Wildlife 'outsourced' City habitats being lost and replaced elsewhere

BRISTOL'S wildlife is being outsourced to Yorkshire as developers destroy local habitats and pay to have them replaced elsewhere.

- Adam POSTANS

New planning rules introduced last year require housebuilders to put back any biodiversity lost to construction projects and add at least 10 per cent from what was there before.

If it cannot be applied to a development, the damage to the wildlife habitats can be offset elsewhere by recreating them in a registered biodiversity gain site (BGS).

But this could be anywhere in England and there are currently only 68 officially registered locations.

None of these is in Bristol, which means any local nature that cannot be accommodated at a building site has to be replaced outside the city, with the nearest BGS about five miles away on the Belmont Estate in North Somerset.

Bristol Tree Forum has been monitoring the process, called 'off-site biodiversity net gain,' since the legislation came into force in February 2024 and has found that four developments in the city have had to do this so far.

Acting chair Mark Ashdown said two of these were at the Belmont Estate but the other two were much more far-flung - 153 miles away from the development site on Temple Island to Barnsley, South Yorkshire, and 123 miles away from another in Avonmouth to Lewes, East Sussex.