Introduction The Natural Environment White Paper (NEWP) was published in 2011 by the coalition government. It set out the government’s strategy for valuing nature in our society and ensuring that it is available for use by future generations. The White Paper contained 92 commitments. The England Natural Environment Indicators (ENEI) publication has been produced under commitment 90 of the White Paper: “We will develop a set of key indicators…to track progress on the ambitions of this White Paper. These will include a new, compact set of biodiversity indicators for the England Biodiversity Strategy. We will consult on them and finalise them by Spring 2012.”
The purpose of the ENEIs was to track progress against the broad ambitions of the White Paper, to communicate this progress to stakeholders and interested users and to provide a robust evidence base on which to base future policy interventions. In January 2018, the Conservative government published their 25 year plan for the environment. The plan sets out government action to help the natural world regain and retain good health. It aims to deliver cleaner air and water in our cities and rural landscapes, protect threatened species and provide richer wildlife habitats. It calls for an approach to agriculture, forestry, land use and fishing that puts the environment first. The government has made a commitment to develop a set of metrics to assess progress towards the goals of the 25 year environment plan. Government will then report on progress annually and refresh the plan periodically to make sure that actions continue to target the right improvements and make a real difference. This new reporting will supersede the ENEI publication and this 2018 publication is therefore likely to be the last in the current series.
Where appropriate, links are provided in this year’s release to updated assessments and/or data for the indicators included in the 2017 ENEI publication1. The accompanying datasets have not been updated this year because all the new data available for the 2018 publication can be accessed via the aforementioned links. An updated assessment2 and accompanying dataset for the marine litter indicator have been included separately within this release because these data are not published elsewhere. At the time of publication, there were no updated assessments or data available for the following indicator measures: breeding seabirds; forest carbon stock; soil carbon concentration; the value of UK woodland ecosystem services; the percentage of large companies that use an environmental management scheme; the percentage of companies where the environment is formally considered in the supply chain; and the number of visits made by children to the natural environment. The most recent assessments and data for these measures can be found in the 2017 ENEI publication and accompanying datasets available here.
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