Britain has voted to leave the European Union, but new borders cannot stop swallows migrating from Africa to Malin Head, via Land’s End and Strabane, nor the Foyle from flowing from Donegal to Derry via Tyrone. Immigration checks will not halt the passage of polluted air from Dublin to Anglesea; carbon emitted from a car in London will continue to affect the climate in Leitrim.
But Brexit raises many serious doubts about our future ability, on either side of whatever fences we may now erect, to limit and roll back the negative effects of human economic activity on our interlinked environments.
“Ecology teaches us that nobody can make it alone, from individual human beings to entire countries,” BirdLife International declared in response to Brexit. It described the outcome as a trauma, because “EU legislation and funding have been the driving force for a generation and more in saving our continent’s biodiversity . . . and cleaning up our environment”.
This note of high anxiety was echoed across nature networks in these islands and beyond. "Brexit is a 'red alert' for the environment," tweeted the head of Friends of the Earth in the UK, Craig Bennett, shortly after the result was announced.
His counterpart in the Republic, Oisín Coghlan, agrees: “The most imminent threat is to the environment in Britain. But it is likely to be negative for all of us”, on this island and on the continent, he says.
Even without Brexit it has been a tricky period for EU environmental policy. Over the past year the EU habitats and birds directives, the mainstays of the union’s conservation strategy, have been subjected to apparently hostile scrutiny on the instructions of the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker.
He insists that the directives should be subjected to a “fitness check”, apparently with a view to “modernising” them. That may sound innocent, even desirable. But conservationists across Europe suspect that this “check” was code for drawing such teeth as these measures have, and drastically reducing their scope. They see this move as guided by Juncker’s view – a very short-term one in the era of climate change – that environmental regulation is generally bad for business.
Environmentalists argue that the problem is not in the directives themselves but in the failure by EU governments, including our own, and ultimately by the commission and EU courts, to ensure that they are implemented. As Coghlan says, very different standards apply to enforcing austerity policies and environmental policies.
More than 500,000 citizens have told Brussels, through social media, that they wanted the environmental-protection framework kept intact. Just last week leaks suggested that they had indeed been found fit for purpose. But it now seems likely that the consequences of Brexit may start to reverse this hard-won victory.
It's much too early to say for sure, of course, exactly what the effects of Brexit will be. Laura Burke, director of the Environmental Protection Agency, says she does not want to speculate about them at this stage. There will be some continuity in the short term: "Ireland will still have to comply with EU regulations and will implement the seventh environmental action plan," Burke says through the agency's press office, adding that she "envisages also our engagement with our colleagues in the UK and NI will continue".
BirdWatch Ireland, one of the most vocal and authoritative of our NGOs, is also declining to comment in detail until after a full review of the situation. Oonagh Duggan, its policy officer, says this only indicates how seriously BirdWatch Ireland regards this challenge. "Nature, water and birds know no boundaries," she says, "and international co-operation is essential to our work."
Michael Ewing, co-ordinator of the Environmental Pillar, which represents the views of 29 NGOs to government, also stresses the current "huge level of uncertainty". But he points to the potential loss in efficient co-operation if the UK abandons the common levels of protection for habitats and species that we share under the directives.
At present it is relatively easy to co-ordinate management of cross-Border special areas of protection, such as Lough Foyle, and special areas of conservation, such as Pettigo Plateau-Tamur Bog; it would become much harder if agencies on each side of the Border were governed by different regulations.
And although Ewing finds current EU fishing regulations unsatisfactory, he fears that worse might ensue if our neighbours start to unstitch existing rules. He adds that we may now lose safeguards whereby we can have input into policy on the construction and operation of nuclear power plants in the UK.
Joanne Sherwood, director of the Royal Society for Protection of Birds in Northern Ireland, shares Ewing's concern about maintaining levels of protection. "Nature deserves no less than it did before, just because we are leaving the EU." She points out that not only special conservation and protection areas but also river catchments managed under the EU's water framework directive transcend political boundaries.
Sherwood also stresses the need to continue, and augment, payments for farmers who provide vital wildlife habitat on their land, funding that at present comes largely from Brussels. And she argues that some mechanism must be found to maintain the EU Interreg programme, currently supporting linked environmental projects in Scotland and both parts of Ireland.
NGOs north of the Border have moved fast since Brexit. Just a week after the vote NI Environment Link, representing 70 organisations and 100,000 members, met the committee of the new Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, and presented a clear and detailed outline of its concerns.
Its key message was one that could provide a useful guide to future environmental strategies, not only in Northern Ireland but in the Republic and across the EU: “We believe the environment underpins our health, wellbeing and economy. Most of all our environment is something for people to enjoy: we believe that increasing people’s access to the environment is the best way to ensure its preservation.”
Brexit: crisis exposes flaws and failures
Brexit just might have an upside for the environment. It might makes us less complacent, less willing to rely on “Brussels” to force us to do what we should be doing anyway in our own best interests.
But support for Brexit was fuelled by hostility to EU red tape, a hostility that has spread across Europe. If conservationists fail to convince people to act locally to sustain healthy environments, top-down regulation will continue to backfire badly. Most environmental groups say that the EU’s directives have been the driving forces protecting the ecosystems and biodiversity that ultimately sustain our economies and our lives. This surely tells us that conservationists often failed to consult with local communities on these issues, and to engage their support.
The result is a widespread perception in rural areas that environmental regulation is an imposition by foreign bureaucrats and urban greens, uncaring about the harsh realities of making a living from the land. This perception has been skilfully manipulated by populist politicians here at home, especially in the turf-cutting controversy.
It has also been one of the motors of hostility to the EU in other countries, from Poland to Malta. And this fact is likely to make Brussels, and national governments, less willing to expand environmental regulation in future, and even less willing to enforce current laws.
Some radical rethinking of how environmental concerns are communicated to a broad public is vital if this tide of opinion is to be turned.
