While the British Government has recently made some progress to help insects, including the creation of a National Pollinator Strategy, to date much of the focus has been on creating temporary pollinator habitat and managing areas of protected countryside. While beneficial, these initiatives fall short of providing the resources that pollinators need at the landscape scale. Pollinators need corridors linking patches of high-quality habitat together in order to be able to fly across the landscape as they naturally would.
To address this issue, a Protection of Pollinators Bill has been introduced to the British Parliament. The Bill builds upon previous work undertaken by the invertebrate conservation charity Buglife to create ‘B-lines’, a network of pollinator corridors running through the landscape.
The Bill proposes to place a duty on the Department of the Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) to bring forward a map outlining a continuous national network of pollinator corridors made up of wildflower rich habitat linking existing areas of high-quality pollinator habitat together. It also encourages public authorities in England to help with the implementation of the corridors.
The Bill was presented to Parliament by Ben Bradley MP, Member of Parliament for Mansfield in Nottinghamshire. Its second reading will take place on 26th October 2018.
More information about the Protection of Pollinators Bill can be found on the UK Parliament Website:
