An action plan has been launched to help revive a rare and valued wildlife habitat.

A recently published Natural England report identified habitat pressures at the Adur Estuary, a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) that supports threatened coastal saltmarsh and mudflats.

In the wake of the report, conservation volunteer group Friends of Adur SSSI are leading the implementation of a new action plan to help recovery efforts.

Protecting Peregrine Falcons, creating Marine Protected Areas and championing nature at global conventions are just some of the critical projects delivered by JNCC and highlighted in our Impact Review, published today.

Covering the period 2024 to 2025, the review sets out how JNCC delivers on its strategy, Together for Nature, and highlights a year of significant progress in turning science into action for nature, people and the planet.

One of the year's standout achievements was JNCC's role at the latest Convention on Biological Diversity Conference of the Parties (COP16), where we supported UK negotiations on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. JNCC led negotiations on invasive alien species and sustainable wildlife management, and co-led the development of the Monitoring Framework, which will track global progress towards nature recovery goals.

Amid the U-turns and Keir Starmer’s personal approval ratings, it’s easy to forget that Labour was elected in 2024 on a platform of optimism. Less than two years on, manifesto promises to “stop the chaos” and “grow our economy” are proving difficult to fulfill.

Yet, there remains one area where the government appears to be performing well.

The UK’s target to reach net zero by 2050 is “within reach, provided the government stays the course”, according to a 2025 progress report from the Climate Change Committee, which is the public body whose role it is to advise the government on its progress in meeting its legally-binding climate targets. This is not only being driven by the power sector - with wind energy soaring and the UK’s last coal-fired power station closing in 2024 – but also through heat pumps and electric vehicles decarbonising heating and transport: areas considered much more fiddly to go green.

A charity has launched its "largest and most ambitious" nature recovery project after receiving multi-million pound backing.

Cornwall Wildlife Trust said its Tor to Shore scheme aimed to link habitats across the county and reintroduce animals to areas, including bringing more beavers to the Helman Tor nature reserve near Bodmin.

Funding for the £5m initiative has been boosted with a £3.3m grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

A specially designed raft has been launched on the east coast of Scotland to create new homes for vulnerable seabirds.

Dubbed the “Maid of Sterna Stuff III”, the raft is moored within the Scottish Wildlife Trust’s Montrose Basin Wildlife Reserve and will provide nesting habitat for over 100 common terns.

Scotland’s seabirds face numerous threats, including from climate change and overfishing, while in recent years they have suffered further declines as a result of Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (bird flu). No terns bred on the reserve’s previous raft in 2021 or 2022, however their numbers have climbed steadily since, and in 2025, around 140 chicks fledged as the species continues its recovery from the devastating disease.

An eel fisher is to argue at the high court in Belfast that the authorities have allowed the ecological collapse of Lough Neagh by failing to take action over pollution.

Declan Conlon, whose family have for generations fished the inland lake in Northern Ireland that once hosted the largest wild eel fishery in Europe, is seeking to take a judicial review against the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (Daera). He will argue the department has failed to act against polluters despite clear evidence of the ecological collapse of the lake.

Lough Neagh, the UK’s largest lake by surface area, is situated in the heart of Northern Ireland and is a globally important and internationally protected site. But it is suffering from an acute environmental crisis. It is overloaded with phosphorus and nitrogen from agriculture, including farm runoff, fertilisers and animal waste, as well as from inadequate wastewater treatment facilities and septic tank leakage.

The Environment Agency is too weak to tackle an “out-of-control plague” of waste dumping, a powerful group of MPs has said.

The public accounts committee (PAC) said the EA had gaps in its powers and intelligence gathering which meant it was not set up to deal effectively with the rise in waste dumping.

“The widespread and increasing issue of illegal waste sites surpasses the EA’s powers,” the committee wrote in a report published on Wednesday.

A pine marten has been caught on camera in Cornwall in what conservationists hope could be the start of a comeback in the county.

