Bob Earll ‘The release of the Government’s new Clean Air Strategy is to be welcomed by it’s past inertia has been a disgrace, losing key court decisions to challenges by Client Earth. The benefits to human health are well rehearsed but the strategy is also targeting the Cinderella of emissions Ammonia from farms. This has been rising and has clear deliterious effects on a wide range of ecosystems including freshwaters. These two reports highlight that risk to biodiversity as well including freshwater:

Rand Europe & the Royal Society

CEH paper in Transactions of the Royal Society B (2013)

Government has launched an ambitious new strategy to clean up our air and save lives.

Environment Secretary Michael Gove today (Monday 14 January) launched an ambitious new strategy to clean up our air and save lives.

Air pollution is one of the biggest threats to public health in the UK – behind only cancer, obesity and heart disease – and the measures set out in the Clean Air Strategy will cut the costs of air pollution to society by £1.7 billion every year by 2020, rising to £5.3 billion every year from 2030. ….

We are also taking action to reduce air pollution from agriculture which is responsible for 88% of ammonia emissions by:

• supporting farmers to invest in infrastructure and equipment to reduce emissions
• introducing regulations to require farmers to use low emission farming techniques
• introducing regulations to minimise pollution from fertiliser use

The government will provide farmers with the support they need to make these important changes. In September 2018 the government launched a new £3 million programme through the Catchment Sensitive Farming (CSF) partnership to fund a team of specialists who work with farmers and landowners in priority areas to provide training events, tailored advice, individual farm visits and support with grant applications.

Our Agriculture Bill already sets out how future financial support for the farming sector will be focussed on delivering improvements to the environment. We propose that a future environmental land management system should fund targeted action to protect habitats impacted by ammonia. Click here to read more