81% of Britons believe nature is under threat and needs urgent action to protect it. We need a People's Plan For Nature
Excited to hear our great friend Jon Alexander from the New Citizenship Project has been involved in shaping The People’s Plan For Nature, which he explains below:
What if we Brits responded to our ridiculous government not (just) with anger, but by stepping into a whole new way of doing democracy?
Today sees the launch of a project that is aiming to do exactly that. The big UK nature NGOs [The RSPB, WWF-UK, National Trust, 89Up] are coming together to crowdsource a “People’s Plan For Nature”.
It will start by gathering stories and ideas from all over the country and then, using a randomly selected citizens’ assembly to digest all that, hear from experts, and produce a considered set of recommendations for what national and local government, business, and community groups can do.
It’s the first big live experiment with a structure/process for holding meaningful national conversations I and the New Citizenship Project team have been working on for a while - so I’m hoping it works!
First phase is a mass story- and idea-sharing exercise… so check it out and get your stories and ideas in the mix! [We’re guessing they’re using Pol.is’s AI-powered software as the tools for this exercise - see our coverage of the software as an enabler of community wisdom here].
The People’s Plan For Nature was launched with a major poll, reported by the Guardian:
A majority of the public believe nature is under threat and needs urgent action to protect and restore it, according to a YouGov poll.
The poll for the National Trust, RSPB and WWF comes as they and other mainstream green groups are mobilising their millions of members to counter what they say is the government’s attack on nature.
More than 8,000 adults were surveyed before the government announced the creation of low-tax investment zones, where “burdensome” environmental and planning rules will be lifted, and details emerged of the scale of environmental laws derived from the EU that are to be scrapped or rewritten in the retained EU law revocation and reform bill
Eighty-one per cent of the respondents said they believed nature was under threat and that more needed to be done urgently to protect and restore it. Forty-eight per cent said they were willing to take action themselves to reverse the damage.
…The YouGov poll suggests the public want action to clean up rivers, greater consideration of nature in the planning and house-building system and strengthened legal protections. Most of these protections stem from EU laws that were rolled over into UK law after Brexit.
They are now under threat from a new bill that has listed 570 environmental laws to be taken off the statute books by December 2023. They include laws that cover sewage pollution in rivers, air quality and pesticide controls.
The majority of respondents said they had witnessed a decline in nature and wildlife in their local area, 65% in the number and variety of insects they see, 58% in birds, 60% in mammals and 59% in green spaces such as parks and woodlands.