Kernow Conservation recorded the creature during routine monitoring on the Trewithen Estate, near Truro, where staff have been working to restore native wildlife.

The footage was captured on a camera which was set up to track reintroduced water voles.

A conservationist believes butterflies could act as a new "canary in the coal mine" for climate change, as she undertakes a two-year study in the wetlands of Wales.

Georgina Paul, of Butterfly Conservation, is now halfway through the project, which is investigating whether the endangered large heath butterfly can be used as an indicator of peatland health.

Peat bogs play a crucial role in storing carbon when they remain wet, but rising temperatures can dry them out, releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Despite the generic title this video discusses the nature sector from a British perspective

A family day out at the Helford Estuary turned into an unforgettable wildlife encounter for a man who believes he may have discovered a rare 'golden lobster' while diving for scallops.

Andy Dixon, 41, an experienced freediver who loves searching for lobsters, scallops and “anything else that’s good to eat,” visited the Cornwall estuary on Sunday with his family to enjoy the spring sunshine.

After spending time diving in his usual scallop spot, Andy resurfaced to find his family had wandered further along the estuary. With the water calm and visibility good, he decided to stay in a little longer and explore.

The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) Cymru has been awarded nearly £1m of government funding for a project aimed at halting the decline in curlew in Wales – a bird set to become extinct as a breeding population by 2033 if current trends continue.

The Gwlad y Gylfinir - Land of the Curlew project will be delivered in Powys, mid-Wales, and follows on from the success of the Curlew Connections Wales project, which comes to an end this month.

The £921,700 grant comes from the Nature Networks Fund, which is providing £15m of funding for 28 projects across Wales, all aimed at restoring and improving biodiversity across land and sea.

The last remaining colony of puffins on the Dorset coast is in danger being lost altogether, conservationists have warned.

Home to about 40 pairs of puffins around 80 years ago, the colony near Dancing Ledge in Purbeck has dwindled to just three pairs in recent times.

Although these birds have engaged in courtship behaviour, mating, and nest building in each of the last three years, and even feeding chicks in 2023, they have not raised any fledges in recent years.

Hunters will be banned from shooting a rare and beautiful duck under new proposals to halt the decline of six British wild birds.

The new rules would restrict the shooting of species including the distinctive woodcock, and the striking pintail, goldeneye and pochard ducks, all of which are classed as under threat and have seen their populations fall sharply in recent years.

Once a familiar sight on lakes and reservoirs during winter, the pochard, a diving duck, is declining rapidly but the proposals would see a total ban on shooting the threatened species.

A wildlife photographer has scooped a prestigious award for his image of a toad taken in a pond near his home.

Paul Hobson, from Sheffield, said "to say I was chuffed is putting it mildly" when he discovered he'd placed first at the British Wildlife Photography Awards 2026.

The striking black and white image, shot from below the surface of the water, shows the amphibian swimming across the woodland pond in the Rivelin Valley.

Endearing little birds with clown-like features, it is no wonder puffins are so much loved and draw so many people to spot them on the East Yorkshire coast when they visit each year. RSPB Bempton Cliffs is home to the UK’s largest mainland seabird colony and of national and international importance.

The chalk cliffs that tower hundreds of feet over the North Sea recently welcomed back the first puffin of the season, faithfully returning to its nesting site. Around 3,000 of the distinctive birds, with their bright orange legs and multi-coloured bills, will colonise the cliffs up until the summer, with pairs of puffins each raising a single chick, cutely-named a puffling, in their secret burrows.

It is a magical experience to witness and one that Kirsten Carter, the RSPB’s head of marine policy – UK land and sea, highly recommends. Kirsten has some heart-warming facts to share about the puffin, whose comical appearance has earned it the monikers Sea Parrot and Clown of the Sea.

A local authority is encouraging residents to book a home visit from its "Green Team" to get top tips for making gardens more wildlife friendly.

The experts from Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council give advice on how to create spaces to attract native species such as hedgehogs and robins.

