Biodiversity was the buzzword of the Rio Earth Summit. John Major promised money to help Third World countries to monitor and conserve the species living within their borders. But, as The Times' recent series on the changing habits of British wildlife shows, there is one critical area of biodiversity in his own country for which his government is doing hardly anything to help.
The Times has collated evidence that seems to suggest that a change in the British climate is leading to different patterns of behaviour in insects, birds and fish. Basking sharks, once a rare sight off British shores, are now commonly spotted. The seahorse, which used to be a Mediterranean creature, has been recorded off the south coast. The skylark, the wren and the chaffinch are among a group of birds starting to lay eggs earlier in the year.
Other species are moving north as temperatures rise. The nuthatch has moved into the Lake District, where 20 years ago it was unknown. Birds' behaviour is related to that of their staple diet, insects, which respond faster than any other organism to climate changes. Aphids, the most destructive of agricultural pests, are flying into crops earlier than ever recorded before, and their flying dates are known to be related to temperatures in January and February.
These tentative data are open to the charge that they might simply be a temporary phenomenon, not the beginning of a trend. The trouble is that nobody has the money to find out. The government has earmarked ú120 million this year on research into global environmental change, but it is being mainly spent on supercomputer predictions of global warming, not on monitoring what is happening, sometimes literally, on the ground.
The British Trust for Ornithology, for instance, will soon publish its second Atlas of British Breeding Birds, which maps the distribution of different species. It has noticed a change since the first edition, 20 years ago, which in some cases may indicate a reaction to warmer weather. But when it applied for a research grant of ú16,000 to buy the climate data from the Meteorological Office that it needed to establish a correlation, the Natural Environment Research Council turned it down. The National Insect Survey found a similar lack of interest when it needed a small sum to analyse data on the flying and breeding habits of moths.
Britain is a superb laboratory for monitoring biodiversity and the response of wildlife to climate change. Its boundaries are defined and its marine life plentiful. It has a wide range of temperatures and an equally diverse range of species. On the northern edge of Europe, but warmed by the North Atlantic Drift, it is at the northern limit of many southern species and at the southern limit of many northern species. Changes in the geographical distribution of species are therefore easy to spot. Also, because of the traditional British fascination with biology and botany, records go back a long way. The country can still boast an extraordinary network of amateur but highly skilled observers of wildlife which can be mobilised for free.
By definition, a long-term trend in global warming will take many decades to be proved. But its implications, particularly for agriculture, are profound. Long before temperature records have unequivocally confirmed the existence of global warming, farmers may have had to switch their crops. The behaviour of insects, birds and fish ought to provide a more useful early-warning system than any number of computer predictions.
The costs of monitoring are modest. What the government can most usefully do is to arrange for the research going on all around the country to be co-ordinated to produce the big picture on the changing habits of British species. The macaw may be more spectacular than the humble nuthatch, but Britain's own biodiversity is just as deserving of government attention as that of Peru or Brazil.
