Health-threatening toxic air and water pollution from sewage and agriculture must be tackled as a top priority, a new environmental watchdog has warned.
The UK government must also urgently address overfishing and damage to the seafloor caused by trawling, loss of natural habitat and soil degradation, the Office of Environmental Protection (OEP) urged in its first report.
OEP chair Glenys Stacey said despite the government’s ambitions, the environment remained “unstable” with worrying and continuing declines in air and water quality, species and habitat.
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The report calls on governments to take a comprehensive “stocktake” of the state of the natural world, with ambitious legal targets and coherent action, and to make the environment a priority across all sectors.
It urges that tackling England’s air, water, landscape and ocean crises deserve the same level of cross-government support and urgency as climate efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero.
The OEP also calls on the government to reverse the decline in funding to monitor the state of the environment over the past decade, but does not call for more resources as a whole to deal with the environmental crisis.
The watchdog is part of the post-Brexit management of England’s environmental regime and its role is to monitor progress in reversing harm to the natural world and act as a regulator of green laws.
Its first monitoring report on the government’s 25-year environmental plan, announced in 2018, warned that while the Natural World’s plans were ambitious, progress in implementing them was too slow.
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It warns that slow, sustained declines in nature can turn into catastrophic “tipping points” – such as setting fishing limits above scientific advice, which could lead to the collapse of fish populations, as well as continued damage to the seabed that could damage the ocean ecosystem.
Failure to prioritize and address these issues before reaching a tipping point will make it harder to reverse the downward trend, Stacey said.
She said: “The 25-year environmental plan is an ambitious attempt to address environmental challenges, yet we continue to see worrying and persistent trends in environmental degradation.
“Our rivers are in poor condition, bird and other species are in severe decline, poor air quality threatens the health of many, and our oceans and seafloor are not being managed sustainably.”
She conceded that turning the tide would not be easy, but urged the government to set a clear and ambitious vision for the environment that was a priority for all sectors.
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“We all have an indisputable dependence on the environment and its precarious state should be a concern and a national priority for all governments,” she warned.
