Welcome to the RSK Wilding news summary for Spring 2023.
A lot has happened since our last catch-up, and I have to say that 2023 is looking to be a massive year for RSK Wilding.
Since we set up the team in early 2020, we have been building our brand, getting stuck into biodiversity net gain (BNG) and the Defra biodiversity metric, understanding the needs of our clients (from developers and large businesses to landowners and local authorities) and laying the groundwork for significant, landscape-scale biodiversity restoration.
Establishing a new business takes time, effort and quite a bit of learning, especially when the policy and legislation environment underpinning the area you are moving into is largely unformed. This is certainly the case with BNG. When we started, the Environment Act was still edging through the UK Parliament at a glacial pace and had not even received Royal Assent. Even now, we don’t have the secondary legislation in place. While policy has been developing more quickly, and it has been clear for a while now that BNG is here to stay, the guidance and mechanisms for delivering that BNG have not been keeping up.
We have therefore been working in something of a regulatory vacuum. However, have we been daunted by this? No! We’ve just had to pick our way along, reacting to changes in the Defra metric, making assumptions about how stacking and bundling might work, talking to local authorities about the likely implications and generally gazing into a crystal ball when advising our various clients on what BNG might mean for them.
However, things are definitely improving, with guidance now provided on many of the key elements of the BNG process – such as conservation covenants, the principles for marine net gain, BNG in development management for planning authorities, etc. – and there is certainly more clarity following the February publication of Defra’s response to its BNG consultation earlier in 2022. In addition, much more guidance is promised as we approach the publication of the secondary legislation on BNG in the autumn.
So, in light of these developments, and as we start to see the snowdrops, celandines and daffodils emerging tentatively into the cool late-winter air, we can see some major habitat restoration projects on the near horizon for RSK Wilding. While I can’t divulge the details at this stage, I can say that these are being driven not only by developers but also by local authorities and landowners, and in each case the motivations and requirements are subtly different.
For developers and large corporations, BNG is the new kid on the block to be either embraced as an opportunity or grudgingly dealt with as the latest ‘environmental tax’. Either way, we are there to help developers achieve the units they need to press ahead with their developments while advising large organisations (normally with support from our colleagues at Nature Positive) on how to play their part in the reversal of biodiversity loss. This can be through minimising the biodiversity impacts of their activities (including supply chain) and/or by optimising the opportunity for habitat creation where the company owns land. Biodiversity offsetting/insetting strategies are therefore becoming a key component of our work.
Local authorities tend to see BNG as both an opportunity and a potential headache. The former relates to the availability, in many local planning authority (LPA) areas, of land that could be enhanced for biodiversity, with many recognising the potential for creating ‘in-house’ habitat banks to help with local demand for biodiversity units. The headache involves how to manage the BNG process with little assistance from the government, and this is something RSK Wilding is increasingly providing support for, be it through designing BNG policies, advising on resourcing requirements or providing support in relation to the establishment of a local network of gain sites (both LPA and third party).
As for landowners and farmers, many are now seeing the diversification opportunities that BNG can provide, including from the natural capital benefits that can accrue from well-designed and well-located habitat creation, water quality improvement and flood risk mitigation and carbon sequestration and enhanced wellbeing through public access to nature. While it certainly makes sense to use the less-productive areas of a farm for habitat creation and BNG, we advise on how biodiversity across the wider farm landscape (in the soil, the vegetation and the water environment) can be enhanced through more sustainable farming practice. In particular, we are very much proponents of regenerative agriculture (as well as being able to advise on environmental land management schemes (ELM)), so look out for us at Groundswell this year!
Towards the end of February, Defra published their response to the BNG consultation they ran at the start of 2022. We will be writing a Thought Leadership piece on this important document in due course, but in the meantime, we hope you were able to tune in to Mark Lang’s First Thursday Club talk on the subject on 6th April. If not, you can catch up here.
Finally, with all this work to be done, we are recruiting at RSK Wilding (see the RSK Biocensus website for details). If this is a journey you want to be on, you have an excellent understanding of BNG and the Defra metric, you enjoy hard work in the interest of biodiversity recovery and you’d like to join an amazing team, get in touch!
Have a great spring everyone,
Jon Davies, Director, RSK Wilding