Why Bats Need Tunnels

(MENAFN- The Conversation) Developers need not “worry about bats and newts” before they start building, Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said in a speech that outlined her plans to reform the UK's planning process. Reeves' comments suggest construction firms and housebuilders will be allowed to destroy habitat if they pay into“a nature fund” that might finance restoration elsewhere.

As an ecologist (with a passion for bats), I have serious concerns about what this would mean for the UK's dwindling biodiversity. The comments from the chancellor are, at best, disheartening at a critical time for nature conservation.

Bats and newts are derided as the gum in the wheels of the planning system . But the idea that nature inherently obstructs development and stymies our collective prosperity is wrong. There are many ways infrastucture can be designed to work with nature in mind from the start – often with low cost.

The chancellor's own calculations are off if she attaches no economic value to nature. In one scientific study that tried to quantify the economic contribution of wildlife, researchers found that losing pest-eating bats in North American farmland would cost farmers several billions of dollars in crop losses.

Blaming wildlife for economic challenges will only worsen the biodiversity crisis . A report from 2023 found that nearly one in six UK species are at risk of extinction, and that the country is one of the most nature depleted in the world .

Rather than weakening protections for nature, the UK should be doing much more to help the plants and animals that call these islands home.

Populations of the great crested newt halved between 1965 and 1975 and have continued to decline by 2% every five years since . The enormous loss of habitat is partly to blame: half of all ponds vanished in the 20th century and 80% of those remaining are in poor condition . These figures highlight the long-running failure of the planning system to protect nature.

Newts need ponds to breed in, but they also traverse surrounding grasslands and marshes to find food and new homes. Destruction of these habitats will not be easily remedied by digging a new pond elsewhere, with money from the chancellor's new fund. Connections between habitats are also essential – isolated, artificial ponds are of little use if wildlife cannot reach them.

This approach will be even less helpful to bats, whose habitat requirements are even more varied .

Bats are highly sensitive to environmental changes. The UK is home to 18 species , including the brown long-eared bat and the pug-like barbastelle. Far from being the menace of developers, bats have suffered greatly as changes to buildings have excluded them from making roosts while changes to the wider landscape have made it harder for them to find feeding and breeding sites.

The numbers of some species have shown a small increase since monitoring began in 1998, but a wider perspective is instructive: the barbastelle bat, for instance, has declined by 99% in the UK over the past few hundred years .

The wider decline of nature now poses a terrible strain. Local bat conservation groups have reported an uptick in the number of starving or underweight bats . All UK bats eat insects, so their health is linked with moths and butterflies and other pollinators that knit ecosystems together. Bats are an early warning system for the overall health of our environment.

Conservation measures have to be tailored to the relevant species and setting. Careful deliberation in the planning system is important to protect species – it cannot be replaced with a pot of money that each developer pays into.

Take“bat tunnels”, the structures designed to help bats safely navigate developments which recently drew the chancellor's ire. These tunnels have been installed along the HS2 trainline and, in theory, protect bats from the 220-mph train as it intersects their flight paths.

Bat tunnels maintain connections between habitats , enabling bats to reach their roosting, feeding and breeding sites without risking their lives near roads or other man-made barriers. It's not just a fatal collision bats risk – noise and pollution also perturb bats and the insects they eat.

While some species might benefit from a simple bat box that allows bats to roost by providing a roosting structure either outside of a building or on trees, others might need more complex changes. Bats rely on sound to navigate, emitting squeaks that bounce around their environment to create an audible impression of the world.

Conservationists might build them flight paths composed of hedgerows and other features that bats can use to orient themselves. This can be particularly important for developments over a large area.

In these instances, it's important that bats, who may travel several kilometres from their roosts to feeding sites , have well-connected habitats. Fragmenting the landscape leaves smaller and smaller pockets of available habitat which in turn support fewer and fewer species.

Instead of being an expensive burden, most measures for mitigating development are fairly easy to implement. It could be as simple as maintaining and improving hedgerows or preserving old trees. More ambitious schemes include designing rail lines that allow animals to pass over or beneath.

Instead of weakening protections and treating biodiversity as a hindrance, a smarter approach would be to integrate nature into development from the outset, and so prevent harm to protected sites and reduce the need for compensation later. The Woodland Trust said that“HS2's assessment of woodland was significantly deficient” and its impacts to ancient woodland could have been avoided with alternative routes or proposals. In lieu of better assessment, the developers ran into avoidable delays .

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to conservation – no big pot of funding that can pay to repair all the damage later. It requires careful, species-specific strategies, because the needs of wildlife vary greatly. Ignoring the necessity of protecting wildlife jeopardises ecosystems which underpin the economy.

Effective conservation is not a barrier to development, but rather, key to a sustainable future, for people, nature and industries.

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