LATEST
NEWS

This summer, England's countryside burned on a scale few of us have seen. Homes were threatened in the West Midlands, and a nature reserve in Suffolk was devastated by a fire that came close to Sizewell B nuclear power station. Through all of it, the people on the ground were asking a simple question: where was the plan? We now know the answer. As the Guardian reported, the wildfire risk programme promised in the 2023 national climate adaptation programme was never implemente

Lives "will be lost". That was the warning from the chair of the Climate Change Committee this week, after England and Wales recorded 1,350 wildfires this summer, the highest number ever. She is right. But the BBC File on 4 Investigates report that carried her warning missed the most obvious point of all. The government is spending millions to fight wildfires while restricting one of the most effective ways to stop them. And the people who manage that prevention on our moors,

This week, Number 10 Downing Street opened its doors to say thank you. A reception was held for those who stood on the front line of this summer's wildfires: fire and rescue services, mountain rescue, the RNLI, St John Ambulance, national park rangers and the Wildlife Trusts. Photographs of smiling attendees on the famous doorstep have been circulating on social media ever since. The summer of 2026 was the worst wildfire season this country has seen in living memory. The majo

The RSPB is never short of views on what other people's land should deliver for wildlife. It has campaigned relentlessly for changes to grouse moor management and regulation, and Defra's current call for evidence is the latest battleground. Its message never changes: land should be judged on what it delivers for nature. Results matter, and in the managed uplands almost every survey to date shows the success red-listed birds are having on grouse moors. That is a record the peo

The last two grouse seasons were among the poorest in living memory. Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust monitoring showed a poor 2024 breeding season led to an average 40% drop in pair counts across England and a 34% decline in Scotland, with brood counts revealing a further fall in adult birds. Two seasons were wrecked by weather and heather beetle, and moor after moor cancelled some or all of its programme. As some policy makers, including worryingly Defra officials, seem t

The catastrophic wildfire that incinerated 657 acres of rare lowland peat habitat at Holme Fen nature reserve this August should be a wake-up call for peatland conservation. Tinder-dry conditions from decades of mis-management allowed the flames to race out of control through the reserve's once-wet peat soils, drawing over 100 firefighters from as far as Devon and London into a grueling month-long battle to subdue the inferno. While Holme Fen lies in the East Anglian Fens rat

Defra's Call for Evidence on gamebird rearing, release and shooting opened on 4 September and closes on 1 November. We have previously noted why it is not the neutral exercise it is dressed up as. This is about something narrower: the evidence Defra will receive on bird of prey crime, and the state of the unit producing it. As things stand, the RSPB fits the satellite tags. With Natural England, it has tagged hen harrier chicks for well over a decade. When a tag stops transmi

Today Defra launches a Call for Evidence on gamebird rearing, release and shooting in England. It is dressed up in the language of "strengthening the evidence base" and "future-proofing the sector", but we are not to be fooled. This is not a neutral fact-finding exercise. It is the latest stage in a long campaign, driven by the RSPB and its allies, to put shooting under a regulatory microscope while the same organisations escape any scrutiny for what is happening on the land

This summer the RSPB has watched three of its own reserves burn yet it is now asking the government to license everyone else. That is not conservation. It is a distraction, and it is being paid for by people who have not been told the full story. Consider the timing. The RSPB's chief executive gives an interview in which she describes herself as exhausted after "three devastating wildfires" on RSPB reserves this summer. Her staff, she says, are still putting out hotspots. And

Something has shifted this summer, and it should not be allowed to pass quietly. For the best part of a decade, the organisations holding the largest share of Britain's upland conservation estate told the country that wildfire was a problem of weather, arsonists and disposable barbecues. Land management, they said, had nothing to do with it. Those who argued otherwise were dismissed as self-interested, and worse. Now look at what they are saying. Natural England's regional di

On 14 August the Government sent an emergency alert to every phone in the country warning of extreme wildfire risk. Four days later, the Peak District National Park Authority's website carries a notice that access land in the White Peak is closed because the fire severity level is exceptional. The Dark Peak, where every major fire of this summer has burned, remains open. Anyone who has walked the Peak will see the problem at once. The White Peak is the limestone plateau in th

For years, activist groups have lectured the moorland communities about fire. Controlled burning, they claim, is vandalism. The uplands, they tell anyone who will listen, must be protected from those who actually live and work on them. This week, many of those same activists pitched tents on a moor in the Peak District, in August, during one of the driest summers on record, with wildfires already burning elsewhere in the National Park. Earth First!, the self-described radica

The RSPB's explainer of 5 August names one cause, climate change, and finds no fault in the policies it has spent a decade forcing on everybody else. Its own reserves burned this summer. The men who turned out to help are not mentioned once. Everything in the article rests on a single sentence: that the rise in wildfire is driven by climate change "rather than the presence or absence of specific management practices such as controlled burning". No citation is offered. Not a s

United Utilities marked International Bog Day with a post about peatland: a serious statistic, a long list of thanks, and an appeal to the public to behave themselves on the moor. The statistic is the problem. Around 924 hectares across Tintwistle Moor, Dovestone and Macclesfield Forest have been affected by this summer's wildfires — more than 1,300 football pitches, as the company puts it. Set that against the 3,000 hectares it says it has restored in five years and one summ

On Tuesday, a farmer in Rutland stopped his tractor in the middle of harvest to take a call from BBC Radio 4. In under four minutes, speaking to Winifred Robinson on You and Yours, he set out a clearer account of wildfire prevention than anything government has managed to publish this summer. Monty Andrews has been farming for more than sixty years. He was not representing a campaign group. He had no press line to deliver and no funding to protect. He simply described what he

New guidance to moorland managers on requesting temporary access restrictions during exceptional wildfire conditions contains an uncomfortable revelation. Ask four National Park Authorities the same question about fire prevention and you get four different answers, ranging from a direction ready to activate to a general enquiries inbox. In the middle of the hottest summer on record, that is not good enough. Guidance has been issued to moorland managers setting out how to requ

Over the past fortnight, Britain has watched its uplands burn. A wildfire that began near Manchester spread across the Peak District, sending thick smoke over Glossop, Snake Pass, Woodhead and Dove Stone, while a major blaze tore through the Cairngorms, forcing the evacuation of homes, businesses, campsites and the Cairngorm Mountain Resort. At one point around 19 wildfires were burning across England and Wales at the same time. This was not a freak event. It was a warning, a

As firefighters spend another night on the hill at Ryvoan Bothy, as families are turned out of their homes in Glenmore with minutes to grab their belongings, as three and a half kilometres of the Cairngorms goes up in smoke, the two largest wildfires burning in Britain right now are on RSPB ground. Not grouse moors. Not the land that the RSPB has spent a decade telling the public is badly managed. Its own. That is not bad luck. That is not the weather. That is a direct and en

Nearly three weeks. That is how long firefighters have now been fighting the wildfire on Tintwistle Moor above Glossop, and on Sunday Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service declared it a major incident. The blaze, which began on 24 June, has torn through around 260 hectares of moorland and woodland, and crews were called back to the scene in the early hours of Monday morning as high winds drove the fire on once again. Let that timeline sink in. This fire started in June, during t

As dawn broke over the Peak District this morning, gamekeepers who had spent the entire night on Tintwistle Moor were still there, beating back flames alongside exhausted fire crews. They were not on the clock. No public body was invoicing anyone for their hours. They turned out, as they always do, because they know this ground better than anyone alive and because watching it burn is unbearable to the people who spend every other day of the year looking after it. Overnight, D