Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust is incredibly disappointed by the government’s announcement that reintroducing wildlife species is “not a priority”. 

On Friday, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) confirmed that the government would not be prioritising reintroductions but was instead focused on increasing biodiversity through habitat restoration and reducing pressures from pollution. This is despite the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (EFRA) Committee’s recommendation to publish a species reintroductions strategy, underpinned by considerable ecological and economic evidence.  

With Natural England having recruited a Species Reintroductions Taskforce, this U-turn by government adds further uncertainty for nature’s recovery and continues to undermine its own ‘world-leading’ set of environmental legislation and its 25-Year Environment Plan. 

The Trust has a strong track record of working to bring back missing species – having seen otter, water vole and marsh fritillary return to their former haunts. We have also seen other species, such as the white-clawed crayfish and sword-leave helleborine, bounce back from the brink of local extinction.  

Every species has a role to play in the complex jigsaw of our natural world. The recent State of Nature Report revealed that one in six species is at risk of extinction in the UK. And if we don’t urgently reverse this worrying trend of decline, our ecosystem will eventually collapse.  

In particular, the Trust has long called for – and will continue to do so – the managed wild release of beavers on the Isle of Wight and elsewhere in order to tackle the biodiversity and pollution crises, and to capitalise on the many societal benefits of wild-living beavers. 

Beavers are a keystone species which means that they play a crucial role in how an ecosystem functions. By building dams, digging ditches and coppicing trees, beavers can alter their surroundings, creating large areas of wetland, slowing the flow of streams and rivers, protecting the land downriver from flooding and improving water quality. These restored wetlands also provide essential habitat for a wealth of plants and other animals such as otters and water voles. 

Reintroducing wild-living beavers would help achieve the government’s priorities of reducing pollution and increasing biodiversity with minimal costs to the taxpayer. The government’s own five-year Devon research project on wild-living beavers proved what is already known in other countries – that wild-living beavers clean up man-made pollution in our rivers. With 86% of the UK’s rivers not meeting good ecological status, we urgently need to reintroduce beavers to help tackle this problem. 

Not only do beavers help tackle river pollution, they increase biodiversity and restore essential wetland habitats, also at minimal cost to the public. They will also maintain the restored wetlands which, in their absence, is costly and often unsustainable to do. Wetlands are one of the most biodiverse habitats on the planet but in the UK, we’ve lost 90 per cent of our wetland habitats in the past 100 years and over 10% of our native freshwater and wetland species are threatened with extinction. Two thirds of existing wetland species are in decline. (biodiversity-challenge-rbmp-2021.pdf (environment-agency.gov.uk). Beaver wetlands are full of biodiversity and provide essential habitat for many other native species such as the water vole, whose numbers continue to decline, despite efforts to reverse this over the past 30 years.  

There is widespread support for beaver reintroduction on the Isle of Wight – with 89% of respondents to a Trust survey stating that they felt positively about beavers being released on the Island. The Trust will continue to strongly and actively advocate for the return of beavers – nature’s great ecosystem engineer – and other missing species.