It turns out that the UK is one of the worst country in the world when it comes to biodiversity . The heavily farmed land has seen the declination of 56 percent of its species between the class 1970 and 2013 , with one in 10 species now consider in danger of belong out , accord to the majorState of Nature 2016 study .
The previous reporthas found that more than half of all UK specie assessed have refuse since 1970 , and that while invertebrates make up97 percentof all UK species , they are also the ones being hardest hit , as they have declined by a thumping 59 percent over this period of metre . That is of major concern , as while we do n’t often see the plethora of louse with which we partake the worldly concern , they supply essential help without which we could not exist .
Of equal concern is that of the 7,964 terrene and fresh water species to be assessed using the modern IUCN Red List criteria , considered the benchmark for how threatened organisms are , it was found that 1,057 of these – or 13 pct – are think to be either already extinct or at hazard of being so within the dear future . These include charismatic tool such as the Scottish savage , of which as few as 300 are think to survive in the highlands , and skylarks that have seen their numbers crash by as much as 75 percent between 1972 and 1996 .
This sorry state of affairsmeans that when compare with the rest of the mankind using the " biodiversity intactness exponent " , which as the name suggests looks at how arrant a Carry Amelia Moore Nation ’s biodiversity has been over a menstruum of C , the UK does shockingly bad . Out of 218 countries assessed , the UK comes in 29th from the bottom , due principally to the heavily industrialized agriculture that dominates most of its countryside . Even compared to other western European nations , such as France and Germany , the UK is really at the bottom of the battalion .
Roughly 75 percent of the landscape is thought to be assort as agricultural , with many practices employed impoverish birds and insects of the forage necessitate to sustain them throughout the twelvemonth . As if that was n’t bad enough , the wildlife is also have to deal with clime change , which is the other chief driver of the decline observed .
While some species are benefit from a warming climate , such as the Dartford warbler that has expanded its range magnetic north , many others are suffering , like the humble dormouse . Yet the write up also foreground that while the current state of nature may be quite poor , there are thing that can be done to improve the situation .
The report showcases the practice of Hope Farm in Cambridge , which has seen an increase of 224 per centum in what is known as the butterfly index , compared with a interior 2 percent decline of the same index . But this is only a small - musical scale representative , and the composition punctuate that if nature is to survive in any meaningful path , more of these should be lucubrate .
