The Berkshire, Buckinghamshire & Oxfordshire Wildlife Trust (BBOWT) has urged local Conservative MPs to ensure that the nature and climate crises are at the heart of the debate during the party's leadership race.

In the month that the UK has experienced its hottest ever temperatures, BBOWT Chief Executive Estelle Bailey wrote to all 16 Conservative Members of Parliament for the three counties imploring them to challenge all candidates on the issues.

Ms Bailey reminded Members that while climate change threatens to devastate fragile wild habitats across the UK and species that depend on them, humans have already destroyed huge tracts of the natural world through agriculture, development and pollution. Numerous once-common species such as red squirrels, turtle doves and dormice are on the brink of extinction or have already vanished in many places.

She also pointed out that 75 per cent of UK adults consider climate change to be a serious problem, according to an ONS survey, and the issue is in the top three public concerns.

Estelle Bailey said:
"The cost of not tackling the nature and climate crisis head on, immediately, would be huge for our economy and communities. We need nature as much as it needs us.

"As the weather this week has reminded us, the nature and climate crisis is getting worse. While the cost-of-living crisis and other geopolitical issues rightly attract considerable attention, we cannot slow the pace of our action to restore the natural environment or be distracted from the urgent need to restore broken ecosystems and devastated habitats.”

In her letter, Ms Bailey praised the importance that the Conservative Party’s 2019 manifesto gave to protecting and restoring the environment, with the aim of developing 'the most ambitious environmental programme of any country on earth'.

However, in the recent hustings for the leadership race, many of the candidates initially refused to confirm that they would uphold the current Government target of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, and BBOWT stressed that the pledge is vital as a minimum standard.

On top of that, the Trust is also calling for '30 by 30' - at least 30 per cent of UK land and sea to be connected and protected for nature's recovery by 2030.

One of the most crucial tenets of restoring the natural environment is to make sure that areas of land for wildlife are interconnected, because this allows populations to travel and breed over a wider area, creating a larger more robust gene pool that can buffer the entire ecosystem against environmental threats including climate change.

Ms Bailey concluded her letter to the MPs:
"I hope that during the course of this campaign, you’ll do all you can to ensure that the Conservative Party’s new leader, and our new Prime Minister, upholds these commitments and builds an ambitious programme to reverse the decline of wildlife, level-up access to nature, and tackle climate change."