Protecting our green and pleasant land
A
CIWEM product story
Edited by the Buildingtalk editorial team
Nov 22, 2007
Green Belts established fifty years ago are now vulnerable to the growing demand for housing as Britain's population grows says CIWEM.
Green Belt is set to become the next environmental battleground as green groups square up to the Government and its plans to build hundreds of thousands of new homes across the country.
Green Belts began around fifty years ago as a hard won planning device to protect our landscapes from urban sprawl.
However, it is now vulnerable to the growing demand for housing as Britain's population grows as a result of immigration and rising birth rates.
Conservation agency Natural England Chair and CIWEM member, Sir Martin Doughty, has announced that it is now time to review Green Belt and consider releasing some of it for development in order to protect sites of greater scientific interest from the threat of house building.
That Green Belt is now under threat has provoked an angry response from the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) and from Europe's largest green membership NGO, the National Trust.
The Trust has threatened to use its vast reserves to buy huge areas of land in order to protect it from development.
Commenting on the Government's plans, CIWEM Executive Director, Nick Reeves says: "Proposals for development on Green Belt should be halted in order to carry out a more thorough review of land ownership in this country".
"With around one percent of people in Britain owning over seventy percent of all land, it is vital that we have a better understanding of where this land is, its purpose and condition, and whether any of it can be released for housing in a way that works with the grain of nature, is fair for all and protects Green Belt".
"More importantly, it is time to recognise that we cannot continue to pick away at the landscape to meet the housing needs of a growing population without realising that this will further breach environmental limits and Britain's ability to sustain it".
"A big population may have economic benefits but eventually it will have disastrous ecological consequences.".
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