More than 500 people have had one of the free one-hour home surveys since they were launched two years ago.

In a world-first, Rathlin Island, off the coast of County Antrim, has eradicated ferrets.

The non-native predator was introduced to the island in the 1980s and has wreaked havoc on the internationally-significant breeding seabird colony.

More than 400 traps were laid across the island as part of a five-year, £4.5m Life Raft project, which has also targeted rats. But crucial to the fight to save the seabirds was a specially-trained detection dog, called Woody.

The Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) has introduced a new mapping resource designed to enhance the protection of breeding wading birds in Northern Ireland.

This new sensitivity mapping tool developed by scientists from the British Trust for Ornithology in Northern Ireland (BTO NI), includes the most up to date information as of 2023 on protected breeding wader locations in Northern Ireland, providing an efficient snapshot into the density and distribution of breeding waders in Northern Ireland including Curlew, Lapwing, Redshank and Snipe.

A new national map showing the location of trees outside of woodlands across Wales is now available for the first time.

The comprehensive research programme, undertaken by Forest Research, and funded by Welsh Government, uses the latest satellite imagery and national LiDAR survey data to identify trees outside of woodlands, revealing these trees make up 30% of national tree cover across Wales.

The dataset accompanying the map, identifies the canopies of all trees at least 3 metres tall and with a minimum crown area of 5 square metres which exist outside the areas already mapped as woodland in the National Forest Inventory (NFI). This includes lone trees, groups of trees, and small woodlands.

When wildlife expert Kate MacRae set up more than 20 hidden cameras in a garden, she did not expect to be potentially the first to record on video a badger giving birth in the wild.

At Yew View, on the banks of the River Severn in Worcestershire, creatures that call the secret garden their home include the likes of coots, moorhens, sparrowhawks and bats, as well as tawny owls, foxes, polecats, muntjac deer and otters.

MacRae, also known as WildlifeKate, was hired to make a nine-acre private site more attractive for some of the county's most rarely seen animals, and installed high-definition and infrared cameras so that its owners and the public could see what was happening in the garden.

Europe’s biggest conservation charity has taken the rare step of asking the public, including its members, to contact their MP over the current state of nature in the UK.

The National Trust is calling on people to join a campaign aimed at stopping the unravelling of nature protections and instead persuading Ministers to step up the pace to help British wildlife recover.

It comes as polling for the charity by the independent research agency More in Common reveals that the Government’s lack of action to restore nature is out of step with the priorities of the public. From a survey of 4,000 people, 6 in 10 said the Government cares less about restoring nature than they do personally, and only a fifth said the Government’s care toward nature is in line with their own.

An ambitious plan to prevent, detect, eliminate and control new and existing invasive non-native species (INNS) has been published today by NatureScot, with climate change predicted to increase invasive species in Scotland even more in the future.

INNS are a major cause of nature loss in Scotland, including substantial reductions of some seabird populations and rare woodland lichens. Globally, INNS have contributed to 60% of recorded extinctions on islands. In Scotland, INNS are increasing on land and in freshwater and seas, affecting important ecosystems like islands, temperate rainforests and peatlands, and iconic species such as puffins, water voles and red squirrels.

They also affect Scotland’s economy. INNS are estimated to cost the country at least £500 million a year. Many of these costs are shouldered by agriculture and forestry, as well as by the construction, tourism and transport industries. As well, INNS can also act as vectors and hosts for the spread of diseases, increasing the risks to human, animal and plant health.

Three of the worst illegal rubbish dumps in England are set to be cleaned up at the taxpayers' expense as part of a national waste crime action plan launched by the government.

Huge tips in Wigan, Sheffield and Lancashire - together containing 48,000 tonnes of waste - have been earmarked for clearance by the Environment Agency. A 20,000-tonne site in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, is already being cleared at a cost of more than £9m.

Normally, the cost of clearing illegal sites on private land is met by the landowner.