On 30 January 2024 the Welsh Government issued a White Paper setting out its proposals for new legislation for the Senedd on Environmental Principles, Governance and Biodiversity Targets. The consultation will run until 30 April 2024.

The re-establishment of devolved government in Northern Ireland was the subject of intense negotiations for months before conclusions were announced by the UK government and the leadership of the Democratic Unionist Party ‘DUP’, and with the publication on 31 January 2024 of the Command Paper ‘Safeguarding the Union’ (CP 1021).  

On 8 January 2024, the UK Parliament will be asked to vote on the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill.

This will amend the UK’s Petroleum Act 1998, and require the Oil and Gas Authority, also known as the North Sea Transition Authority, to run an annual process inviting applications for new oil and gas production licences.

Natural England has said that –

“Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) is an approach to development, land and marine management that leaves biodiversity in a measurably better state than before the development took place.”

The specialist not-for profit Fish Legal and the Pickering Fishery Association won a notable victory in the High Court on 20 November 2023, that could be significant for the health of many other UK rivers.

The Energy Act 2023 received Royal Assent and was enacted on 26 October 2023. It is a hefty piece of legislation – 335 sections, 22 Schedules, 473 pages – described by the government as “the biggest piece of energy legislation in the UK’s history”.

It was really welcome to be able to attend an online briefing this week by the Welsh Government Bill team working on proposals for the Environmental Governance and Biodiversity Targets Bill, along with representatives of the UK Environmental Law Association ‘UKELA’ Wales Working Party, NGOs and other stakeholders.

The UK has lost nearly half of its biodiversity since the Industrial Revolution. It has fared worse in this respect than most countries in the EU, the G7 and China. It is consistently in the bottom 10% of nations in the Biodiversity Intactness Index. According to the Royal Society, the abundance of the UK’s estimated 70,000 known species of animals, plants, funghi and microorganisms is declining.

In December 2022, chaired by China and hosted by Canada, the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity reached agreement on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework an ambitious set of commitments aimed at halting and reversing biodiversity loss and the accelerating rate of species extinctions now thought to threaten 1 million species.