of the negotiations around that that indicators themselves might detract from the purpose of addressing change rather than simply documenting it. However, assessing state and trends is a key part of the assessment process we followed, and the report is not short of things that look just like indicators.
SoNaRR collates evidence from elsewhere, such as the State of Nature Report, UK Biodiversity Indicators, river basin management plans, greenhouse gas inventories, and many other sources to make their assessments. The evidence is presented throughout the narrative report, but the evidence with access to more of the data behind it and behind the assessments is also available through our new Wales Environmental Information portal. The portal presents the evidence in interactive maps, charts, story maps and provides the SoNaRR evidence space in an accessible format. The format allows Welsh Government, public bodies, and indeed the public, to make the appropriate decisions about how to manage our natural resources into the future. The user can not only view the headline indicators, but can also apply their own filters by ecosystem, political boundaries and ecosystem services that are impacted to inform their own decisions about action.
There are further developments in Wales for biodiversity indicators. We’re working with Welsh Government and JNCC to understand which of the UK Biodiversity Indicator Suite could be produced to the Wales scale and so develop a suite comparable to the to the UK Biodiversity Indicators. This will allow us to report better progress for Wales on the Nature Recovery Action Plan which is our response to the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Aichi Targets. That will be reviewed alongside the UK Biodiversity Indicators in light of the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework and the outcome of the COP later this year.
SoNaRR presents the evidence to make clear that connection between our actions, the state of our natural resources, the climate and nature emergencies and our well-being and ensuring access to that evidence and the evidence behind the assessments helps us to ensure that we make the right decisions to move us along that path to a sustainable future.