Natural resources
Globally, we are consuming about 25% more natural resources - such as wood, oil and peat - than the planet can replace each year, according to World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) research. In the UK alone, we are generating carbon emissions and consuming natural resources at such a rate that if everyone in the world lived this way we would need three planets to support us.
We cannot be considered to be sustainable in our use of resources until we only take the resources from the Earth as fast as they are created and only produce waste as fast as in can be absorbed into the environment without causing harm. These processes, whether growing trees for building or adding treated sewage into water course, depend on biodiversity. However, the large impact that the use of natural resources has on biodiversity is not always negative.
Mineral extraction
Mineral extraction can have
massive impacts on the landscape and the wildlife, removing whole
habitats and reshaping the land. However, today mineral extraction
provides one of the major opportunities for rebuilding our
biodiversity. Once the minerals have been removed, more and more sites
are being returned to ‘wild', creating places for wildlife and people.
All
mineral planning is the responsibility of the relevant Mineral Planning
Authority. Mineral extraction sites must be restored by the operator to
a beneficial end-use which can include habitat creation. Restoring
mineral sites for wildlife can create wonderful places for people to
enjoy and learn about the natural world. Where geological features of
interest are unearthed, incorporating these into the restoration can
add to the interest and educational value of the site further. For further information please follow this link.
Water Resources
"Water is our most precious natural asset; our prosperity and quality of life depend on it. Yet we have come to take it for granted and forgotten that assets have to be nurtured and valued if we want to enjoy their benefits.
"This is especially so in the South East which is already densely populated and will be the focus of much physical and economic development in the coming decades. We are a dry part of the country and must therefore manage our finite supplies carefully.
Graham Setterfield, Chairman, South East Water Resources Forum - Please see SEEDA website for more information
Climate change will lead to wetter winters and dryer summer exasperating the issues we already face of flooding and drought. This could have a massive impact on our wetland habitats (e.g. reedbed, wet lowland meadows and fen). Without careful management this could result in too little water in the dry summer and too much in the winter. Flooding also drops sediment and nutrients on to species rich wildlife meadow, which over time could result in the loss of many of the species. For example, the flooding that happened during the summer of 2007 deposited so much phosphorous on the some of the wet lowland meadows around Oxford that it will take 35 years for this to leave the ecosystem (Floodplain Meadows Partnership, Open University).
Extraction of river water in the SE is carefully regulated and monitored by the Environment Agency. However, we still have areas of low flow. The River Kennet in Berkshire, for example, suffers from low flow, which is having a negative impact of the wildlife of the river and flood plain.
Just as water resource management can benefit wildlife, wildlife rich areas can benefit water management. Wet grasslands, reedbeds and fens can be used for water purification, flood storage and help maintain the banks of the water course.
Over-exploitation
Over-exploitation
of wild species populations is the result of harvesting or killing
animals or plants, for food, materials or medicine, over and above the
reproductive capacity of the population to replace itself. It has been
the dominant threat to marine biodiversity, and over-fishing has
devastated many commercial fish stocks, but over exploitation is also a
serious threat to many terrestrial species. Over-harvesting of timber
and fuel wood has also led to loss of forests and their associated
plant and animal populations. We have drastically reduced some fish
populations and destroyed whole forests and their ecosystems
Other
species have been relentlessly persecuted as vermin, often based on
wrong assumptions about the supposed harm they caused. For centuries in
Britain, Red Kites had a price on their head as ‘lamb-killers', in
spite of their lack of strength for such a task.
In the South East ...
Within the South East we are already using more resources that we can produce in the region. In fact, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment has calculated that we would need an area the size of France to provide the population of the South East with all we use and consume. As a result, there is great pressure on the land, with a need to produce food and fuel, produce building materials, provide space for people and wildlife and much more.
There is also an increasing awareness that
the natural environment provides a number of ecosystem services that support our
prosperity, well-being and health. Maximising the resources we get from the land and sea is becoming more
important and gaining multiple benefits from the land is one way toward
delivering the resources we need in the space we have.