Conservationists name for Lake District to lose Unesco global heritage standing

Conservationists have introduced a marketing campaign to revoke the Lake District’s Unesco global heritage standing, arguing that it promotes unsustainable sheep farming on the expense of nature restoration and native communities.

In a letter to Unesco, the ecologist Lee Schofield argues that the designation “promotes a false perception of farming, is not economically sustainable, is working against crucial efforts to restore the natural environment and mitigate the impacts of climate change, does not help sustain farming livelihoods, is not wanted by local people and is contributing to damaging overtourism.”

The marketing campaign is subsidized through a file printed through World Heritage Watch, co-authored through Schofield, Dr Karen Lloyd of Lancaster University and the University of Cumbria’s Prof Ian Convery. They argue that the inscription elevates sheep farming over similarly conventional blended farming that comes with livestock, pigs, horses and poultry.

The Unesco designation celebrates the Lake District as a “cultural landscape” formed through conventional agro-pastoral farming, with sheep farming a central a part of its id. Schofield notes that the phrase “sheep” seems 357 instances within the Lake District’s 716-page nomination report, a long way exceeding mentions of different conventional farm animals.

The authors calculate that the Lake District’s 673,000 sheep contain 90% of medium-sized mammal biomass, with wild mammals representing 3%. Schofield calls sheep farming “both ecologically catastrophic and economically precarious”, linking it to the truth that simplest 20.7% of the Lake District’s websites of particular medical passion are in a beneficial situation. Intensive sheep grazing can save you tree regeneration, scale back biodiversity and purpose erosion and compaction of soils.

“We’re in a biodiversity and a climate crisis. But as important as cultural heritage might be, we’re not in a cultural heritage crisis,” Schofield says.

The Unesco designation supplies no monetary fortify for the farming practices it celebrates, whilst, consistent with critics, hindering the transition to climate- and nature-positive farming that’s the primary center of attention of post-Brexit farming finances.

David Morris, of the fowl and natural world conservation charity RSPB, recommended the file’s claims. He mentioned the designation “has been misused to protect probably some of the most ecologically damaging and economically loss-making agriculture practices in the English uplands”.

Morris argued that the inscription enabled “nimbyism” in opposition to conservation efforts. When the RSPB changed sheep with livestock and ponies on its Haweswater website, locals cited global heritage standing in opposition. “People are able to use the world heritage thing to lobby against progressive change for nature recovery,” he mentioned. The RSPB and different environmental NGOs are taking into consideration elevating considerations immediately with Unesco.

The considerations echo warnings from the Guardian columnist George Monbiot in 2017 that global heritage standing would “lock the Lake District into its current, shocking state, ensuring that recovery becomes almost impossible” whilst boosting tourism unsustainably.

Visitor numbers have risen from 16.4 million in 2015 to greater than 18 million a yr, with 22 million projected through 2040. Lloyd says intense tourism is using space costs past native households’ achieve and overwhelming infrastructure. “The Lake District world heritage inscription is presiding over the death of the landscape and its communities – both wild and human.”

However, the view that global heritage standing is hindering revolutionary farming is contested. Jane Barker, a farmer and previous deputy chair of the Lake District National Park Authority, mentioned the designation “hasn’t really made a difference” to her farm industry. “I don’t recognise what [Schofield] has said in terms of [world heritage] putting a brake on things,” she mentioned.

Farming inside the designation might be “perfectly compatible with net zero, climate change, biodiversity, water quality”, she mentioned, including: “There is an appetite amongst the older and the younger generations [of farmers] to embrace that change.”

Julia Aglionby, a professor of observe on the University of Cumbria and government director of the Foundation for Common Land, argues that global heritage coverage of conventional practices was once essential. “In parts of the Lake District, some people would like to take all the sheep off. I personally think that’s an erosion of cultural heritage,” she mentioned.

Aglionby disputed that revoking global heritage standing was once the solution. She mentioned: “The main issue is that we haven’t had an effective public money for public goods policy.” Rather than global heritage blocking off environmental schemes, Aglionby mentioned, “most farmers I know are really keen to get into schemes. Their concern is that there aren’t schemes available.”

If a hit, the marketing campaign would mark the second one lack of UK global heritage standing, after Liverpool’s waterfront was once stripped of its designation in 2021.

Steve Ratcliffe, the director of sustainable construction for the Lake District National Park Authority, mentioned: “We recognise the urgent challenges facing biodiversity, climate and farming. Whilst changes in land management are necessary to support nature recovery and climate resilience, this should take place with consideration to the area’s cultural heritage.”

Unesco didn’t reply to a request to remark.